Sugar Pretzels

Sugar Pretzels

I imagine these are a rather plain sort of cookies, most notable for a cute shape. Well, sounds good to me. The recipe is:

1 cup sugar, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 teaspoon soda, flour to roll, and roll them in sugar.

That’s pretty vague. I assume soda is baking soda, and the rest is self-explanatory. But flour to roll? I guess that’s just enough for me to make a stiff enough dough to roll. And roll in sugar? What kind of sugar? You must twist these into the shape of pretzels, so do I roll in sugar before or after I twist? Help!!! Time to look online for “sugar pretzels” and see if anyone else has made this. But an online search for sugar pretzels turns up nothing that looks like this, so I’m going to wing it.

Let’s see how much flour I need to get a rollable dough. Started with one cup, that wasn’t quite enough. Added flour in by half cups til I got to 2 cups total and the mixing was stiff, this seemed to be a very soft but rollable dough if you are delicate with it.

After trying a few techniques, the best formed cookies were made by rolling a chunk of dough between my floured hands, dipping it in the sugar and rolling it to coat, then rolling it again to double the length and make a pretzel shape.

I’ve tried three kinds of sugar: Powdered, granulated, and chunky. My prediction is the chunky gold bits will be the best – good contrast in texture and reminiscent of pretzel salt. 

Now we’ll put these cuties in the oven, but how long and at what temperature? It makes sense to me to  try 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes, that works for chocolate chip cookies. 

Oh nooo, roadkill cookies. However, they do taste fine, even if they are not as adorable as I hoped for, and I was right about the sugar chunks. At 9 minutes they were perfectly done with just a light golden bottom. Overall these are very much like good buttery sugar cookies and not overly sweet. I’ll rate this 3/5 stars due to technical difficulties. Review by family:  “It’s good!?!?”

If I were to make this again, I’d try to add more flour, hoping to keep more of the pretzel shape. I looked up “how to keep sugar cookies from spreading” and saw a recipe online that was similar but used 3 cups of flour and was kneaded by hand because the dough was extremely stiff.  But honestly I might just make them again as is because they were tasty!

-Rachael Zuch of Zuch Design

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