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These simple sourdough sugar cookies are perfect to decorate for any occasion! With a velvety soft interior and slightly crispier edges, you are going to want to bake these sweet sourdough cookies on repeat!
Why You’ll Love This Recipe!
Fermented Dough – Chilling the dough in the fridge for up to 48 hours creates a deeper flavor and the most incredible texture!
Perfect for the Holidays – You can make these fit pretty much any holiday celebration, from Christmas to Easter, Valentine’s Day and anything in between!
Ingredients
- All-purpose Flour
- Baking Powder – not to be confused with baking soda.
- Salt
- Granulated Sugar – White sugar is best here. You can use brown sugar instead of white sugar, however the texture and flavor of the sugar cookies will be different. The cookie will be softer than usual and harder to decorate if you use brown sugar.
- Butter – soft butter is best, it doesn’t matter whether it’s salted or unsalted butter. Leave it out at room temperature well before you want to use it.
- Egg
- Vanilla Extract – you can use vanilla extract or almond extract (I like to add both just because I’m a little extra). You can even add other extracts like strawberry or maple syrup.
- Sourdough Starter – you can use active starter or unfed sourdough starter (discard). For this recipe, I recommend you don’t use older discard as it can give your sugar cookies an unpleasant flavor.
How To Make Sourdough Sugar Cookies
This sourdough sugar cookie recipe uses minimal ingredients to create a delicious sourdough cookie – perfect for gifting or filling up the cookie jar on your kitchen counter. I recommend using a kitchen scale for this recipe (as I do with all sourdough baking recipes) because weighing ingredients is more accurate.
Add all purpose flour, baking powder and salt to a mixing bowl and whisk together until well combined. Set this aside.
Add the butter and sugar to the bowl of a stand mixer cream them together using the whisk attachment until they are light and creamy. This can take up to 5 minutes, depending on the power of your stand mixer.
Add the egg, vanilla extract and sourdough starter to the butter and sugar mixture and continue to whisk on medium speed until well combined.
Now, add the butter mixture to the dry ingredients and combine into a soft dough. I usually just do this with a wooden spoon or spatula as the dough gets stuck in the whisk attachment. Don’t over mix the dough, it should just come away from the sides of the bowl.
Divide the mixture into two balls, wrap each of the cookie dough balls in parchment paper and place into the refrigerator for at least 2 hours, although this dough can be fermented up to 48 hours.
Kate’s Pro Tip
Use The Fridge!
If at any point the dough seems too soft to work with, just put it back in the fridge. Don’t leave cookies that have been cut out on the counter. If you need to set them aside before you bake them, pop them back into the fridge.
When you’re ready to bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 175ºC (350ºF).
Use a rolling pin roll each ball of dough into a “sheet” of dough around a 1/4″ thick. Use a cookie cutter to cut out your desired shapes, placing them onto parchment lined baking sheets. You’ll want to leave around an inch inch between each cookie. Re roll the excess dough and cut out shapes until you have no dough left. If the dough becomes soft, pop it back into the fridge to firm up.
Place the cookies into the oven for 10 to 12 minutes (watch them closely). You don’t want them to brown too much. They should stay fairly pale. If you prefer really crunchy edges, leave them in the oven for an extra 3 to 5 minutes.
Take the cookies out of the oven and allow them to sit on the tray for around 5 minutes before placing them on a cooling rack to cool completely.
How To Decorate Sourdough Sugar Cookies
These cookies are simple to cut into whatever shape you like. Hearts and stars are really simple shapes to cut out and can be decorated very simply. These soft sourdough sugar cookies are perfect for Christmas, Valentines, Thanksgiving or even Easter!
Some other ideas are:
- Dip the cookies in a simple glaze then top with your favorite chocolate chips or sprinkles.
- Use two circle cookie cutters to create “donut” shapes like I have here and then add glaze and sprinkles.
- Sprinkle them with cinnamon sugar before baking for a very simple, tasty topping.
If you love sourdough cookies, why not try these amazing sourdough chocolate chip cookies, sourdough gingerbread cookies, sourdough snickerdoodle cookies or these sourdough oatmeal cookies.
How To Store and Freeze
Baked and iced cookies will last for around 5 days in an airtight container. I prefer to store them in glass as plastic will make them too soft too fast.
This dough is fine to freeze. I find the easiest way is to cut the cookies into the shapes, snap freeze on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and then pop the unbaked cookies into a zip loc bag. You can then place the frozen cookies onto cookie sheets when you are ready to bake.
You can bake them from frozen, they will just take an extra few minutes to bake through. Store cookie dough in the freezer for up to 6 weeks.
Frequently Asked Questions
You can mix this dough in a number of ways:
– use an electric hand mixer (I find this is the most convenient way to do it).
