Sugar Cookies

As I type this, it is raining so hard that I'm half tempted to build an ark. This is not what you expect in Southern California! It's cold (by our standards, around 60 degrees) and wet and dark. Which made it the perfect day to bake comfort food! And in our house, sugar cookies are a form of comfort food.

Oh, before I get into the recipe, I want to apologize for being AWOL for nearly a week. I'm really not doing well on this whole "bake every day" thing, am I? I'm going to try harder on it. I planned to do something every day last week, then I got flattened by a toothache. I finally saw someone about it, who gave me all sorts of fun medicine and told me I'm going to have to get a tooth pulled in the very near future. Talk about fun! But I'm back!

So, onto sugar cookies. I love soft sugar cookies, so that's what I made. Dave loves soft sugar cookies too, so I rarely make the hard "pretty looking" (cut out shapes & decorated) kind.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter softened & 1/2 cup shortening OR 1 cup butter softened (if you use all butter, like I did, expect your cookies to spread out as they cook!)
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups flour

Tools:
Large mixing bowl
Mixer
Spatula
Cookie sheets

Turn the oven to 350 degrees. No, not your normal temp, but that's OK! These come out better this way.

Make sure your butter is soft, but not melted. I left my butter sitting in the bowl for an hour to help soften it up, but about 5 to 10 seconds in the microwave should work fine too.

Mix the butter with both sugars, the baking soda and baking powder. It's going to look like lots of clumps, but that's OK too.

Add the eggs and vanilla and mix well. It should finally start looking creamy!

Slowly add the flour, mixing well as you do. If at the end you need to mix it by hand to get all the flour in, that's normal.

Put them on cookie sheets. I made about 36 cookies, but I like mine big. This could easily make 48 or more. I usually put 12 on a sheet, but if you use all butter I recommend about 9, since they spread so much.

Bake each batch for about 8 to 10 minutes. I found that what worked best really depended on the baking sheet. My darker baking sheet cooked fine at 8 minutes but my lighter one needed about 10.

These will be soft and yummy. Enjoy and think of nice fall weather, like I am!