Chewy Sugar Cookies

I’m so excited that I can pull out the Christmas tree, blast my Christmas Pandora station and start the holiday baking (without getting judgey stares from others)! It’s officially CHRISTMAS SEASON!

I pretty much sang Christmas carols the whole time while making these. My sous chef, aka my four legged friend who just lays on the cold kitchen floor as I work, probably was not very pleased. I will say that the sous chef really couldn’t care less about the Christmas tree so far…whew! 🙂

Back to the cookies. The hubs LOVES a good chewy sugar cookie, so when I saw this recipe on Christen’s blog, I couldn’t wait to make these happen! The ingredients sound a little weird at first (cream cheese in sugar cookies?!), but trust me, it works. The hubs said these were probably the best cookies I’ve ever made! SCORE!

Chewy Sugar Cookies
Source: mildly adapted from Cooks Illustrated (Nov/Dec 2010 issue), as seen on Cooking with Christen

Ingredients:

•  2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1.5 cups sugar, plus extra for rolling the cookies in
• 3 oz cream cheese, cut into small pieces
• 6 tbsp butter, melted and warm
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 large egg
• 1 tbsp milk
• 2 tsp vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350.
2. Line a baking sheet with silicone mat.  Whisk flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt together in a medium-sized bowl.
3. In a large bowl, place the 1.5 cups sugar and the cream cheese, then pour the warm butter over it and whisk to combine.  It will be slightly lumpy.  Whisk in oil, mix well then add the egg, milk and vanilla and whisk until smooth.  Add flour mixture and mix with a scraper spatula until dough forms.
4. Using a medium cookie scoop, scoop cookies onto a baking pan, leaving adequate space for baking. Using the bottom of a drinking glass, gently flatten each cookie to make them uniform in size. Sprinkle additional sugar on top of each cookie (and sprinkles, if you’d like).  Bake 11-13 minutes, until edges are just set. (This step is much different from Cooks Illustrated, because I found the resulting dough to be too sticky to work with.) This made about 30 cookies.
5. Cool on wire rack.