Potbelly Sugar Cookie

Home reconstruction

A sugar cookie that is still soft three days later is not a butter-and-sugar cookie with a trick applied. Something in it is holding water.

Cream cheese. Swapping a portion of the butter for cream cheese changes the cookie in three ways at once, and it is the whole recipe.

What cream cheese does

It brings water. Butter is about 16% water; cream cheese is over 50%. That extra moisture stays in the crumb and keeps it soft.

It brings acid. Cream cheese is slightly acidic, which reacts with the bicarbonate for a little lift and tenderises by weakening gluten.

It brings protein and stabilisers, which hold onto that water instead of letting it escape as the cookie cools.

The result is a cookie that stays soft and slightly cakey rather than crisping up as it goes stale.

You will not taste cheesecake. At this ratio it reads as a slight richness.

Do not brown them

A sugar cookie that has browned at the edges has dried out at the edges. These should come out pale — set at the rim, still very soft in the middle, with essentially no colour.

Take them out when they look underdone. Two minutes too long is the difference between soft and crisp, and there is no way back.

Cream properly here

This is the exception to the usual warning. Most cookies suffer from over-creaming, but cream cheese and butter need a good three minutes together to combine into a smooth base — otherwise the cream cheese stays in lumps that bake into pale wet spots.

Both at room temperature. Cold cream cheese will not combine at all.

Roll in sugar, not just sprinkle

Rolling the whole ball in granulated sugar gives a thin crust that stays slightly crunchy against the soft interior. Sprinkling the top gives you sugar on the top only.

The contrast is a large part of the appeal.

What you need

• 170 g unsalted butter, softened
• 115 g full-fat cream cheese, softened
• 250 g granulated sugar, plus 50 g for rolling
• 1 large egg
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/4 tsp almond extract
• 340 g plain flour
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 3/4 tsp fine salt

Method

1. 1. Oven to 175°C. Line two trays.
2. 2. Beat the butter and cream cheese together for 3 minutes, until completely smooth with no lumps.
3. 3. Add the 250 g of sugar and beat 2 minutes more.
4. 4. Beat in the egg, vanilla and almond extract.
5. 5. Whisk the flour, bicarbonate, baking powder and salt separately.
6. 6. Add to the wet on the lowest speed and stop as soon as the streaks go.
7. 7. Roll into balls and roll each one fully in the extra sugar.
8. 8. Space well apart. Bake 10–12 minutes — set at the edges, no colour.
9. 9. Leave on the tray 5 minutes before moving.

The almond extract

A quarter teaspoon, and it is below the level where anyone identifies it as almond. It rounds out the vanilla and gives the cookie the faintly bakery-ish character these have.

Leave it out and the cookie tastes noticeably plainer.

Storing

Five days in an airtight tin, and genuinely still soft on day four — which is the point of the cream cheese.

Three months frozen as dough balls, rolled in sugar before freezing. Bake from frozen with two extra minutes.