Observed each year on July 9, National Sugar Cookie Day honors the ever popular and delicious sugar cookie.
A holiday favorite and very easy to make, sugar cookies are sure to disappear quickly once they come out of the oven. Made with sugar, flour, butter, eggs, vanilla and either baking powder or baking soda, most people have the ingredients on hand at all times and can have the kids help make a batch on any day. The fun just begins with cutting the dough with fun shaped cookie cutters and then getting creative by decorating with icing and sprinkles.
The sugar cookie is believed to have originated in the mid 1700′s in Nazareth Pennsylvania. It was there that the German Protestant settlers created the round, crumbly and buttery cookie that came to be known as the Nazareth Cookie.
They baked their cookies in the shape of a keystone, the state’s symbol.
- American cookie jars evolved from British biscuit jars and first appeared on the scene during the Depression in the 1930s when housewives began making more cookies at home, rather than buying them at the bakery, and needed containers for them.
- Early American tinsmiths began making cookie cutters by hand back in the 1700s.
- The U.S. has a National Cookie Cutter Historical Museum located within the Joplin Museum Complex in Joplin, Missouri.
- In 1989, New Mexico named the ‘bizcochito’ its official state cookie. Bizcochito, derived from the spanish word ‘bizcocho’ which means biscuit, is a delicious shortbread cookie flavored with anise and topped with cinnamon sugar.
- The U.S. leads the world as the biggest cookie bakers and eaters, spending more than $550 million annually on Oreos alone.
- The first sugar cookies weren’t called by this name. When word started spreading throughout Europe in the 17th century about these tasty desserts, and later when they were introduced to the Americas, some entertaining terms were employed to describe these small treats. After all, this child-sized indulgence deserves a few whimsical appellations like jumbles, jumbals, crybabies, plunkets and gemmels. Early cookie recipes that probably morphed into the modern sugar cookie were called gimblettes in France and cimbellines in Italy, too.
- About 171 million tons (154 million metric tons) of raw sugar will be made from sugarcane and sugar beets worldwide in 2012.
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