Yahoo Lifestyle Taylor Swift's Viral Cookies are Perfect for Your Holiday Gathering
Taylor Swift and her fans are usually never wrong—from record-breaking albums to sold-out Eras Tour shows, they just know what’s up. So when Swifties came together online and declared Taylor’s chai sugar cookie recipe a must-bake holiday treat, I knew it could be worthwhile to listen. It also just so happened that I was looking for a new Christmas cookie recipe to add to my rotation, so I grabbed all the ingredients and whipped up these Taylor treats for the very first time hoping it wouldn't be the last time. Here's how it went in my kitchen.
Get the recipe: Taylor Swift Chai Sugar Cookies
Origins of Taylor Swift's Chai Sugar Cookies
Taylor Swift's chai sugar cookies are a playful spin on a classic sugar cookie packed with cozy chai spices that are just perfect for fall and the holiday season. The pop star's cookies come with a very sweet folklore of their own, first showing up online in 2009, when Taylor posted a picture of them on her Instagram. A plate of snickerdoodle-like cookies dripping with icing on a baking sheet with the caption "chai sugar cookies with cinnamon eggnog icing AKA Christmas in September" left fans begging for the recipe and Swift graciously shared her handwritten Taylor's version.
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The recipe started with Joy Wilson’s Giant Vanilla Sugar Cookies on her Joy the Baker. Swift added the contents of a chai tea bag to the base recipe, plus a festive glaze. Since then, Wilson fine-tuned the recipe on her site, calling it Taylor Swift’s Chai Sugar Cookies. Instead of using a chai tea bag, Wilson's version of the recipe opts for a blend of ground ginger, ground cinnamon, allspice, cardamom, cloves, and a pinch of black pepper to bring the chai spice flavor home. The nutmeg-spiced eggnog-inspired glaze adds some holiday razzle-dazzle.
Related: Taylor Swift's Favorite Sweet Potato Casserole Recipe
Ingredients for the Taylor Swift Chai Sugar Cookies
Courtesy of Jessica Wrubel
For the cookies and the glaze, you'll need unsalted butter and neutral oil, like canola or vegetable oil. You also need granulated and powdered sugar, flour, baking soda, kosher salt, vanilla extract, an egg and milk or eggnog. For the chai spice, you need ground ginger, cinnamon, allspice, cardamom, cloves, nutmeg and black pepper.
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How to Make the Taylor Swift Chai Sugar Cookies
Preheat the oven to 350° and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Beat softened butter until creamy, then mix in oil, sugars and chai spices until smooth. Add the egg and vanilla, the flour, baking soda and salt and beat once more until you achieve a soft dough. To make the dough easier to handle and to help the cookies keep their shape, chill the dough for 1 hour or freeze it for 15 minutes.
Scoop the chilled dough into one tablespoon-sized balls, then roll each dough ball in cinnamon sugar and flatten them to ¼-inch on the baking sheet using your hands or a spatula. Bake until the edges are lightly golden, which should take 8 to 14 minutes, depending on your oven. Let the cookies cool for 5 minutes on the baking sheet before transferring to a rack to cool completely. (If you glaze hot cookies the icing will slide right off.) Whisk the glaze ingredients until the mixture is smooth but thick enough to spread.
Spread some glaze over the centers of the cookies, leaving the edges bare, and finish with freshly grated nutmeg. The cookies are best within one or two days of baking.
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My Honest Thoughts About the Taylor Swift Chai Sugar Cookies
Courtesy of Jessica Wrubel
I'm pretty picky about my cookies, but after just one taste, these cookies earned a top spot in my rotation. Taylor's chai sugar cookies are truly the Enchanted treat of the season (look what you made me do!). The chai spice blend adds the perfect holiday flavor and the cookie is chewy around the edges and soft in the center.
The sweet, spiced glaze really lifted me up into a cloud of sparkling dust. Simply put, these cookies taste like they were baked fresh at Taylor's family's Christmas tree farm. I will admit that I gilded the lily by sprinkling a little chai spice on the glaze. The result? A cookie that was so utterly irresistible that I simply couldn't shake it off.
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Tips for Making the Taylor Swift Chai Sugar Cookies
Chill out. This dough is soft, so let it rest in the freezer for about 30 minutes.
Store-bought is fine. If you're short on time and/or energy (it's the holidays, we get it), you can easily make a speedy shortcut version of Taylor's recipe. Add the chai spices to your favorite store-bought sugar cookie mix, bake, then top with glaze.
Make smaller cookies. The recipe calls for fairly large cookies, but if you prefer a smaller, more snackable treat, make them smaller. If you make them smaller you'll also have more cookies for holiday gifting.
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