Soft Cream Cheese Sugar Cookies

Soft baked cream cheese sugar cookies. This is the best cut-out sugar cookie recipe you will ever try! Soft, easy to make, and fun to decorate.

I’ve been flying through sticks of butter testing new cookie recipes for you (a tough job, but someone needs to keep those cookie trays fresh!). Before I share them though, I wanted to kick off cookies’ biggest time of year with a treasured, classic recipe that I bake every year, perfect Cream Cheese Sugar Cookies. Soft, tender, and surprisingly easy to make, these are THE ideal cutout cookie, for the holidays…or anytime you need a soft, chewy, and utterly perfect cut out cookie.

These melt in your mouth cream cheese sugar cookies have been my go-to roll out cookie dough since well before I was tall enough to preheat the oven. I first shared the recipe a few years ago, and they’ve become many of your favorite sugar cookie recipes too.

These chewy cream cheese sugar cookies are sturdy enough to pick up with your fingers or mail in a care package, but they remain magically soft up to a week after baking.

Not that they’ve ever lasted a full week around here, BUT in the event that you happen to have some hidden away and are rationing them out, know you’ll be able to enjoy them over the course of a week or more (longer if you freeze).

Unlike many other roll out cookie dough recipes I’ve tried, this cream cheese cookie dough is easy and forgiving, so much so that little ones can easily help to make and decorate them. My four-year-old niece and I baked a batch of these sugar cookies together last year, and I can’t wait to make them with her again.

Even if you usually bypass the sugar cookies in favor of other options on the cookie tray, I am begging you to give these cream cheese sugar cookies a try. They are exceptional.

Making Perfect Cream Cheese Sugar Cookies

When you take a bite of these cookies, what you’ll taste is the most pleasing, buttery, bewitching, and un-boring sugar cookie you’ve ever had. While they don’t taste like cream cheese, cream cheese is the secret ingredient that makes this sugar cookie dough so easy to handle. It tenderizes the cookies and adds a subtle tang that balances the sweetness of the sugar and frosting.

Ingredients

For the Cream Cheese Sugar Cookies:

• 1 cup unsalted butter - at room temperature
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 large egg - at room temperature
• 2 ounces reduced-fat cream cheese - at room temperature (do not use fat free)
• 1/2 teaspoon  vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon  almond extract
• 1 teaspoon  lemon zest
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

For the Frosting:

• 3 cups powdered sugar
• 3-4 tablespoons milk
• 2  tablespoons light corn syrup
• 3/4 teaspoon almond extract

For Decorating:

• Food coloring
• Sprinkles
• Colored sugar
• Other decorations as desired

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