Grandma's Easy Sugar Cookie Recipe

Although my Grandma Williamson has passed on a number of sugar cookie recipes, I find this one to be the easiest. Mainly because it doesn't require chilling any dough or going through the rather laborious process of rolling and cutting dough. Score! I topped these beauties with a lemon icing this time around but I'll give you both icing recipes so you can choose between the two.

Sugar Cookies

• 1 cup butter, softened (or half butter/half shortening)
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup milk
• 5 cups flour
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Beat butter and sugar together until well blended. Add all other ingredients and mix until well incorporated. Use either a cookie scoop or a rounded tablespoon to drop batter onto a greased cookie sheet. These do spread a little when baking so leave some space between them. Bake for 12 minutes or until they start to be golden brown.

Standard Icing

• 3 cups powdered sugar
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
  
• 2 T milk
• 2 tsp vanilla

Lemon Icing

• 4 cups powdered sugar
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
  
• 2 T milk
• 4 T lemon juice or to taste
  

For the icing, I just beat together the softer, or liquid, ingredients first and then incorporate as much powdered sugar as is necessary to get it to spreading consistency.

After I got my icing to the lightly lemoned state, I set aside about 1/3 cup and colored the remainder with yellow food coloring. The picture shows the finished product with all the pieces put together! The squiggles are nothing more than the basic icing squeezed through the snipped tip of a Ziploc bag. Be as creative as you want to be and enjoy!

Dobos Torte

The August 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Angela of A Spoonful of Sugar and Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella. They chose the spectacular Dobos Torte based on a recipe from Rick Rodgers' cookbook Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Caffés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.


A side profile of one of my mini dobos. We were supposed to take the time to evenly cut out all the sponge cake layers, coat everything in the chocolate buttercream after stacking and garnish with hazelnuts or some other nut...but I took the busy mother's route instead. The taste is still impossibly good. There is so much butter in the buttercream but yet it doesn't taste that way at all. Very rich and creamy and worth repeating on its own.

The caramel-coated sponge cake pieces on the top were a mild failure for me but I included them in the pictures nevertheless. The torte tastes delicious but, like many of the challenges, it involves so many steps and so much time that it makes it impractical for a casual gathering. But that's my thought being now almost 9 months pregnant and having to take care of my almost 1-year-old on top of it. Simple, quick and delicious would be really nice!