Soft and Chewy Sugar Cookies Recipe

Classic soft, vanilla-scented sugar cookies, perfect for giving as holiday gifts or keeping all to yourself.

Overhead of a plate of soft and chewy sugar cookies on a glass plate.

Serious Eats / Sarah Jane Sanders

Why It Works

  • Aerating the butter and sugar provides insulation to keep these cookies thick and light.
  • A cold egg chills the dough, making it easy to handle.
  • One full tablespoon of vanilla extract guarantees a robust flavor and aroma.

Sugar cookies are the plush, pillowy hotel beds of dessert: comforting, soft, and warm. Every time I sink into one, I wonder: Why don't I do this more often?

I figure it's because I'm so easily enthralled by the heavy hitters (brown butter, brown sugar, chocolate, toffee, toasted pecans...) that I forget how sublime the basics can be. Sugar cookies are a celebration of simple ingredients, handled with care. No special-order components or crazy technique—just butter, sugar, eggs, and flour, with plenty of salt and vanilla.

Scoops of raw dough for soft and chewy sugar cookies.

Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

Does Better Butter Bake Up Better?

I've tried to step up my sugar cookie game over the years, but the harder I try, the more I'm convinced that sugar cookies don't care. Whether I throw down for imported European butter or make do with what I find at the store, they bake up soft and chewy, light but never cakey, and just a little crisp around the edges. Buttery, fragrant, and totally self-indulgent.

Sugar cookies are stubbornly indifferent to my level of investment; in a blind tasting, my tasters accused me of giving them the same cookie three times in a row ("Is this tasting about the placebo effect?"). When the tables were turned, I was just as helpless to guess which cookies were made with local butter, Plugra, or Kroger brand. This was something of a sore point; the difference had been stark in the bowl. Local butter perfumed the dough with something fresh and aromatic while Plugra delivered an umami-like depth. In comparison, the batch made from my grocery store brand seemed almost aggressively bland.

I'd sworn my days of penny-pinching with inexpensive butter were over, but an oven proved to be the great equalizer. All the nuance and complexity found in top-notch butters faded into a general sense of richness, while the deficiencies of cheap butter were smoothed over by aromatic vanilla, lightly caramelized sugar, and the subtle flavor of toasted flour.

Ball of soft sugar cookie dough in the palm of a hand.

Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

In the end, sugar cookies are about teamwork, all those ingredients giving up their individual identity to form a unified whole. That doesn't mean you can't reach for top-notch butter, only that you needn't feel guilty if you don't.

Decorating With Sugar

The one ingredient I've found to be a true waste is something called "sparkling" sugar. It glitters like so many diamonds in the bag and works beautifully with chilled, icebox doughs. But soft and buttery drop cookies seem to dissolve it, muting its brilliance and producing a thick, gritty shell.

Overhead of various sugars and sprinkles for decorating soft sugar cookies.

Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

Stick with plain white sugar, nonpareils, or colorful sanding sugar—the sort sold next to birthday candles at the grocery store. You can even make custom colors for the holidays by mixing plain a few ounces of granulated sugar with a gram of luster dust, a flavorless colorant made from non-toxic minerals.

My favorite finish is vanilla sugar, which is dead easy to make: split a vanilla bean and rub the seeds into a few ounces of sugar. Any type of vanilla bean will do, but Tahitian vanilla is particularly seedy, so it offers the most bang per bean (slip the empty pod into a carton of cream and let it steep for a week—best whipped cream ever). It's also incredibly aromatic, which means you can smell the vanilla coming off the cookies even before sinking into that first, pillowy bite.

Closeup of a tray of soft, pillowy sugar cookies decorated with red sugar.

Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

December 2015

Recipe Details

Soft and Chewy Sugar Cookies Recipe

Active 15 mins
Total 45 mins
Serves 30 cookies

Ingredients

  • 8 ounces unsalted butter (2 sticks; 225g); firm but pliable, about 60°F (16°C)

  • 10 ounces sugar (1 1/2 cups; 280g)

  • 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder (10g)

  • 1 1/4 teaspoons Diamond Crystal kosher salt (5g) (For table salt, use half as much by volume or use the same weight)

  • Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg

  • 1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract (15ml)

  • 1 large egg, cold

  • 11 1/4 ounces all-purpose flour (about 2 1/2 cups, spooned; 320g)

  • Assorted sanding sugars, nonpareils, and sprinkles, or plain granulated sugar blended with vanilla seeds, luster dust, or powdered food coloring for finishing

Directions

  1. Adjust oven rack to middle position, preheat to 350°F (180°C), and line 2 aluminum half sheet pans with parchment paper (not wax paper!).

  2. Combine butter, sugar, baking powder, kosher salt, nutmeg, and vanilla extract in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Mix on low to moisten, increase to medium and beat until fluffy, pale ivory, and soft, about 5 minutes. Add egg and continue beating until smooth, about 2 minutes more, pausing to scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula as needed. Resume mixing on low, sprinkle in flour, and continue mixing until a thick dough is formed.

    Collage of adding sugar, nutmeg, vanilla extract to a mixing bowl and creaming them with butter.

    Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

  3. Divide into twenty six 1-ounce portions with a 2-tablespoon cookie scoop. (That's about 1 ounce/30g per cookie.) Roll each ball of dough between your hands until smooth and round. If desired, tumble in a dish with sanding sugar, nonpareils, sprinkles, granulated, or vanilla sugar until coated on all sides. Arrange cookies on prepared half sheet pan, leaving 2 1/2 inches of space in between cookies. Do not flatten; cookies will spread on their own.

    A four-image collage. The top left image shows some of the cookie dough inside of a cookie scoop. The top right image shows the ball of dough being rolled into an even shape with two hands. The bottom left image shows the ball of dough now inside of a dish of seasoned sugar. The bottom right image shows three rows of sugar-coated cookie dough on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper.

    Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik

  4. Bake until puffed and pale gold around the edges, but still steamy in the middle, about 15 minutes. Cool directly on sheet pan until firm, about 10 minutes. Enjoy warm, or allow to cool completely, then store in an airtight container for up to 2 days at room temperature.

    Baked soft and chewy sugar cookies, decorated with sugar.

Special Equipment

Stand mixer, paddle attachment, flexible spatula, #30 or #40 cookie scoop (1/8 cup), 2 aluminum half sheet pans

Notes

Make ahead: Divide portioned dough between heavy-duty Ziploc bags, and refrigerate up to one week (or freeze for two months). Bring to roughly 70°F (21°C), then roll, coat, and bake as directed.

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Nutrition Facts (per serving)
133 Calories
6g Fat
18g Carbs
1g Protein
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Nutrition Facts
Servings: 30
Amount per serving
Calories 133
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 6g 8%
Saturated Fat 4g 19%
Cholesterol 22mg 7%
Sodium 103mg 4%
Total Carbohydrate 18g 6%
Dietary Fiber 0g 1%
Total Sugars 10g
Protein 1g
Vitamin C 0mg 0%
Calcium 24mg 2%
Iron 1mg 3%
Potassium 16mg 0%
*The % Daily Value (DV) tells you how much a nutrient in a food serving contributes to a daily diet. 2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice.
(Nutrition information is calculated using an ingredient database and should be considered an estimate.)