Almond Butter Sugar Cookies

Almond Butter Sugar Cookies 3 C flour 2 t baking soda 1 C sugar 1 C butter, cold 1 egg 3/4 t pure vanilla extract 1/2 t pure almond extract 1. Combine the flour and baking soda in a medium sized bowl. 2. In your stand mixer, or with hand held beaters cream the butter and sugar. Add the egg and extracts and mix well. 3. Add the flour mixture a little bit at a time and beat just until combined. Be sure to scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl. The dough will be a bit crumbly. 4. Place the dough on a floured surface and knead to help it from crumbling all over. 5. Roll out 1/2 of the dough on your floured surface. Cut into what ever cookie shapes your little heart desires. Place on a sprayed cookie sheet and bake at 350 for 10 minutes. (Convection ovens bake at 325 for 7 minutes.) I like sugar cookies to be pretty soft, so I tend to under cook them. I took mine out of the oven when they were just starting to get golden around the edges. They ended up being soft and yummy for several days. 6. Cool on a wire rack. Sugar Cookie Frosting Time: 10 minutes to mix + decorating time Yield: Frosting for about 24 cookies Recipe from Amanda at I Am Baker ***NOTE: I used Wilton Food coloring for the first batch of icing. The colors had a little bit of trouble bleeding into each other. I contacted a lovely gal named Amanda from I am Baker. She and I met this past summer at the Baking with Betty event. (Just take a look at her fabulous blog. The girl has creativity coming out of her eyeballs.) She told me about a brand of food coloring called Americolor. I found it at my local Hobby Lobby and it worked much better.*** 1 C powdered sugar 1 T milk 1 drop lemon juice (fresh or from the bottle) 1 T light corn syrup Americolor Food Coloring (I found some at my local Hobby Lobby) 1. Use a whisk to combine the powdered sugar, lemon juice, and corn syrup in a medium sized bowl. 2. Add the milk just a drop or two at a time. You are working towards two different consistencies here. The thicker frosting should be about the consistency of toothpaste. You are going to use it to pipe around the edges of your cookies. You will also need a thinner icing used to “flood” the cookies. The thinner icing should resemble syrup. Add the milk to your icing with these two consistencies in mind. Add your food coloring and you are good to go! Pipe the thicker frosting around the edges of your cookies. Let it harden for about 10 minutes, then fill in your cookie with the thinner frosting. You can make some really fun designs by using two colors of the thinner frosting. For the cookie above, I piped the thicker icing around the edge. Then filled it with thin white frosting. I then piped some thin red icing in lines and finished it by dragging a toothpick through the lines. Fun….oh so fun. You can see that the cookie on the right has three colors of the thin frosting. The cookie on the left only has white thin frosting, the red and green were piped with thick frosting. After the cookies are all prettied up, they need to sit out and dry for several hours. I made the mistake on my first batch of covering them with plastic wrap just after they were done. The next time I saw them, the colors had bled into each other…and I was a bit bummed out! Not so fun. I didn’t curse or anything. It is Christmas you know. I’m trying to be extra nice and all.