Hi! I am Nicole Ferrigno. I'm here today with Lizzie Evelyn. We're with Paisley Fig Pastry. We're showing you how to make Holiday Cookies. Next we're going to show you how to make a Christmas Tree Ornament Cookies.

We're going to start with one stick of unsalted soften butter. We're going to get it mixed in a stand mixer on sort of low medium speed, to that we're going to add one cup of granulated sugar. Once the sugars all added we can turn the speed on mixer up a bit, that's going to cream for a couple of minutes, till it's nice and fluffy and pale yellow in color.

It's important periodically to scrape the bowl down of its ingredients. Make sure everything is incorporated, rubber spatula is your best friend. Okay, now so to this mixture we're going to add one large egg, and one teaspoon of vanilla extract.

As a general rule, it's a good idea to add eggs that are of course at the room temperature, to doughs like this. So, if that means taking the eggs out of the refrigerator for a little bit, may be half hour before you start, or you can set the eggs in a bowl of warm water. It will allow them to become incorporated more easily.

So, when mixing on medium speed until the egg is so incorporated in the butter and sugar, then we're going to add our dry ingredients, which are two cups of all purpose flour, quarter teaspoon of salt, and half-a-teaspoon of baking powder. You can go ahead and add that mixture all at once, and we're mixing on low speed, we don't want to over work the dough. So we're mixing gently, until the dough gathers into a bowl.

Again, we're going to scrape the bowl down. Now, once the dough is gathered mostly into a bowl as it has here, we're going to take it out of the bowl, we're going to go ahead and pack it into plastic wrap. Now it's gathered nicely, and we're going to go ahead and press it down into a disk, wrap it well, and then chill it. Certainly it will chill a lot faster, if we're able to really press it out into a nice thin disk.

Okay, beautiful! Thank you. Now, we're ready to put it in the fridge to chill. So, that dough will need to chill for about an hour or so, until it's nice and firm, and able to be rolled out.

Now, while we're waiting for our dough to chill, I would like go over the next sort of step with you. You're going to need a special ingredient for the decorating process of the sugar cookie ornaments.

What I have here in this bowl are crushed pieces of any clear hard candy, Jolly Ranchers are good, because they have a lot of color to them. We're going to go ahead and crush them up, you can do in a food processor. I took a rolling pin and just sort of mashed them up a bit into pieces to pulverize. You can go ahead and get those ready, and you'll have them all set for the next step. And once our dough has been chilled for about an hour, we're going to roll it out, shape it, and go ahead and cut out centers, and fill with our candy.