Pinwheel Sugar Cookies

This recipe is tried and true.
It's the one I always remember us making when I was little. Obviously, there's many out there, and lot's of different types. This one is a hard sugar cookie recipe, but you can subtract 2 minutes from the  cooking time and it will be nice and chewy.
You definitely won't finding these like the ones you buy that have 1/2 an inch of frosting and who knows what chemicals. Not that my recipe is any healthier. It's half sugar and butter, but I find that better than "preservatives" and "thickeners" and "emulsifiers." Kinda grosses me out to not know what's in my food unless it's Hot Cheetos.
Those have a special exception.
Laughing emoji.

Anyway, I love this one because you can flavor it, color it, top it, and shape it. Quite a versatile recipe.
This time, I decide to make pinwheels for St. Patrick's day. I also did crosses and 3 leaf clovers but didn't take pictures of those because the topic is pinwheels today (aka. didn't have time). This is not one of my experiments inspired from browsing the web and Pinterest. My sis actually was in one of her creative moods and tried it out. She basically rolled two different colored doughs together.

Our family has this funny habit of always running out of the red food coloring, so making a whole bunch of orange and peach stuff to use up the yellow. That leaves the green and blue rejected in the cupboard. Hey, what can you do when the ratio of girls to boys is 4:2? Females = lots of pink stuff. So, we are everlastingly trying to find ways to use up the other colors.
Therefore, B's original experiment was with green and white. I improved it later using the same color for St. Patricks day. You wouldn't believe it, we colored so many things green that almost a whole bottle was used!!!

We use the sugar cookie recipe from Betty Crockers 1986 edition that my mom got as a wedding present. So, if you have the book, no need to read mine except for the pure fun of my exhilarating commentary. My grandma gave us her mom's Betty Crocker from the '40's that she covered in contact paper.
What a treasure.
Except that the sugar cookie recipe from the war years sucks because they were trying to conserve resources and had sugar & butter rations.
Gack.

Sugar Cookies

1 1/2 c. Powdered Sugar

1 c. Butter, softened

1 t. Vanilla Extract

1/2 t. Almond Extract

1 Large Egg

2 1/2 c. Flour

1 t. Baking Soda

1 t. Cream of Tartar

Mix first 5 ingredients in a large bowl then stir in remaining ingredients. Cover and let chill for 2 hours in fridge. Heat oven to 375 F and grease cookie sheets lightly. Divide dough in half and roll them each 1/4 an inch. Cut with cookie cutters and place on pans according to size. Bake for 7-8 minutes or until edges are light brown and cool on wire rack.

Read before making:

First of all, you can totally use granulated sugar instead of powdered sugar. I often have do this so I can frost the cookies in my GENEROUS way...

The second thing is you can substitute any extracts instead of the vanilla and almond, but I normally like to stay basic on the cookie and extravagant on the frosting. I find it tastes better. When I made these pinwheel cookies, we only had half of both almond and vanilla, so I used lemon. Most of the cookie were going to be unfrosted, so it worked out to have a bit more flavor too!

If you don't have Cream of Tartar, take out the baking soda too and use two teaspoons of baking powder instead.
I never put the dough in the fridge unless I have to wait for some reason. It's so much more logical to pop it in the freezer for half an hour while you tidy up your workspace and get ready for the next step! You can also feel free to subtract 2 minutes from the time to get chewy cookies. I personally love doing this because crunchy ones are so noisy and messy.

The Pinwheels:

When mixing the dough, die half of it green. Make sure to make it more green than you thing it should be because it always fades in the oven. Chill them in seperate bowls or wrapped in plastic wrap. Once they are ready, roll one of them out on the counter, and the other on wax or parchment paper. Then, use your whole arm to brace the flopping dough on paper, and flip it on top of the other one like this:

See that flour on top? Very important. We want no unrooting of the dough to re-press in and ruin the design. Roll the two doughs together until they are 1/4 an inch. You won't cut the edges until later, because you might get more out of those lumped up edges than you think. Since it's a spiral, the imperfections of the roll aren't going to be too noticeable. 

Very carefully and slowly, start rolling. You will see cracks but don't worry they won't be noticeable when you cut the circles. Try to press the cracks with warm fingers if you get worried. Also, towards the end it'll smooth out. 

You can chop the craziness off, like I did. When you cut, sharpen a non-serrated knife as best you can, and then saw the dough, don't smash because you do not want deformed cookies!!!!

Quickly place the cut dough onto cookie sheets so they don't stick together.

Woa, green! Then bake them for 5-7 minutes, not nine, because you do not want brown edges. It just looks weird to have these vibrant cookies and then a browned area. They expand like twice their size so spread them apart. Me and my sis were so shocked when we saw how huge they got.

Enjoy all ya'll! These are super fun and GREEN in case you have the same food die issues as us...