SUGAR COOKIES

SUGAR COOKIES ARE THE SIMPLEST COOKIE YOU can make. Although the ingredient list is short (butter, flour, sugar, eggs, vanilla, leavener, and salt), this cookie can be especially delicious when made right. However, sugar cookies can also be bland and boring. There are no chips or nuts to offer distractions, so the dough itself must be delicious. Our ideal sugar cookie is sweet and buttery, with a soft, chewy texture.

We started testing by focusing on the type and amount of sugar. Some recipes call for confectioners' sugar, but we found that these cookies were too crumbly and not chewy at all. We tried adding some brown sugar, but the caramel flavor felt like a variation to us. It did not deliver the clean, sweet, buttery flavor we wanted for a master recipe. Granulated sugar (and a lot of it) proved to be the best sweetener for flavor and texture.

We next focused on the flour. After several tests we settled on a ratio of one cup butter to two cups flour. This cookie has slightly less flour than many others to allow the buttery flavor to dominate. Cutting the flour made the dough a tad soft, but we reduced the eggs from two in our working recipe down to one and that solved the problem. Reducing the egg also seemed to bring out the flavor of the butter.

We tried baking powder as well as cream of tartar and baking soda. (There are no acidic ingredients in this cookie, so plain baking soda would not work properly.) We felt that the baking powder gave this cookie the cleanest flavor. Several tasters noted a slightly sour flavor in the cookies made with cream of tartar and baking soda.

Our final tests concerned the vanilla. We tried leaving it out and really noticed the difference in this simple cookie. For the best flavor, we found it necessary to use two teaspoons. With less vanilla, the cookies tasted flat or bland.