What’s your favourite cookie? Are you cuckoo for chocolate chips? Over-the-moon for oatmeal? Partial to peanut butter?

Those are all great choices. But the most interesting cookie might be the simple sugar cookie.

There are only six ingredients. They can be rolled out, cut and decorated in a zillion different ways. And, of course, they are super delicious too!

What do historians think? Let's take a time machine back about 1,300 years...

A baker in the Middle East would use a bit of cake batter to test how hot the oven was. They discovered that people loved to eat these mini-cake testers. Eureka! They created what we now call the sugar cookie.

So how did sugar cookies get to North America?

About 300 years ago, a group of European settlers in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, started creating butter cookies. These are a lot like today's sugar cookies. The people of Pennsylvania loved them! They even made the sugar cookie the official cookie of the state!

Did you know that sugar cookies weren’t always called sugar cookies? They’ve also been known as jumbles, crybabies, plunkets, gemmels, gimblettes and cimbellines!

Doesn’t matter what you call them, they sure are tasty!

Have you ever made cookies? It can be as easy as plopping a bit of dough on a pan. As it bakes it becomes a yummy round cookie.

But sugar cookies are rolled cookies. That means you get to use a rolling pin and cookie cutters. You can get creative and make them into awesome shapes.

Decorating cookies might just be the most fun part of all!

Bakers use a piping bag to squirt icing along the edges of a cookie. A technique called flooding is used to fill in the other parts. After the icing is on, sprinkles can be added for even more fun!

CBC Kids uses cookies in order to function and give you a great experience. Your parent or guardian can disable the cookies by clicking here if they wish.