American Sugar Cookies ( for HBC )

The month of December brings joy and festive mood and so we at HBC ( home-bakers-challenge)  an event by Priya Suresh  also have many Baked Christmas Goodies to choose from for our this month's challenge. Priya Ranjit  our host for the month of December gave us such a wide choice that I am tempted to try as many of them as possible. These traditional sugar cookies are the first from that list. Thanks Priya Suresh and Priya Ranjit for this yummy treat.

Ingredients :

1 n 1/2 cup................maida

1/2 cup .....................butter

1/2 cup.......................sugar

1...............................egg

3 to 4 drops.............vanilla

1 tsp.......................baking powder

1/4 tsp...................salt

50 gm ...................chocolate 

few silver balls 

Method :

Cream together butter and sugar till very fluffy .

Add egg and vanilla and further mix for 2 more minutes.

In a grinder add maida, salt and baking powder and just pulse for a minute.

This ensures uniform mixing of baking powder in the maida.

Now add maida little at a time to butter egg mixture.

Knead a dough and chill it for 4 hours or more . ( mine was in fridge for almost 8 hours)

Take out the chilled dough and roll it with a rolling pin.

Cut the cookies in desired shapes .

Brush the cookies with milk.

Sprinkle some sugar over the cookies . ( I did not do this )

Bake them in a preheated oven at 180 degrees for 10 to 15 minutes.

Cool them completely and then decorate.

Instead of sprinkling sugar before baking you can decorate it after baking the way you want.

I melted  the chocolate over a double boiler.

And spread this evenly on the cookies and sprinkle some silver balls on them.