Tessa's Recipe Rundown
Taste: The perfect amount of sweetness.
Texture: My favorite part, each bite is the ideal balance between soft and chewy.
Ease: Super easy 30-minute sugar cookie recipe with no chilling required.
Why You’ll Love This Recipe: Fun, simple, and perfect for holidays from Christmas to Valentine’s Day, even 4th of July. Everyone LOVES these cookies.
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Not to boast, but everyone who has tasted or made this sugar cookie recipe has said it became their instant favorite!! It took weeks of testing to get it just right.
These Soft & Chewy Sugar Cookies require NO CHILLING and are incredibly easy to bake up.
Reader Love
Delicious! Just made these with my 3 year old daughter. Easy to follow recipe and will be my go-to for sugar cookies! Only difference was adding rainbow sprinkles (the round ones) to the sugar to roll the balls in before baking.
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This recipe is perfect for your Christmas cookie boxes or just enjoying with a glass of milk. If it’s a warmer time of year, it also makes a great base for ice cream sandwiches!
Originally, I had created a recipe with cream cheese that was ultra-soft. However, I found that it would become claggy, and each bite would get stuck to the roof of your mouth.
After many rounds of recipe testing, I finally nailed an easy sugar cookie recipe that’s soft and chewy (and STAYS soft) and has that perfect sparkly crackled top.
Sprinkle of Science
Ingredients Notes
- All-purpose flour – Make sure to weigh your flour accurately. If you add too much flour, your cookies won’t spread at all and won’t be soft or chewy.
- Baking powder – This gives the sugar cookies lift, without adding too much spread or browning.
- Fine sea salt – So important to balance the sweetness!
- Unsalted butter – It’s important that your butter is at a cool room temperature (around 67°F), otherwise your cookies may spread.
- Granulated sugar – The star ingredient! Don’t reduce the sugar – find out why here and peek the image below.
- Eggs – One whole egg with an extra egg yolk lends richness and chewiness to the texture. Make sure they’re at room temperature.
- Vanilla extract – No sugar cookie recipe is complete without the flavor of vanilla extract.
Keys to SOFT Cookies
- The extra egg yolk helps to add more moisture and richness, for a soft and chewy texture.
- The other trick is found in the size of the dough ball…. a whole 3 tablespoons in each! This creates larger cookies that spread out perfectly with ultra-soft centers.
- Whatever you do, don’t overbake this sugar cookie recipe. They should still look ever so slightly ‘wet’ in the center when you pull them from the oven.
How to Prevent Cookie Spreading
To prevent flat sugar cookies that spread into little puddles, it’s important to make sure your butter is at a COOL room temperature.
Your sticks of butter should give slightly when pressed with your finger but still hold their shape. To be precise, your butter should be 67°F.
Crinkly Tops in Sugar Cookies
Besides rolling in sugar, baking powder is one ingredient that gives these cookies their characteristic cracks, so make sure your baking powder is fresh.
TIP: When the cookies are piping hot out of the oven, use a round cookie cutter to swirl around the edges of each cookie to re-shape into a perfect circle and enhance those crinkly tops.
The Best Baking Sheet for Cookies
The below photo features cookies from the same exact batch of dough, baked for the same amount of time at the same temperature.
2. Wilton Non-Stick: browned heavily with less spread
3. Walmart Mainstays: pale cookies, pan warped and rusted
4. Viking Ceramic Lined: cookies burnt on the bottom
5. Nordicware Unlined Aluminum: my favorite Goldilocks pan*
6. OXO Gold Nonstick: browned heavily with less spread
A light-colored aluminum half sheet pan is my favorite for baking cookies. Avoid dark nonstick pans altogether, they brown too much and may burn the bottoms of your cookies. Check out my Baking Pans 101 post for all the surprising details.
Do You Need to Chill the Dough?
It’s not required, baking immediately after mixing will result in absolutely delicious cookies.
However, if time permits, chilling the scooped dough in an airtight container for 24-72 hours does result in cookies that are thicker, chewier, and more flavorful. Roll in sugar after chilling otherwise the sugar will absorb into the dough. Learn more about chilling cookie dough here.
