The Grade School Lunch Room Special: Sugar Cookies, Upgraded
Pardon the broken cookies. I was breaking off pieces so I could test some different methods without throwing up from eating like 9 cookies, and by the time I perfected the recipe I was too tired to make another batch just for better photos. Oops.
The Recipe
Ingredients
2 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon table salt
1 1/2 cups white sugar
2 ounces cream cheese, cut into 8 pieces
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and still warm
1/3 cup neutral oil (See notes!)
1 large egg
1 tablespoon milk
1 tablespoon vanilla extract or vanilla flavoring (See notes!)
1/2 cup sugar for rolling (white, turbinado, or demerara. See notes!)
Method
Preheat your oven to 350°F. Line some large rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper or a SilPat (if you have it. If not, make sure your baking sheet is non-stick!). Mix flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together in a medium bowl and give it some whisky business (ie, whisk until combined. Blame Joshua Weissman.). Set aside.
Place sugar and cream cheese in large bowl. Pour warm butter over sugar and cream cheese and whisk to combine. Some lumps of cream cheese will remain, but they will smooth out with the addition of other ingredients.
Whisk in oil until incorporated. Add in the egg, milk, and vanilla and continue to whisk until smooth. Add flour mixture and mix with a rubber spatula until a soft, homogenous dough forms. Think somewhere between a thick cake batter and Play-Doh.
Sprinkle extra sugar in a shallow dish. Working with about 2 tablespoons of dough at a time, roll it into balls and then in the sugar to coat. Place on baking sheet several inches apart, because these babies SPREAD.
Using the bottom of a drinking glass or flat-bottomed measuring cup, squish the dough balls down until they just start to crinkle at the edges, or until they are about two inches in diameter. Sprinkle some extra sugar from the dish on top if desired. Discard remaining sugar because it’s gross.
Bake, one tray at a time, until edges are set and just beginning to brown, 10 to 12 minutes, rotating halfway through.
Cool cookies on the sheet for a few minutes, then move to a cooling rack or clean lint-free towel to cool completely.
Notes
This one’s got way fewer notes than the chocolate chip cookies. And by that I mean I only have three instead of seven million.
Neutral oils include canola, vegetable, peanut, corn, and safflower oils. I tried the first three, and peanut oil was my favorite. It all depends on how sensitive you are to the different flavors of these oils. For example, I absolutely despised the ones made with vegetable oil because they were very cloying, but your mileage may vary as I am cursed by a hatred of vegetable oil.
I have made these with both vanilla extract and artificial vanilla flavoring. You can use whichever you wish, but artificial vanilla will be more reminiscent of the this cookie’s predecessor. Either way, delicious.
You can use a few different types of sugar for rolling. Regular white sugar will give you the softest cookie, but turbinado and demerara add a nice crunch and more molasses flavor!
The Story
This recipe is based on the chewy sugar cookie from America’s Test Kitchen, found in the book “The Perfect Cookie”, pictured in the thumbnail! Anyway, on with the stuff you definitely did not come here for…
If you’re like me, you probably went to school in a small town with a very underfunded but run-of-the-mill lunch room. Half-pint milk cartons, a chest freezer of off-brand ice cream novelties, weird hexagons of “Mexican Pizza”, sad cheeseburgers, passable breakfast, cardboard pizza with plastic cheese…you know, normal lunch room stuff. Sometimes you would get something pretty damn good, but most of the time the food was mediocre to average. It wasn’t the fault of any of the folks in the kitchen, that’s just how public school-provided lunches ARE.
However, the one thing that always delivered for me were the sugar cookies you could get in the dessert line. Soft, chewy, barely flavored, but somehow just absolutely fuckin’ delicious, and only 25¢ each. I distinctly remember a certain friend buying like $2 worth of cookies every day and scarfing all 8 of them down. cough cough Jake cough cough
These cookies are just like that, but so much better. You can actually taste the vanilla (because there’s a lot of it), and no matter what sugar you use for rolling there’s the perfect contrast of a crispy outside and a soft, chewy inside. I’m a sucker for sugar cookies, and when I think of the perfect one, these hit the spot and then some.
Miss me with those crispy caramelized coins, soft and sweet is where it’s at. Like a marshmallow. Mmmm, marshmallows. So squishy and satisfying. Perfect when toasted (not BURNED god damnit) over a campfire and then squished between some graham crackers and melty chocolate.
…I’ll be right back. I think I have an idea.