After making waffles last weekend, I still had 1/4 of a bottle of buttermilk leftover. Unable to dump such goodness down the drain, I rummaged through my recipe book to find a way to use it up.
There were the usual recipes for buttermilk: biscuits, scones, and pancakes. Yet, I wanted something different and something sweet. Then, I found it: buttermilk sugar cookies.
The recipe I used is here on Maggie's Madcap Life blog. The only changes I made were to sprinkle coarse sugar on top, to use parchment paper and to use a cookie scoop. These are changes that I would make to almost any cookie recipe. Coarse sugar lends a cookie a touch of crunchiness. Parchment paper makes for easier clean up. Cookie scoops are ingenious. 
Really. I don't know how I lived for so many years without one. They cut in half the time it used to take me scoop the cookie dough up with 1 spoon and then scrape it onto a cookie sheet with a 2nd spoon. If you don't have one, trust me; you need one.
The cookies came out moist, puffy, cake-like, crunchy on top, and sweet but not too sweet. 
They are the perfect quick-to-make sugar cookie to have with a cup of tea or coffee. Your kids should love them too. My almost-18-month-old had a blast helping me make them and she loves to help her Daddy and I eat them.
However, they are nothing like Christmas sugar cookies. If Christmas cookies are what you want, don't skimp on the work. Don't try to bake drop style cookies and expect them to taste like the cookies that must be refrigerated, rolled, cut out, rolled again, baked, iced and decorated. It's not fair. This recipe is good but it can't produce a miracle.
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