What Temperature and How Long to Bake
Bake at 350°F for 10 to 12 minute, or until the sugar cookies are set and are just beginning to brown around the edges, for classic thick & chewy sugar cookies.
The higher the temperature and/or the longer you bake, the crispier your cookies will be.
If you like really soft, almost dough-y cookies, bake at 325°F, adding a few minutes to the bake time.
How to Store Cookies to Keep Soft
Store sugar cookies in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days. Store cookies with a tortilla, apple wedge, or piece of bread to keep them soft for longer.
Freezing
This sugar cookie recipe freezes beautifully. Freeze the uncoated, pre-portioned balls of cookie dough in a freezer-safe container, tightly wrapped in plastic wrap, or in a Ziploc bag. Allow them to thaw overnight in the fridge or for 30-60 minutes at room temperature, then bake as directed below.
FAQs
Yes! A hand mixer will work just as well as a stand mixer.
No, this sugar cookie recipe was designed for simple drop-style cookies. If you want cookie cutter sugar cookies instead, check out my Cut Out Sugar Cookie recipe here.
It makes quick and easy work of portioning the dough uniformly so no one fights over the biggest cookie. I love using a 3-Tablespoon size cookie scoop for this sugar cookie recipe. Learn more about Cookie Scoops and how to use them here!
Yes! Feel free to add 1/2 – 1 teaspoon almond extract for a fun twist.
Yes, either omit the salt entirely, or reduce the amount to 1/2 teaspoon.
This is totally optional, as these cookies are so pretty by themselves – but if you want to make them a more colorful treat, here some ideas:
-Roll the balls of dough in colored sugar before baking.
-Fold in 1/4-1/2 cup of multi-colored jimmies or holiday jimmies or sprinkles as a last addition to the dough.
-Use my Best Buttercream Frosting recipe for decorating.
-Another favorite is my Best Cream Cheese Frosting recipe!
I prefer parchment paper for cookies over silicone mats, it’s easier and quicker to clean up. Learn about parchment vs. Silicone mats here.
Whatever you do, never use nonstick cooking spray when baking cookies. This will lead to too much browning and spread (hello, burnt cookie puddles).
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Ingredients
- 2½ cups (318 grams) all-purpose flour
- 2 teaspoons baking powder
- 3/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
- 2 sticks (226 grams) unsalted butter, at cool room temperature
- 1¼ cups (250 grams) granulated sugar, plus ¼ cup (50 grams) for rolling
- 1 large egg plus 1 egg yolk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt to combine.
- In a large bowl, use an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment on medium-high speed to beat the butter and 1¼ cups sugar until light and fluffy, 2 to 3 minutes. Scrape down the sides and bottom of the mixing bowl. Add the egg, egg yolk, and vanilla, and beat until combined, scraping the bowl down as needed. Slowly beat in the flour mixture.
- Place the remaining 1/4 cup sugar in a shallow dish. Using a large (3-tablespoon) spring-loaded scoop, divide the dough into balls, then roll in sugar to coat evenly. Place the dough balls on the prepared baking sheets, spacing 2 inches apart, and flatten slightly with the bottom of a measuring cup.
- Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, or until the cookies set and begin to brown. Cool for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely. Cookies can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days.
I don’t have a digital scale but I do have just a regular scale similar to this one.
Can I use this one or would it just be better to use the other method you mentioned using a knife?
Hi Valerie! I cannot speak to the accuracy of your scale, having never used anything similar, so unless you can test its accuracy to verify it works well, I would recommend the ‘spoon and level’ method Tessa talks about in this article. I hope that helps! Let us know what you think of these cookies once you have given them a try 🙂
Horrible! Followed instructions to a T and it came out a runny mess! Couldn’t make a ball from it if ya tried!
Hi Cassie! I’m sorry to hear that these cookies didn’t turn out as they should for you. The dough should be a nice soft cookie dough, easily scoopable into round balls, and super delicious! Without having baked alongside you, it’s tough to say what went wrong here – but here are a few common things that may have occurred:
– Were any ingredients substituted, reduced, removed, or accidentally forgotten? Every ingredient in a baking recipe is there for a reason, and many ingredients need the perfect balance to chemically react with one another, to form the perfect bake. That’s why reducing sugar, using a different type of flour, skipping leavening agents, etc can have a big impact – and why ensuring you measure accurately as so important. Even seemingly small changes can mess with a recipe’s chemistry, resulting in cookie issues.
