Basic Sugar Cookie Dough

This easy sugar cookie dough recipe is the perfect base sugar cookie recipe. It can be used to make a wide range of sugar cookie recipes, and is great to prepare in advance. Use it to make my easy roll-out sugar cookie recipe, which pairs perfectly with my 2 ingredient sugar cookie icing.

Hi hi! Just popping in to share my super easy sugar cookie dough recipe! I have a bunch of easy sugar cookie recipes planned, so I wanted to give this dough a special home all to itself, and make an ultimate guide on how to make the best sugar cookie dough (to me, anyway).

This is a super versatile cookie dough recipe, which I use as the base of my sugar cookie recipe. You can flavor it as you like, and it is perfect to make ahead and chill in the fridge so you can have soft, freshly baked sugar cookies whenever you need them.

This simple sugar cookie dough is great for all sorts of purposes - whether you are making holiday cookies, christmas cookies, or cookies for any special occasion, it is hopefully going to be your new best friend! Keep them plain, or add an easy sugar cookie icing to fancy it up a little bit.

This sugar cookie dough recipe is also super similar in method to my basic gingerbread cookie dough which I use for my easy gingerbread cookies. They bake at the same temperature so I often like to double up and make them at the same time!

Ingredients in Sugar Cookie Dough

This super simple sugar cookie dough is made with ingredients you likely already have in your fridge and pantry:

• Butter. I use unsalted, if you only have salted butter you can just omit the salt out of the recipe. Use what you have, but because butter is the main flavour in this cookie dough, if you can get your hands on good quality butter, now is the time to use it.
• Granulated sugar (white sugar). I use caster sugar as NZ sugar is a little more chunky than the US, but if you're in the USA, regular granulated sugar is fine.
• Egg. One large egg, just to hold things together.
• Vanilla bean paste or vanilla extract. Again, this is the time to bust out your good stuff. I use vanilla bean paste as I love the speckles it gives, but you are welcome to use vanilla extract too.
• All-purpose flour. (aka plain flour). You don't want a flour that is too high in protein for this sugar cookie recipe, as you don't want too much gluten to develop.
• Baking powder. Just a touch to help with the texture of the cookies.
• Salt. Leave this out if you are using salted butter, but salt in baking is so important to help balance out the sweetness and help with taste.

How to scale sugar cookie dough recipe

This sugar cookie dough recipe is super easy to scale - you can use the scaling button on the recipe card. Because you roll it out between pieces of parchment paper, you can just divide up the dough once it has been mixed, and roll each out to size.

I wouldn't do more than a triple of this recipe at once as your mixer may not be able to cope with it, but I have doubled it and it came out just fine, so a triple mix should be good to go.

How to roll out sugar cookie dough evenly

I roll out my sugar cookie dough between two pieces of parchment paper. I use pre-cut paper the size of a half sheet pan (16.5" x 12.25" / 42x32cm), and the dough, rolled to the correct thickness, should almost fill the space between the two sheets.

I also use rolling pin guides, which are silicone strips that lay down either side of the dough. The rolling pin presses down onto them to help the dough be rolled to an even thickness.

Make sure that you flour the parchment paper before placing the dough down, and add another sprinkle of flour on the top to help prevent sticking.

Can homemade sugar cookie dough be made in advance?

Yes, this sugar cookie dough is great to make in advance. The rolled out dough can be stored up to 3 days in the fridge before cutting out and baking, or you can store the cut-out cookies in the freezer before baking.

Adding mix-ins

This sugar cookie dough can be used as a perfect base recipe for sugar cookies, and you can flavour it any way that you like. Feel free to add in some lemon zest, or almond extract. I also played around with adding in sprinkles to make a funfetti situation - to make this, add 100g of rainbow sprinkles just after the dough is mixed. I use these rainbow sprinkles, if you're in NZ, these look like they might work!

You could also double the recipe and remove half the dough, then add mix-ins if you like if you were after two different doughs in one batch.

Frequently Asked Questions

What tools and equipment do you use?
You can find a full list of the tools and equipment I use on my products page

How many cookies does this sugar cookie dough recipe make?

This recipe makes about 20-30 sugar cookies, depending on how big your cutters are. I used a 3" / 75mm cookie cutter to make most of the round ones, along with a slightly smaller round cutter and got about 20 cookies, with one round of re-rolling the dough.

How do I stop my dough from sticking when I roll it out?

Make sure that the parchment paper is lightly floured before placing the dough down, then lightly flour the top surface of the dough too before topping with a second piece of parchment paper. I haven't tried using a silicone mat for rolling this cookie dough out or baking it on - you are welcome to give it a go but I am a parchment paper girl!

For more base cookie recipes:

This easy sugar cookie dough recipe is the perfect base sugar cookie recipe. It can be used to make a wide range of sugar cookie recipes, and is great to prepare in advance.

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