Cream together sugar and butter with your mixer.

Add in eggs, vanilla, and almond extract and mix together.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, salt and baking powder.

Add your dry ingredients to your wet and mix slowly until your sugar cookie dough is formed.

Shape into a ball in your mixing bowl. Cover it with a lid or plastic wrap and put in the fridge to cool for at least an hour.

Remove your dough from the fridge and preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

Roll out your dough with rolling pin to 3/4 inch thickness onto a lightly floured surface.

Use your cookie cutters to make your cut-out cookie shapes. Once cut out, move them to a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

Bake anywhere from 10-15 minutes depending on the cookie size. Mine took about 13 minutes with varying sizes.

Bake until they start to puff up and cookie edges have very little golden brown color, but no longer. This keeps them soft.

Let them sit on the baking sheet for another 3 minutes or so to firm up a little.

Transfer them to your countertop or other surface in a single layer to cool.

Once completely cooled to room temperature, you can store your cookies to frost or decorate later, or you can begin frosting.

Let your frosting harden before storing in an airtight container.

Enjoy!