Ingredients

• 1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1 & 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 & 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 & 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• Royal Icing
• Sprinkles, Non-pariels for decorating

Instructions

In a large mixing bowl, cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add in egg, vanilla extract, and almond extract and mix until combined.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder, and salt. Make sure to spoon the flour into your measuring cup and level it off with a knife to ensure accurate measurements. Slowly add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and mix until completely combined.

Divide the dough into 2 parts. Roll one part of dough between 2 sheets of parchment or wax paper to a thickness of 3/8″ and place the parchment and dough on a baking sheet in the refrigerator. Repeat with second part and stack on top of first portion of dough in the refrigerator. Chill for about 20-30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Cut dough into shapes with cookie cutters and transfer to a baking sheet. Gather up extra dough and re-roll when you gather enough. Continue to cut, gather, re-roll until all of the dough has been used up. Bake for 8-12 minutes. The cookies should barely begin to brown. Cool on baking sheet 5 minutes, then transfer to a baking rack to cool completely. Store in an airtight container if not decorating immediately.

To Decorate:

Make the Royal Icing per the recipe that is linked.

There are so many options, so feel free to decorate as you like. Ideally, make the Royal Icing thin enough that you can dip the cookies as recommended in my post for Iced Heart Cookies. That’s the easiest way to ice cookies.

For a bit more tailored look, follow my Easter Iced Sugar Cookie recipe. In this cake, you pipe the royal icing around the edge to outline the cookie and then fill it in by piping more icing. Add sprinkles at this point or let the icing become completely firm (could take 24 hours) and pipe another color of frosting over.

Chef’s Notes:

For this recipe, the dough only needs to chill about 20-30 minutes in the refrigerator since it is already rolled out. If you would rather chill the dough first before rolling, you’ll want to increase the chill time to about an hour.

Using the parchment paper is a great tip for rolling the dough, because it eliminates the need to add extra flour to keep it from sticking.

My cookies were done baking in 9 minutes, but check yours closely. You want them to be just barely set and not yet browned. They’ll seem slightly undercooked right out of the oven, but will firm up nicely once cooled. 9 minutes seemed to be the sweet spot for me!

Once the cookies come out of the oven, only let them stay on the baking sheet for about 5 minutes, or just until you’re able to carefully slide a spatula underneath the cookies without breaking them to transfer to a cooling rack. Letting the cookies stay on the baking sheet any longer will dry them out, making them less soft and tender.