– How do you measure your ingredients? By volume (using cups), or by weight (using a digital kitchen scale)? When measuring by volume, it’s so easy to mis-measure ingredients and throw off the chemistry of the recipe. Check out Tessa’s article here, where she talks about how to best measure ingredients to ensure accuracy every time.
– Another thing could be how long you creamed your butter and sugars together for, and how warm your butter was at this time. Both have a huge impact on a cookie’s outcome. Have a look at this article, where Tessa discusses both and the repercussions on the resulting baked goods.
– How old are your leavening agents? If your baking soda/powder are not fresh, they won’t do their jobs and your baked goods can not rise properly, fall after baking, and much more. Baking powder/soda can also lose their effectiveness long before the expiration date on the packaging. Tessa talks about the science behind leavening agents, and how to test for leavener freshness, in this article here!
I hope something here helps, and I hope you’ll give these cookies another try – they really are incredibly delicious!! Happy baking 🙂
These are now a family favorite! Even my daughter who is NOT a sugar cookie fan loved them! The tiniest bite of salt seemed to be a big part of the love. I followed the recipe exactly. No complaints- except that they are hard to keep around for very long! A total win.
Thanks for recipe. Works perfect and cookies are delicious even when I add 3 spoon of lemon green tea which I blend up with some of sugar.
I’ve made this recipe about 5 times and it’s been great. Make sure to flatten out the cookies before baking and measure your flour with a scale.
I also love to coat them with cinnamon sugar. (:
I made these for the kids and they were a big hit. The only problem was that I couldn’t eat them because I have to eat gluten-free. Can these cookies be made using gluten free flour?
Hi Esther! We don’t typically bake with gluten-free ingredients, so we can’t say for sure! Let us know how it goes if you give that a try 🙂
The recipe is amazing, although me and my friends found them a little dry, and decided that they could use more butter. Other than that, they tasted great!
I am wondering if it is possible to make these cookies without an electric mixer?? Will they turn out the same if I melt the butter / make it a bit softer so that I can cream it manually? thanks in advance:)
Hi Mirabel! Unfortunately, both the creaming process and the cooler temperature of the butter are crucial in making this cookie recipe. Learn more about both here! I recommend instead making recipes designed to use melted butter, such as Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies or Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies or Soft Batch Double Chocolate Chip Cookies. Let us know if you give any of these cookies a try 🙂
I made these by hand & they turned out fine! Put the butter in the microwave for 10 seconds. Use your hands too! Super great recipe.
I was wondering if you could put maraschino chopped cherries in this recipe and use the juice of the cherries instead of vanilla?
Hi Linda! We haven’t tried that, and it should work okay – just be sure that your cherries are very, very thoroughly dried before adding them to your dough, to prevent adding too much excess moisture to the dough. Feel free to experiment with adding a little juice in place of the vanilla, but we think the vanilla brings such a wonderful flavor that I’d hesitate to remove it entirely. Let us know how it goes! 🙂
Hadn’t made sugar cookies in a long time— these are exactly what I loved and missed!
This recipe was amazing! I saw someone asking if you can roll out the dough and make shapes etc. I just want to say YES you can! I rolled out the dough (yes it will stick a little but dust a tiny bit of flour on top and it’ll be fine). Refrigerate this rolled out dough and when chilled cut into shapes. Repeat with left over dough.
These cookies did not turn out good for me. I had to add milk to thin out the dough. The first batch was very fluffy
Hi there! I’m sorry to hear that these cookies didn’t turn out as they should. The texture you describe sounds like you may have accidentally added too much flour. How do you measure your ingredients? By volume (using cups), or by weight (using a digital kitchen scale)? When measuring by volume, it’s so easy to mis-measure ingredients (particularly flour) and throw off the entire chemistry of a recipe – resulting in overly puffy, dry, dense or even hard cookies, without much flavor. Check out Tessa’s article here, where she talks about how to best measure ingredients to ensure accuracy every time. I hope that helps! Happy baking 🙂