Tuesday with Dorie - Grandma's All-Occasion Sugar Cookies

We are getting very close to Christmas now, so our TWD hosts are choosing lots of seasonally-friendly recipes for us to bake. This week's host is Ulrike of Kuchenlatein, who chose Grandma's All-Occasion Sugar Cookies from Dorie Greenspan's Baking - From My Home To Yours to bake.

These basic cookies can be flavoured and "dollied up" however you like to make them overtly festive, or left just plain. I chose to sprinkle mine with red, white and green decorating sugar to add a splash of colour while avoiding the commitment of having to ice them at 11pm in the evening, while I left the dough plain.

This was another Dorie recipe whereby the finished product tasted great, but the dough was difficult to deal with in reaching the end result because of its softness. I refrigerated my dough for more than 24 hours, but it very quickly softened out of the fridge. I cut the rolled out dough using cookie cutters instead of taking the "slice 'n' bake" option, which I think was a mistake. After the first few cookies, I realised very quickly why Dorie mentioned that she just used a round cookie cutter - the dough is too soft to tolerate fancy shapes well, and when the cookies bake, the dough spreads to such an extent that the shapes become puffed and distorted, ending up reminiscent of the Pillsbury Doughboy. For the last couple of batches, I actually cut out the rounds from the dough using kitchen scissors and left them on the backing paper when baking them.

Despite my issues with the dough's handling ability, the end result was delicious - and I am not really a cookie fan. The cookies were crispy and light (excepting the puffy, fancy-shaped ones, which were thicker and therefore softer), and the decorating sugar gave them extra "crunch" as well as colour.

Thanks to Ulrike for hosting this week's Tuesday with Dorie - you can check out how everyone else personalised their cookies by going to the TWD blogroll.