We don’t know what we love more: When Taylor Swift releases a new song, or a new cookie recipe!
This morning, the full-time singer and part-time baker (and InStyle‘s November cover girl) released the second single from her highly anticipated new album, 1989, which drops Oct. 27. The mesmerizing new song is titled “Out of the Woods” and was co-written by Jack Antonoff, lead guitarist for the band Fun.
and Lena Dunham’s boyfriend. Dunham (a member of the Taylor Swift BFF brigade) celebrated the launch with a throwback ’gram of Swift and Antonoff making music in her living room, confessing that she was “kvelling” over the song’s already chart-topping success.RELATED: Go Behind the Scenes With Taylor Swift and Her (Fourth!) InStyle Cover
We’re celebrating the new song by baking up some sweetness—straight from Swift’s kitchen! The songstress recently shared two of her go-to cookie recipes on her social media at the request of fans: Vanilla Chai Sugar cookies and Pumpkin Chocolate Chip cookies.
Read on for Swift’s ’grams of the cookies and the recipes straight from her Tumblr and Instagram, and get more Swift deliciousness by picking up the November issue of InStyle, available on newsstands and for digital download Oct. 17.
Vanilla Chai Sugar Cookies
Makes: 1 dozen 4-inch cookies or 2 dozen 2-inch cookies
Ingredients:
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
½ cup vegetable oil, such as canola, almond or sunflower oil
½ cup granulated sugar, plus additional for sugaring tops
½ cup powdered sugar
1 large egg
2 tsp vanilla extract, or the seeds of 1 vanilla bean
2 cups all-purpose flour
½ tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
Directions, straight from Taylor Swift:
MMMKAY—there are two ways you can go about this.
The quick and easy way is to make sugar cookies from a sugar cookie mix and just cut open a packet of chai tea and pour it into the batter as you make it. Cause you’re busy and you want making cookies to be a chill part of your day.Pow. Done.
OR
If you want to make the cookies from scratch (that’s what I did for the 1989 Secret Sessions), you can use this recipe I found a baking blog I like, joythebaker.com and I believe it was originally from a book called The Pastry Queen. If you want another great baking blog, I get a lot of great ideas from smittenkitchen.com too. This is a recipe for basic insanely good sugar cookies, I added the chair element to the recipe because I thought it would infuse cozy holiday vibez into the cookie and it really did. So I’ll star the part that I added in the recipe.
[Joy the Baker's recipe for Giant Vanilla Sugar Cookies]
***after you add the egg and vanilla, cut one chair tea packet open and empty the crushed up tea leaves into the batter CAUSE CHAI COOKIES ARE ABOUT TO HAPPEN UP IN HERE***
I made an icing for the cookies, but they’re fine on their own. If you want to make icing for them, just mix 1 cup powdered sugar with 1/4 T-spoon of nutmeg, 1/4 T-spoon of cinnamon and 3 TAYblespoons <- – (I’m so annoying, it astounds me sometimes) of milk or eggnog if you can find it this time of year. The more milk/eggnog you add, the more your icing will become a glaze. But glazes are legit too so basically just LIVE YOUR LIFE.
I lightly sprinked cinnamon over the icing once the cookies were baked and iced, but there are so many icing options you can pair with these cookies—I mean it’s out of control.
If you’re really feeling like living on the edge, you can go ahead and add a few drop sof food coloring to the icing to make it festive. No one is going to stop you.
Why?
Cause the bakers gonna bake bake bake bake bake.
Bye.
RELATED: Taylor Swift Named Billboard’s 2014 Woman of the Year (Once Again)!
Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies
Makes: about 60 cookies
Ingredients:
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup white sugar
1 cup light brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup canned pumpkin puree
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground cloves
2 cups milk chocolate chips, not semisweet (or, if you’re baking like Taylor, she uses semi sweet or dark chocolate bars chopped)
Nonstick cooking spray or parchment paper
Directions, straight from Taylor Swift:
I use different ones but this one is pretty solid. Except that I don’t use milk chocolate chips, I use semi sweet or dark chocolate chocolate bars that I chopped up into different sized chocolate chunks.
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