Grandma’s Soft Sugar Cookies with Icing

The envelope arrived three days after the funeral. Inside was a photocopy of my grandmother’s handwritten recipe collection—twenty-seven pages of smudged blue ink and cryptic abbreviations that made sense only to her. My aunt had found them tucked inside a 1970s Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, each recipe written on whatever paper was handy: backs of envelopes, torn notebook pages, once even a flattened cigarette carton from a brand that stopped existing in 1985.

The sugar cookie recipe was on proper card stock, though. Cream-colored, with a border of faded flowers. That alone told me it mattered.

The Recipe Nobody Asked Me to Preserve

I wasn’t the obvious choice for family recipe keeper. My sister went to culinary school. My cousin owns a bakery. I burned boxed mac and cheese twice in college. But I’m the one who called Grandma every Sunday, and I’m the one who showed up on random weekdays to sit in her kitchen while she cooked. She never formally taught me anything. I just absorbed it through proximity and repetition.

These cookies appeared at every gathering for as long as anyone can remember. Baby showers, graduations, funerals, Tuesday dinners that somebody decided should feel special. They showed up in old butter cookie tins, layers separated by wax paper, the icing slightly cracked from transport but still sweet and soft.

Nobody ever said they were the best cookies they’d eaten. People said they were good. Reliable. “Just like I remembered.” That’s higher praise than “best,” honestly. Best is a competition. “Just like I remembered” is a promise kept.

What Actually Goes Into These

The Cookie Base:

• 1 cup butter (2 sticks, unsalted, not negotiable)
• 1½ cups white sugar
• 2 eggs (large, though Grandma’s chickens probably weren’t standardized)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• ½ cup sour cream (full fat—low-fat is a different chemistry experiment)
• 3½ cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt

The Icing:

• 3 cups powdered sugar
• 3 tablespoons butter, softened
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2-4 tablespoons milk
• Food coloring (Grandma used exactly three drops of red for pink, two drops of blue for blue, and left one batch white)

The Method That Actually Works

Let your butter sit out until a finger pressed into it leaves a dent but doesn’t sink through. This takes about ninety minutes in a 70-degree kitchen, less if you remember to cut it into pieces first. I’ve tried every shortcut. They all compromise something.

Cream the butter and sugar with a mixer on medium-high for five full minutes by the clock. Your butter will transform from yellow and grainy to pale cream and fluffy. This isn’t optional beautification—you’re incorporating air that will affect the final texture. Stop early and you’ll get dense cookies. Nobody wants dense cookies.

Crack in your eggs one at a time. Wait until the first one’s fully incorporated before adding the second. Pour in the vanilla with the second egg. Your mixture will look silky and cohesive and exactly like something you’d want to eat with a spoon. Don’t eat it with a spoon yet.

Measure the sour cream and dump it in. Your beautiful silky mixture will immediately look broken and curdled, like you’ve ruined everything. You haven’t. This is correct. Keep mixing for another thirty seconds. It won’t get smooth again. That’s fine.

Whisk together your flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a separate bowl. I’ve skipped this step. The cookies had weird pockets of concentrated baking soda that tasted like pennies. Learn from my mistakes.

Add your dry ingredients in three additions, mixing on low speed just until the flour disappears. The dough will be soft and sticky—more like thick frosting than cookie dough. If you’re thinking “this can’t possibly be right,” you’re exactly where you should be.

Scrape the dough into a bowl, press plastic wrap directly onto the surface, and refrigerate for at least three hours. Minimum. I’ve tried rushing this. At two hours, the dough is still too soft to roll without sticking to everything. At one hour, forget it. Make the dough after dinner, bake them the next afternoon.

When you’re ready to bake, set your oven to 350°F. Pull the dough from the fridge and let it sit for exactly ten minutes. Too cold and it’ll crack when you roll it. Too warm and it’ll stick and stretch and make you want to quit baking forever.

Flour your counter. Flour your rolling pin. Flour the top of the dough. Roll it to ¼ inch thickness, checking with a ruler if you’re me and terrible at estimating. Cut whatever shapes make you happy.

Place the cookies two inches apart on parchment-lined baking sheets. Bake for 11-12 minutes. The cookies should look barely done—pale on top with the faintest hint of gold around the bottom edges. Touch one gently with a fingertip. It should feel soft and give slightly. If it feels firm, you’ve overbaked them. They’ll still be edible but not quite right.

Let them sit on the baking sheet for exactly five minutes. Move them too soon and they’ll fall apart. Wait too long and they’ll stick. Set a timer. Transfer them to a cooling rack and don’t touch them for at least thirty minutes.

