Sand Tart Cookie Recipe (PA Dutch, Sugar Cookie, Christmas) - Life's Little Sweets (2024)

FAQs

Do you sprinkle sugar on sugar cookies before or after baking? ›

Dip cookie dough rounds in sprinkles or sugar before baking. On ungreased cookie sheet, place cookie dough rounds about 2 inches apart. Bake 12 to 16 minutes or until golden brown. Cool 2 minutes; remove from cookie sheet to cooling rack.

Egg Wash Method

Make an egg wash—add pasteurized egg whites and a splash of water to a small bowl and mix with a fork until combined. Brush the tops of the cooled cookies with the egg wash and immediately add sprinkles.

One of my simplest sugar cookie tricks is to brush the surface of the cookie with a little egg wash. Using an egg wash made from whole egg will lightly brown the surface during baking—it becomes a little more shortbread-like in texture as a result.

The sanding method combines the dry ingredients with butter until you have a sandy texture. You can then add any flavourings you wish. Rice flour (or sometimes even cornflour) is often used in shortbread recipes to enhance the sandy texture.

Sanding sugar is similar to decorating sugar, except that it is larger in size and more polished looking, making it fall somewhere in between regular granulated sugar and coarse sugar. Sanding sugar comes in a bunch of different colors, or with no color, and as an added bonus, it also reflects light.

Granulated sugar also helps tenderize batters and binds with water to keep baked goods moist. Powdered sugar in cookie dough will give you chewier cookies (if there's egg in the recipe). In shortbread-like cookies it gives you a cookie that's more dense but with a silkier crumb.

On a lightly floured surface, roll out the cookie dough to ¼-inch thick. Cut out using cookie cutters and bake on a baking sheet lined with a silpat mat or parchment paper for 12 to 15 minutes, until the edges just barely start to turn golden. Cool completely before decorating with royal icing or frosting.

If you want to add sprinkles to cookies, cupcakes, breads, or cakes before baking, that is totally and completely ok. Add sprinkles to the tops of these baked goods right before they go into the oven. Adding sprinkles to “wet” batter is the only way to get them to stick without an additional “glue” like frosting.

The easiest thing to do is to brush the tops of the cookies with a little bit of water or milk, using just enough to dampen the cookie dough and no more. This will help the sprinkles stick and won't change the finished appearance of the cookie when you're done baking.

Sprinkles should be put in the cookie dough prior to baking. If you would like sprinkles on top of your sugar cookies too, then press them on with your finger tips before baking. This will ensure the sprinkles stick to the sugar cookies.

Can you roll and cut Pillsbury sugar cookie dough? ›

Generously flour work surface. Roll dough to 1/4-inch thickness on work surface. Cut out desired shapes using floured 2- to 2 1/2-inch cookie cutter.

The main reason TO beat an egg before adding it is that the mixture to which you are adding is not going to be sufficiently mixed afterwards to hom*ogenize the egg. That is, if you are adding the egg and then just "stirring gently", that's not going to be enough to beat the egg.

There's a lot of reasons this can happen. If you're using melted butter/browned butter a possibility is that you didn't let it cool long enough and you accidentally cooked the eggs which means your cookies would have scrambled eggs in them. You may also not have mixed the eggs in enough or used too large of eggs.

One of the easiest ways to give your sugar cookies a colorful sparkle is by using sanding sugar, edible glitter, sugar pearls, or colorful sprinkles. You can add these additional pops of color either before the cookies go in the oven or when you are decorating them after they are dried.

Using a moistened paper towel wet the bottom of a glass, dip in colored sugar (re-dipping for each cookie) and flatten ball of dough. You may need to apply the moistened paper towel every so often, to keep glass wet and easily able to pick up sugar crystals.

The key to getting sprinkles to stick to dry icing is to heat the icing a bit before adding the sprinkles.

Grab a plate or bowl and pour sanding sugar over your cookie right after icing it. Turn the cookie upside down and then lay it on the pan to dry. Super easy and adorable. You can also sprinkle just a little bit of sanding sugar on the wet icing.