3-Ingredient Sugar Cookie Recipe

There are three major ingredients in all cookie recipes: fat, sweetener, and flour. The fat (usually butter, but sometimes shortening or lard) adds moisture to the dough and helps the cookie brown as it bakes. The sugar not only sweetens the cookie, but it also tenderizes and helps the cookie maintain its soft, sugary bite. Finally, the flour provides structure, binding the fat and sugar together.

Many cookie recipes also contain eggs and leaveners like baking powder and baking soda, but we weren't sure those ingredients were strictly necessary to create a good cookie. So we put that theory to the test and made these cookies with only three ingredients: unsalted butter, white sugar, and all-purpose flour. Our test batch turned out great, prompting us to expand the ingredients list to include a few optional additions if you want to take the cookies to the next level.

You'll find the full list of ingredients and step-by-step instructions in the directions portion at the end of this article.

These 3-ingredient sugar cookies don't contain any leavening agents or eggs, so they're definitely reminiscent of a shortbread cookie. They contain a high amount of butter, which gives them a soft and crumbly texture instead of a chewy finish. If you don't like how crumbly they are, try replacing one tablespoon of the white sugar with brown sugar. Brown sugar contains molasses, and that extra moisture will make the cookie denser and chewier.

You could also add an egg and baking powder to the cookies, but those additions take us pretty far away from the 3-ingredient rule. Eggs add fat and structure to the cookie, and they'll help trap the gasses produced by the baking powder to make your cookies much firmer with a softer chew. If you want to go this route, you'll probably want to double the flour and butter to accommodate the extra liquid from the egg.

Another way to firm up the texture without changing the recipe is to chill the dough balls for 30 minutes to an hour before baking them. This extra step allows the butter to harden, firming up the dough.

Before you add the flour to the creamed butter mixture, we definitely recommend sifting it first. You can use a dedicated tool called a flour sifter, or you can use any fine-mesh strainer. Epicurious explains that sifting flour breaks up the clumps that can form as the flour sits on the shelf. These clumps can turn into dry pockets in your baked goods, which will taste dry and bland as they're not incorporated into the rest of the ingredients. For this cookie recipe, you could skip the sifting step as the electric mixer will probably break up any clumps as it mixes. But, we don't like to leave these things to chance, so we sifted our flour into a separate bowl before proceeding.

From there, add the flour in two additions — half at first, then the second half when the first addition is fully mixed in. If you're adding vanilla or almond extract and citrus zest to the cookies, go ahead and add it now. Then, form the cookies into one-inch balls and place them on an ungreased baking sheet about two inches apart. For an extra sugary sugar cookie, roll each ball in sugar, and flatten it out if you're adding sprinkles during this step.

After about 15 minutes in the oven, the cookies should be lightly golden brown on the edges. They will still be very soft, but they will firm up as they cool.

Oh man, these cookies turned out so good! When we let them rest on the baking sheet for a few minutes before transferring them to the cooling rack, they kept their form and didn't fall apart at all. Texturally, we didn't mind their crumbly nature at all and we actually fell a little in love with these cookies; they were perfectly crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside.

Flavor-wise, we had equally few complaints. The sugar and butter came together to create a subtle cookie that was neither too rich nor too sweet. We loved the extra sugar used to roll the cookies, which added a really pleasant caramelization on the edges. The plain cookies were good on their own, but they got even better when we added some of the optional additions. A little vanilla extract went a long way to boosting the cookie's sweet flavor, and the citrus zest really burst with flavor. Sure enough, there were no leftovers, so we might have to double this recipe next time we make it.