Thick & Chewy Muffin Tin Sugar Cookies

It’s been a while since we last baked something together, so when the big kid asked if we could make cookies for Family Day I said yes. Poking around the kitchen to see what ingredients we had at hand it was decided that we would make sugar cookies. We assembled all of the ingredients on the dining room table, dumped things into our over-sized bowl and mixed and mixed and stirred. Both girls took turns measuring, dumping and mixing.

You can tell I had helpers based on the sheer number of measuring cups and spoons that ended up getting used.

I knew I didn’t feel like rolling out dough or cutting shaped cookies, so I had already told the girls we were going to make lump cookies. As we got to the part where the dough was almost ready to be formed into balls and squished into cookie shape the eight year old offered to grab the cookie sheet, while her younger sister and I finished up with the dough. Except she couldn’t find the cookies sheet. Of course, I thought she was just looking in the wrong spot, but then… I couldn’t find the darn thing either. Who the heck loses a cookie sheet? Apparently me, that’s who.

We’d already made the dough and heated up the oven, so I felt locked into baking cookies at this point. I eyed my big glass lasagna pan but decided against it as I know that things heat up differently when baking on glass versus baking on metal. We ended up popping the cookies into a muffin tin, putting them in the oven and hoping for the best.

They turned out AWESOME. Soft, chewy — this is my idea of cookie perfection. Now it could have just been that we made thick little lump cookies, instead of thin, rolled out, sugar cookies, but I am guessing the muffin tin and the way it spread out the heat had something to do with the way the cookies turned out. Plus the combination of rolling cookie dough into balls, squishing it flat in our hands and just popping each one into a spot on the muffin tray made this so darn perfect for doing with the kids. No worries about how the cookies are spaced out. It’s pretty much idiot proof.

I also don’t normally add vanilla to my sugar cookie dough. However ever since I brought back some pure vanilla of amazing tastiness from Mexico I’ve started sneaking it into everything. Even, on occasion, pot roast. No, I’m not kidding.

Anyroad, here it is, my recipe for Thick & Chewy Muffin Tin Sugar Cookies:

Ingredients:
1 cup margarine
1 1/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
Optional chocolate, peanut butter or butterscotch chips.

Preheat oven to 350.

Stir the margarine and the sugar together for two of three minutes, until as my daughter put it “the sugar is all yellow” and evenly mixed.

Add the eggs, vanilla and salt and mix well, until the eggs are blended in.

Then add the dry ingredients, the baking powder and the flour. Mix until everything is a dough-like consistency. It will seem a little flaky and like it’s not sticking together. Get your hands in there and hand mix it, giving it a few good squeezes, and blam, suddenly it’s dough!

Form the dough into a small ball, smoosh it flat on the palm of your hand, and then pop that smooshed cookie into a spot in your muffin tin. Repeat until your muffin tin is full.

At this point, you can add chocolate chips if you like (or butterscotch, or peanut butter). Take a chip and push it point down into a cookie. Repeat as needed. My kids enjoyed squishing the chips into the cookies, and they enjoyed eating the end results. Personally, I prefer the plain sugar cookies.

Bake the cookies at 350 for 10 minutes, remove from oven and let cool for 10 minutes. Seriously, resist the urge to start trying to eat hot cookies. They will be sort of mushy when they first come out. As they cool they turn into cookie perfection. So, let them cool. And then…. ENJOY!

This recipe makes about three dozen thick and chewy cookies. Seal up any leftovers in an airtight container and they should stay fresh and chewy for a few days.