Valentine's Day Sugar Cookies
These adorable Valentine's Day sugar cookies are tender, sweet, and perfect for making heart sugar cookies! Make a batch of these cuties for classroom parties, your kiddos, or your lucky sweetheart.
🔍 Recipe At-A-Glance: Valentine's Day Sugar Cookies
- 🕰️ Prep Time: 20 minutes, plus chill time
- ⏰ Cook Time: 8 minutes
- 💚 Flavor Profile: These may be the best sugar cookies you ever have! They are buttery, sweet, and perfectly tender.
- 💗 Good For: Baking and decorating with kids, classroom parties, sharing with your sweetheart
- 🧡 Difficulty: These are Baking 101 level easy
"Best sugar cookies I've ever made! Not only do they look good, but they taste wonderful, too. Not too sweet or sugary, just the perfect blend of goodness! Thank you for sharing this recipe."
- KEILEE -
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🧡 Why You'll Love This Recipe
Hey sweetheart, ready to fall in love with a sugar cookie recipe? I got you. I've been making this exact cut out sugar cookie recipe for decades, and they turn out perfect every time! Now they're made even more special with a little Valentine's flair!
Here's why you'll love this recipe:
- No spread, no puff: No deformed hearts or wonky cupids here. Your cookies go in and come out of the oven looking like your cookie cutters.
- Easy to work with: Non-sticky dough that is easy to roll, easy to cut, and easy to clean up.
- Lightly sweet, buttery flavor: These sugar cookies are not too sweet (our best ever sugar cookie icing balances that out) and are packed with buttery richness.
- The perfect sugar cookie texture: Not cakey, not crisp, these cookies are the glorious chewy, soft texture we all love. Although if you do enjoy a good cakey sugar cookie, my Lofthouse sugar cookies recipe will do the trick!
- Customizable flavor. My go-to is to flavor these cookies with vanilla extract, but these are so good with almond, coconut, or even lemon extract!
💗 The Ingredients You Need
- Butter: You want it to be softened before making the cookies. Check my Expert Tips & Trips below for two easy ways to soften butter fast!
- All purpose flour: Just regular ole white flour is what works best here.
Make sure to check the recipe card below for the full ingredients list, along with quantities and my expert tips and tricks.
🥣 How to Make My Valentine's Day Sugar Cookies
Step 1: Cream together the softened butter and sugar, then add in the eggs and the extract of your choice. You can do this using a stand mixer, hand mixer, or in a bowl with a spoon.
Step 2: Add in the flour, baking powder, and salt, and mix until well-combined.
Step 3: Divide the dough into quarters, then form into discs and wrap in plastic wrap. Chill in the fridge for at least two hours, or 20 minutes in the freezer.
Step 4: Take one disc out of the fridge or the freezer and roll it out on a lightly floured surface until the dough is between ⅛" and ¼" thick.
Step 5: Grab your favorite cookie cutters and go to town!
Step 6: Bake the cookies on an ungreased cookie sheet for 6-8 minutes in a 400° oven.
Step 7: Watch the cookies very closely! The cookies are done with the bottoms are just barely brown. Immediately transfer the cookies to a wire baking rack to cool. Allow cookies to cool completely before decorating.
Step 8: Now the super fun part! After the cookies have completely cooled, decorate them with our easy sugar cooking icing and your favorite sprinkles.
👩🏻🍳 My Expert Tips & Tricks
- Soften butter fast trick #1: Fill a metal bowl with hot water, let it sit for a sec to warm up the bowl. Dump out the water. Place the sticks of butter under the inverted hot bowl on the counter. Wait 5 minutes or so.
- Soften butter fast trick #2: Place the butter in a zip-top bag and submerge it in warm (not hot!) water. Wait a few minutes.
- The wet ingredients may look curdled: Don't stress! I promise the final dough will turn out perfect.
- Don't overbake. They could be done in as little as five minutes! You're looking for very slight color along the edges. Err on the side of underbaked!
- Get those cookies off the pan ASAP. The cookies will keep on cooking if you leave them on the hot metal pan. Use a large thin spatula to move them to cooling racks as soon as they are out of the oven.
- Cool completely before decorating. If not, the best icing for sugar cookies will run everywhere.
- This recipe makes a lot! If you want less, you can easily half the recipe. Or do as I do, and freeze the extra dough discs for other holidays. This recipe makes perfect Christmas sugar cookies, Easter sugar cookies, and Halloween sugar cookies!
🍪 More Cookie Recipes to Try
If you tried these Valentine's Day Sugar Cookies or any other recipe on my blog, please leave a 🌟 star rating and let me know how it went in the comments!
📖 Recipe
Valentine's Day Sugar Cookies Recipe
Ingredients
- 1 ½ cups unsalted butter 3 sticks, softened
- 2 cups granulated sugar
- 4 large eggs
- 1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract or coconut or almond extract
- 5 cups all-purpose flour plus more for rolling (see notes)
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- Sugar cookie icing dyed pink, red, or whatever color you want
- Valentine's Day sprinkles
Instructions
- Cream together butter and sugar in the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment or using a hand mixer. Mix in eggs and extract.
- In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Add the flour mixture to the butter in batches, stirring until well combined.
- Divide dough into four equal pieces, shape into discs, and wrap each in plastic wrap. Chill for at least 2 hours in the fridge, or 20 minutes in the freezer.
- Preheat oven to 400°F.
- Remove one disc from the fridge and roll the dough out on a floured surface until the dough is ⅛"-¼" thick.
- Cut with cookie cutters (we recommend hearts of course!) and transfer to an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 6-8 minutes, watching closely. Cookies are done when bottoms are just barely golden. Remove cookies immediately from the baking sheet, and let cool completely on cooling rack before icing. Repeat with remaining dough, ensuring that the pans are cool to the touch before filling them with more cookie dough.
- Decorate with sugar cookie icing (keep it as white icing or add a few drops of food coloring to dye it) and sprinkles, as desired.
Notes
- The standard way to roll out sugar cookies is to use additional flour, but you can also use powdered sugar. The powdered sugar absorbs into the cookie while it bakes and doesn't leave any flour residue.
- Here's our sugar cookie icing recipe for when it is decorating time!
- Make sure the cookies are cooled completely before icing.
Nutrition
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so so so cute!!