Dolly Parton's Sugar Cookies

Dolly Parton herself swears by these sugar cookies, and the recipe lives up to her. Five ingredients, no baking soda or powder, no salt, just butter, sugar, flour, two egg yolks, and a generous teaspoon and a half of fresh lemon zest. The texture lands somewhere between a shortbread and a sugar cookie: tender, slightly sandy, rich with butter, brightened by lemon.

Egg yolks only is an unusual choice and it’s deliberate. The yolks bring fat and color without the protein structure that whites add. The result is a more delicate, more crumbly cookie than your standard sugar cookie. Don’t go tossing in a whole egg.

Lemon zest is what makes this recipe sing. Skip it and you have plain butter cookies. Add it and you have something distinctively bright and grown-up that still tastes Southern-fancy. Use only the yellow part of the peel, never the white pith underneath, which is bitter.

Chill the dough the full three hours. The recipe is firm on this. With this much butter and no leavening, the dough has to be cold to hold its cut shape. Warm dough spreads on the sheet pan and your stars look like blobs.

Pro Tips

• Roll the dough between two sheets of parchment paper. No flour mess, no sticking, and the dough rolls out evenly without tearing.
• Re-chill scraps before re-rolling. Each handling warms the butter; cold dough cuts cleaner.
• Watch closely at the 8-minute mark. The recipe says pinkish-brown tops, which means almost-not-done. Overbaked sugar cookies turn dry and crumbly.
• Decorate after cooling completely. Royal icing on warm cookies slides off; cooled cookies hold the icing cleanly.

Variations

• Swap lemon zest for orange or lime zest for a different citrus profile.
• Sprinkle coarse sanding sugar on the cookies before baking for a sparkly finish that needs no icing.
• Sandwich two cookies with a thin layer of lemon curd between for a Dolly-style sandwich cookie.