The very best soft sugar cookie + cream cheese frosting recipe

My mom’s sugar cookies are famous. For real. They’re soft and cakey with the very best cream cheese frosting for cookies – it’s way better than the tasteless “royal” icing that’s often used to decorate sugar cookies or the pasty pink frosting on those store bought ones. She makes them for every holiday and I don’t know how many people have requested the recipe over the years. Good thing she doesn’t mind sharing recipes, because I’m going to share it with all of you today.

One thing I really like about this recipe is that you don’t have to chill the dough before rolling it out. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really like making cookies to be an all-day affair. I’d rather just mix them up and get them baked, and that’s exactly what you can do with this recipe.

How to make sugar cookies with cream cheese frosting

Let’s Make

Soft Sugar Cookies With Cream Cheese Frosting

5 from 1 vote

Serves: 36 cookies

Prep Time: 30 mins

Cook Time: 10 mins

Total Time: 40 mins

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Ingredients

Cookies

• 2 cups Sugar
• 1 cup Margarine
• 3 Eggs
• 6 tablespoons Milk
• 5 cups All Purpose Flour
• 1/2 teaspoon Salt
• 5 teaspoons Baking Powder

Frosting

• 1/4 cup Butter softened
• Dash of Salt
• 1 teaspoon Vanilla
• 3 cups Powdered Sugar
• 3 tablespoons Milk
• 4 oz Cream Cheese softened

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Instructions

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cookies

• Cream together sugar, margarine, eggs and milk until well combined.
• Add flour, salt and baking powder until just combined. 
• Liberally flour a work surface and rolling pin.
• Roll out about 1/4 of the dough at a time to 3/8 inch thickness.
• Cut with cookie cutters and place onto a very lightly greased cookie sheet.
• Cook about 10 minutes until cookies are just done and remove from pan immediately. Frost when completely cooled.

Frosting

• Soften butter and cream cheese, then blend together with remaining frosting ingredients.
• Tint with food coloring if desired and frost cookies.

Course: Dessert

The recipe is fairly straightforward, but here are a few tips:

1 – Don’t roll the dough out too thin! If you want nice, soft, puffy cookies, your dough needs to be right around 3/8th of an inch thick once rolled out (and yes, I do sometimes grab a ruler and measure until I get a feel for it).

2 – Don’t overbake! Cookies should not be brown AT ALL. Not even a little (see photos below) or they’ll end up crunchy. Plan to stick around while the first tray of cookies is baking and keep a close eye on them to see how long they’ll need in your oven. When done they’ll be nice and puffed and firm enough to come off the cookie sheet pretty easily – they won’t be gooey – but even the bottoms will still be white (photos below).

3 – You will need flour to roll these out, especially the right at first. Go ahead and dump some flour on your work surface, then scoop out some dough, then put more flour on top. As you continue to cut cookies and roll out more dough, some of the flour will get mixed in and you won’t need to add as much each time.

Oh, I almost forgot – your cookie total will depend on what size cookie cutters you choose, but I’d say you can plan on 4 dozen good sized round cookies from one batch.

How to make cream cheese frosting for sugar cookies

Ok, so these cookies are good, but it’s the cream cheese cookie frosting that takes them over the top! Make sure you wait to frost the cookies until they are completely cool. The cream cheese cookie frosting recipe included is delicious and super easy to mix up. If you like a lot of frosting on each cookie, you might want to increase all the frosting ingredients by one half to make sure you have plenty (6T butter, dash of salt, 6 oz cream cheese, 4-5T milk, 4.5 cups powdered sugar, 1.5t vanilla).

This truly is the best cream cheese frosting for sugar cookies!

Now, baking up and then frosting an entire batch of sugar cookies can take some time. In an effort to speed things up, I’ve found a super easy frosting method that’s much quicker than spreading the frosting on each cookie with a knife, and looks kinda fancy. Click here for the easiest way to frost sugar cookies.