The Icing That Caused a Family Rift

In 2003, my mother decided Grandma’s icing recipe needed improvement. She’d been watching too much Food Network. She tried royal icing that dried hard and cracked your teeth. She tried cream cheese frosting that never set properly. She tried a glaze made with corn syrup that looked professional but tasted like chemicals.

Grandma never said anything directly. She’d just taste whatever Mom brought, say “that’s nice, dear,” and then make her own batch the old way. By the third family gathering, everyone was eating Grandma’s cookies and leaving Mom’s on the plate. The message was received.

The thing about Grandma’s icing is that it’s not trying to impress anyone. Beat soft butter and powdered sugar together until crumbly. Add vanilla and two tablespoons of milk. Mix until it comes together into something spreadable but thick. Add more milk by the half-teaspoon if needed. That’s it.

The icing should hold its shape when you plop it onto a cookie but spread easily when you push it with a knife. Too thick and you’ll tear the cookie trying to spread it. Too thin and it’ll run off the edges and pool on your counter.

Divide it into small bowls for coloring. I use three bowls because Grandma used three bowls. Pink, blue, white. My kids argue for purple and green and orange, and sometimes I give in, but the traditional colors feel right for these particular cookies.

Spread the icing with an offset spatula or a butter knife. Don’t aim for perfection. These cookies are supposed to look handmade, slightly irregular, like someone’s grandmother made them in a regular kitchen. Instagram-perfect cookies with flawless icing belong to a different recipe.

What I’ve Figured Out Through Repetition

I’ve made these cookies in seven different kitchens across four states. Gas ovens, electric ovens, one truly terrible apartment oven that ran fifty degrees hot and burned everything. The cookies always turn out, with minor adjustments.

If your oven runs hot, drop the temperature to 325°F. If it runs cool, increase to 375°F. Invest in an oven thermometer. They’re seven dollars and they’ll prevent more problems than any other tool in your kitchen.

You can substitute Greek yogurt for sour cream in a pinch. The cookies will be slightly less tender but still good. I’ve done this four times when the store was out of sour cream. Grandma would probably disapprove, but Grandma also once made a cake with cottage cheese when she ran out of butter, so maybe she’d understand.

The dough freezes perfectly for up to three months. Roll it out, cut your shapes, freeze them on a baking sheet, then transfer to a freezer bag once solid. Bake straight from frozen, adding two minutes to the baking time. This is how I survived my daughter’s third-grade class party when I forgot until the night before.

Baked cookies freeze well too. Layer them between sheets of wax paper in an airtight container. They’ll keep for two months. Let them thaw at room temperature for about an hour before serving. The texture recovers completely.

Why These Particular Cookies Matter

My grandmother raised four kids during a time when nobody talked about how hard it was to raise four kids. My grandfather worked construction, which meant good money when there was work and nothing when there wasn’t. She stretched everything—food, money, patience, love.

These cookies came from that era of making things work. The sour cream was there because they got it delivered and couldn’t waste it. The simple icing was there because elaborate decorations required time she didn’t have. The soft texture was there because soft cookies are more filling than crispy ones.

She never called them special. She’d say “just cookies” like they were nothing, like anyone could make them. But she made them constantly, for every occasion and sometimes for no occasion at all. They were her way of showing up, of making normal days feel cared for.

I make them now for the same reason. Last week I made them because my son’s friend mentioned he’d never had homemade cookies before. I made them for my neighbor who just had surgery. I made them on a random Thursday because the house smelled empty and I wanted it to smell like someone lived here who cared about these things.

The recipe card is laminated now, preserved against the inevitable spills and splatters. My daughter, who’s ten, has already asked if she can have it someday. I told her yes, but not yet. I’m not done with it.

Making Them Your Own

I’ve experimented more than Grandma would’ve approved. Almond extract instead of vanilla creates a subtle difference that’s interesting without being strange. A tablespoon of lemon zest in the dough makes them perfect for spring. Peppermint extract in December icing has become our family tradition.

My brother adds a tiny pinch of nutmeg to his dough. My sister swears by a tablespoon of honey in the icing. These variations are good. They’re still fundamentally the same cookie, just personalized slightly.

But sometimes I make them exactly as written, no changes, because that’s what I need. The familiar process of measuring and mixing, the specific smell of butter and vanilla and sour cream, the way the dough feels under the rolling pin. It’s muscle memory that connects me backward through time to every other instance of making these cookies.

That’s what recipes like this do. They’re not about innovation or improvement. They’re about continuity, about making the same thing the same way because the sameness itself has value. They’re about passing something forward that was passed to you, slightly worn but still intact.

Make these cookies however you want. Change them, experiment, add your own touches. But make them. That’s what matters.