STARS
These are the sugar cookies my mother-in-law used to make and she got the recipe from a booklet printed by my husband's grade school teacher of recipes from the class moms sometime in the 50s. It turns out the contributing mom was one of my husband's best friends. This caused some confusion about whose recipe it actually was. Ever since we set up your own household as newlyweds we have made these exclusively in the shade of stars. We may come all the way from large to tiny. They look very pretty mixed together on a plate.
They are very good plain and the thinner the better.
Cream together:
1/4 pound butter
1 cup white sugar
Mix together:
1 large egg
2 Tablespoons milk
1 teaspoons vanilla extract (sometimes I use double this amount)
Mix together:
2 cups white flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
Add the egg mixture to the butter mixture then add the flour mixture in.
Add enough additional flour to make a stiff dough if necessary.
Divide into quarters, pat into flattened burger like shapes and refrigerate about 30 minutes.
Remove one quarter at a time to roll. Roll out, using as little flour as possible on table
and rolling pin, cut with a cookie cutter and place on cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.
Bake at 400 degrees for 6 to 8 minutes until just lightly brown. Beware, they burn easily.
Slip off cookie sheet en-mass by slipping off the parchment paper. Allow to cool enough to harden before removing from the paper.
Decorating:
Ice, decorate as you wish, it really isn't needed for the taste.
Some people like to sprinkle with colored sugar prior to baking.
11/23/08
I made these with my son today and it seems I have multiple copies of the recipe. Anyway, today's copy said 350 degrees and 5 minutes. That worked pretty well except for the one batch that needed 6 minutes. We used a baking stone and parchment paper.
The other big change this year was we ran the dough through a pasta maker instead of rolling it by hand. We used the next to thickest setting and that was about as thin as we could go. Then we put the rolled dough on the paper, cut it out there and lifted the scraps to use for re-rolling. It made about 6 dozen very thin cookies today. I really like the consistency of the pasta roller.
12/1/09
This year we used the pasta maker again at the thickest setting and baked at 375 for 9 minutes. We brushed the cookies with milk and sprinkled with sugar.