Nothing says Amish baking more than homemade sugar cookies: soft, warm rounds soaked in sugar. It doesn't get much better than that. A really, really good sugar cookie - like these pictured - don't need frosting, the cookie itself is amazing enough. One of our northern Indiana readers shared this recipe and photo and I have seen sour cream sugar cookies in my Amish archives, I think there was an Amish baker in Holmes County, Ohio who gave me a recipe that shared a lot of this one's flavors. Enjoy!
Sour Cream Sugar Cookies
Ingredients
- 3¼ cup flour
- 1 tsp. baking soda
- ½ tsp. salt
- 1 cup sugar
- ½ cup butter, soften
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp. vanilla
- ½ tsp. nutmeg
- ½ pint (1 cup) sour cream
Instructions
- Cream the butter, egg, vanilla, and sour cream together. Then add the dry ingredients.The dough will be sticky, I ivide it to make it easier to work with. Work the dough with some flour just enough so it can be rolled out and cut with cookie cutters. Roll it out to about a fat ¼ inch. Just before you are done sprinkle sugar over the dough then lightly roll the sugar in. Bake at 425 degrees for about 8 min.
Â
Karen
They look and sound good. May try for the holidays.
Christine
Hi Just wondering if there is supposed to be sugar in the list of ingredients? These look delicious!
KJill
This is pretty much the recipe I have from my great-grandmother who passed in 1975 at the age of 100 We use a little less flour and her recipe calls for sour milk (1 Tlb vinegar in the milk works here) but I have used sour cream, yogurt, or buttermilk depending on what I have on hand. The baking soda reacts to ''sour" to make the puff and we do them as a drop cookie. The nutmeg is a must in these cookies, even more than the sour cream it is what makes them stand out from other sugar cookies. We also sprinkle them with course colored sugar, my father (now 85) remembers his grandmother always did that when he was a kid. I live in central PA near the Big Valley Amish, as a child this great-grandmother was sent after her mother died to live with what my dad said she called a Pennsylvania Dutch family to help out and she learned to cook there.
Kevin
Kjill, thank you for sharing that...sounds like you have some deep culinary history in your family to draw upon. I've been studying Amish culture for over 25 years and I have never made it to the Big Valley of Pa, I really, really, really need to someday...
KJill
Mifflin County - Kishacoquillas Valley (aka Big Valley) Certainly worth a trip as it is such a long established Amish area with some of the most conservative Amish in the country. Wednesday is market/animal auction day in Belleville and the best chance to spot three different buggy colors and count suspenders (none, one or rarely two). Of course there is good food to be had, the traditional whoopie pie and shoefly pie and some of the best ham anywhere. Not the tourist destination that Lancaster is largely due to the location and very conservative nature of the local groups. Though there have been Beachy Amish moving up from Lancaster in the past 20 years they are primarily in Penns Valley the next valley to the north.
Kevin
Thanks for the tip KJill, if I make to the Big Valley, I will shoot for a Wednesday!