Sugar Cookies with Cream Cheese Icing

½ c. butter or margarine
½ c. sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
2 ¾ c. all purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder

Preheat oven to 400º F. In large bowl, cream butter and sugar with an electric mixer. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Mix together flour and baking powder. Add to creamed mixture, 1 cup at a time, mixing after each addition. Dough will be very stiff. DO NOT CHILL.
Divide into 2 balls. On floured surface, roll each ball into circle 1/8 inch thick. Cut into desired shapes and place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 8 – 10 minutes on top rack of oven. Remove from cookie sheet immediately. Cool. Ice with Cream Cheese Icing and decorate as desired. Yield: approximately 3 dozen, but this will depend on size of cookie cutter used.

Cream Cheese Icing: Mix together one 8 oz. package cream cheese, ½ c. Crisco, 1 tsp. clear vanilla and ½ tsp. clear butter flavor. (Crisco and clear flavorings are used to keep icing very white, thus if you color it, the color will be true.) Slowly add 1 pound sifted confectioner’s sugar and mix until smooth.

I discovered the recipe for theses cookies when I bought a set of Wilton Sesame Street Cookie Cutters in 1974 to make a cake for my best friend's 2 year old son, "Ronnie-Man." His dad's name was Ronnie, hence the nickname. I fell in love with this recipe because, unlike most sugar cookie recipes, you do not chill the dough. So once I start the mission to make cookies, I can work straight through. I think this cookie is just perfect for icing and decorating because it's not very sweet, so the icing tops them off perfectly.

The cream cheese icing recipe is one I adapted from another friend's Italian Cream Cake recipe. Elizabeth and Toby wanted Cream Cheese Icing on their wedding cake, so to keep it a lovely white, I used Crisco (the basis of most decorator icing), instead of butter or margaine, then added clear vanilla and butter flavorings.

Because almost anything tastes better with cream cheese icing, I decided to pair it with my sugar cookies, instead of a regular buttercream decorator icing and entered these in the Kentucky State Fair in 2006 and they won a blue ribbon in the Sugar Cookie Division! (By the way, they were cut in "Seashell" shapes.)

My favorite cookie shapes for Christmas with this recipe are Christmas trees, snowflakes, stars, holly leaves, and JOY. (Yes I have a cookie cutter that cuts out the word, JOY. It's one of my more recent acquisitions, and makes a striking cookie when I just use red, white, and green icing to trace the letters on the cookie.