Dessert Contest Results

Sophia came to Grammy's house to make her winning vanilla bean sugar cookies! This is a recipe from another Southern Living Christmas book. (Those books have some of my favorite recipes.) This is my favorite sugar cookie, loaded with vanilla beans, vanilla extract, and vanilla sugar, which I make with left over vanilla beans. ( I use only the real thing! The imitation vanilla has a funny taste.)

Someone once told me she had bought vanilla sugar, which caught my attention. I had never heard of it. Investigating, I found that it was just sugar flavored with a vanilla bean! I am sure she paid quite a bit for that little bit of sugar. Now we have a plastic container filled with sugar and vanilla beans. After I scrape out the vanilla bean seeds, I put the beans in the sugar container, add fresh sugar as I use the flavored sugar and have vanilla sugar on hand everyday. There are so many uses for it and if you don't have vanilla on hand, and the recipe calls for sugar, it can be used instead. Stir it into your coffee or hot chocolate, top cookies or muffins before baking. I am sure you can come up with other ideas.

Sophia helped stir up the cookies, cut out and bake them. She decorated them herself. Although I usually use white chocolate to frost these, this time we made a simple icing with powdered sugar, milk, clear Karo syrup and vanilla.

We displayed them on a footed cake plate. I overheard her telling her mother that her cookies were on a 'fancy plate'!