– use a stand mixer (this way you can also bring the dough together in the stand mixer using the paddle attachment).
– mix everything by hand (you’ll need your muscles to cream the butter and sugar together).
– use a Thermomix (speed 4 is fine to cream the butter and eggs, use dough mode to bring the dough together).
Yes you can flavor these cookies. I’ve added vanilla to these cookies, but you can use a different extract if you want to. Some alternatives would be almond, peppermint, lemon or orange. They also work well with a teaspoon of cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice added too!
Sourdough Sugar Coookies
Equipment
- Cookie Cutter
Ingredients
- 300 g All-purpose Flour
- 3 g Baking Powder
- 2 g Salt
- 165 g Granulated Sugar
- 160 g Butter, softened
- 1 Egg
- 5 g Vanilla Extract, (or almond extract)
- 100 g Sourdough Starter, or sourdough discard
Instructions
- Add all purpose flour, baking powder and salt to a mixing bowl and whisk together until well combined. Set this aside.
- Add the butter and sugar to the bowl of a stand mixer cream them together using the whisk attachment until they are light and creamy.
- Add the egg, vanilla extract and sourdough starter to the butter and sugar mixture and whisk on medium speed until well combined.
- Now, add the wet mixture to the dry ingredient mixture and combine into a soft dough. I usually just do this with a wooden spoon or spatula as it gets stuck in the stand mixer attachment. Don't over mix the dough, it needs to just come together.
- Divide the mixture into two balls, wrap each in parchment paper and place into the fridge for at least 2 hours, although this dough can be fermented up to 48 hours.
- When you're ready to bake the cookies, preheat the oven to 175ºC (350ºF).
- Using a rolling pin, roll each ball of dough into a "sheet" of dough around a 1/4" thick.
- Use a cookie cutter to cut out your desired shapes, placing them onto parchment lined cookie sheets. You'll want to leave around an inch inch between each cookie. Re roll the excess dough and cut out shapes until you have no dough left. If the dough becomes soft, pop it back into the fridge to firm up.
- Place the cookies into the oven for 10 to 12 minutes (watch them closely). You don't want them to brown too much.
- Take one sheet of dough out at a time and cut the cookies out with a cookie cutter (see notes for how to deal with excess dough). Place the shaped dough onto the cold cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. You want to leave around 5 cm (2 inches) between each cookie.
- Place the cookies into the oven for 10 to 12 minutes (watch them closely). You don't want them to brown too much.
- Take the cookies out of the oven and allow them to sit on the tray for around 5 minutes before placing them on a wire rack to cool completely.
- You can decorate these cookies however you'd like. Royal icing is great if you want to pipe a design on (there's a recipe for this on my sourdough gingerbread cookie recipe). The white stars and pink circle cookies in these photos have been decorated using fondant icing which I rolled out really thing and cut to the same shape.
Notes
Nutrition
Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.
Like this? Rate and comment below!
These were delicious and melt in your mouth!
I may have done something wrong but the dough was incredibly sticky even after an overnight refrigeration. I had to put them back in the fridge 3-4 times through the process and eventually gave up on cutting shapes and just did balls and smooshed them with a flat cup.
Thank you for the delicious recipe!
I did use the recipe with a couple of changes. Instead of butter, I used margarine and raw tahini – 1/2 a cup of margarine and 1/4 cup of raw tahini. With no mixer, I used a stick blender attachment and then kneaded it all to bring it together, with my hands.
I rolled the dough out between two sheets of parchment paper and placed in the refrigerator for 24 hours. I cut out cookies and gathered the excess dough. I then rolled the excess dough into round balls and with a small glass, dipped in a bit of oil and granulated, white, sugar, I pressed down on the tops and embedded the granulated sugar.
This yielded two sheets. The other sheet of rolled dough is still in the fridge. The cut-out cookies were a bit too brown and of uneven height. The round balls came out very uniform, so for me, that’s my preferred method.
Thank you.
Have you ever made these with whole wheat flour?
Just wondering if the dough can be rolled into a log and after proofing could just be cut into 1/4th inch round cookies?
Could you share what you used for the glaze with the sprinkles? I’m looking for a light glaze that doesn’t effect the taste of the cookie.
Thanks
I rolled out the dough and left it in the fridge for almost a whole day, and it was still too soft and sticky to handle. I pressed the cookie cutters in, scraped the excess dough from around them and removed them (albeit carefully as the dough stuck to those too), and made a third layer with the leftover dough before putting it all back in the fridge for another night. You’d think with 1 1/2 sticks of butter they’d be pretty solid but it seems discard can behave too much like a liquid sometimes. Hopefully I’ll be able to bake them tomorrow; otherwise I may just bake solid sheets of cookie and crumble it all up for piecrust.
Great recipe!! Works so well.