Sugar Cookies with Royal Icing

These sugar cookies cause me nostalgia. We made these for Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine's Day as kids. I remember sitting on the counter, my sister and brother sitting in the bar stools at the counter and each of us had a big piece of dough rolled out in front of us. It was really fun to pick out which cookie cutter to use next and of course we ended up fighting over the cutters. My sister has my mother's cookie cutters (shouldn't we have shared custody of them?) and I have my own batch. Mine aren't as cool or original but they do just fine.

I love my mother's handwritten recipes.

I'm quite the mess maker.

Normally I would frost these with a fluffy white frosting but I wanted to try my hand at royal icing. I think I tried it in high school with Tina and it was a flop. This time it went pretty well. I did my research and found some great tutorials. This one really helped. The first batch of "flood" icing wasn't thin enough, the second batch was too watery and by the third batch I had mastered it. I had a lot of fun with these.

Sour Cream Sugar Cookies
Source: My Momma!
Yield: 2 dozen

4 cups flour
1 t. soda
1/2 t. powder
1/2 t. nutmeg
1 cup butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup sour cream
1 t. vanilla

Sift together dry ingredients. Beat butter and egg with paddle attachment until fluffy. Add egg, sour cream and vanilla. Slowly add dry ingredients. Chill dough at least one hour. Roll to 1/4 inch thickness and bake at 350 for 10 minutes.

I like to freeze half of the dough for another time.