Christmas Sugar Cookies

Total Preparation Time: 30 minutes

Dough Ingredients:

- 3 cups of white flour, plus more for dusting

- 1 cup of butter (2 sticks). Heat butter in microwave until melt

- 1 large egg

- 1 cup of white granular sugar, plus some red sugar for decorating (Add more sugar if you like sweet a lot. - - You need a lot of sugar to make anything taste sweet).

- 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder

- 1/2 teaspoon of salt

- 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
- 2 tablespoons half/half milk

Icing Ingredients:
- 1 tablespoon milk
- 1/4 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 pound powdered sugar
- food coloring

Instructions:

- Making the dough: Pull in all the ingredients in a large bowl, and mix well into dough. Wrap the dough with plastic or wax paper. Leave it in refrigerator to chill for at least 2 hours. Divide the dough into 4 parts. Roll out flat. Cut using cookie cutters into the cookie shapes of your desire. Remember to dust some white flour on the cutting surface and the top of the dough to avoid stickiness.
- Bake the cookies: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake the cookies in 10-12 minutes or as soon as the cookie edges start turning brown. Take out the baked cookies and flip them over. Let the baked cookies sit until hard and cold.
- Applying the icing: Mix all the icing ingredients well into thick liquid form. Apply icing evenly on the cookies according to your desired pattern. This is where your creativity shines. I colored the tree-shaped cookies with green icing, star-shaped cookies with red icing, and the stocking-shaped cookie with red and green stripes. I love how my simple stripe stocking-shaped cookie design turned out. Some more design ideas to consider: write the names of the people to whom you will give the cookies on the stocking-shaped cookies; add white icing on the tree-shaped cookies to make it like snow on the trees, and then dot different color M&M's to look like color ornaments.
- Spray red-color sugar on the cookies immediately after placing icing.

(Provided by Ping Sun)