Sugar Cookie Recipes

Sugar cookies are a buttery classic that make a delicious anytime treat. Enjoy your sugar cookies plain, or decorate them with icing to make them festive. This recipe is a favorite of Martha's, who likes to add one tablespoon cognac alongside the egg and vanilla, after creaming together the butter and sugar.

If you're decorating cookies using our royal icing for sugar cookies and have a compromised immune system, we recommend instead using meringue powder, found in the baking aisle of most markets, instead of raw egg whites.

These large cookies have a classic lemony flavor, a chewy texture, and glistening, crackly tops created with a double sprinkling of sanding sugar.

Classic sugar cookies take baking back to basics. But in their simplicity lies their perfection: It's hard to beat the delicate flavor of cookies with only the most elemental of ingredients. We veered from tradition a little by adding sour cream for softness and candied citrus for zest. This recipe appears in our cookbook "Martha Stewart's Cookie Perfection" (Clarkson Potter).

It takes just four ingredients to make these easy, crispy cookies.

Buttery classic, sugar cookies make a delicious treat anytime. Here, Martha heightens them to special-occasion status with a simple glaze and a fanciful combination of candied flowers, crystallized ginger, and chopped pistachios.

Get out your cookie cutters! As its name suggests, this sugar cookie recipe is ideal for making cutout cookies for Christmas, Easter, or any other holiday or occasion that calls for shaped sweet treats.

Transform your favorite sugar-cookie dough into sweet flowers with just the tip of a knife and some round candies.

Feeling festive? Use this recipe, along with our Royal Icing, to make a variety of beautiful holiday cookies this season. 

Debra Satterthwaite of Carmel, Indiana, put a twist on a classic sugar-cookie recipe with the addition of lemon zest, ginger, and fresh mint.

Start filling up your cookie jar with those popular treats.

Rendering your own lard is what really makes these anise-flavored Mexican sugar cookies stand out, but you can use vegetable shortening in a pinch. Martha made this recipe on "Martha Bakes" episode 711.