Last year, I posted about making cookies around Christmas time. This year one of the cousins shared a recipe that is supposed to be Grandma Link’s recipe. Of course, we made sugar cookies this weekend.

I’m not going to share the recipe at this time, as I want to do a bit more with it to see if I can work out some of the challenges we had. The recipe itself had some interesting things to sort out as we went along.

Cookies on the racks after being frosted.

One line of the recipe read “1 heaping cup (half short, half imperial)”. Now I had my trusty co-chef (Walt) read through it with me, and we knew that this meant half shortening and half Imperial margarine. The line for eggs said “2 or 3 eggs”. We decided that meant two larger eggs or three smaller eggs. The last challenging line was “approx. 4 cups of flour”. We ended up using about 5 cups of flour.

Making the cookies

I mixed it up on Saturday since the recommendation was for it to be chilled in the fridge for at least 8 hours. The dough was still very sticky, so we added more flour as we were getting ready to roll it out. I used a marble board and marble rolling pin. Because the marble is cooler than air temperature, it will help keep your dough chilled a little longer.

We used an assortment of cookie cutters and ended up with about a hundred cookies! Now many of them were smaller (about 2 inches) because we thought that would be nice size to share at work. We baked them all on Sunday. That was another interesting part of the recipe – bake 8 to 12 minutes depending on thickness. We frosted a fair number on Sunday, but have more to do.

Cookies waiting to be frosted

The sugar cookies taste amazing with bit of tart from the lemon flavoring and sour cream. They are very light and are very good without the frosting. The last line on the recipe card said “several of my friends have trouble handling dough”. Once we added enough flour, it worked pretty well.

Digging deeper

An old recipe can be challenging to decipher. In my post about measuring small amounts, I talked a bit about terminology. In the post about German Chocolate Cake, I talked about measuring by weight and not by volume.

If you want to learn a lot about older recipes (Roman Empire to the food served on the Titanic) you might want to check out “Tasting History with Max Miller” a YouTube channel with amazing information. As usual, no affiliation, just a happy follower.