When you use bench flour to keep your cookie or pastry dough from sticking to the counter top, sometimes your dough will absorb too much of the extra flour which will over-dry the dough and toughen the cookies. Not good.
To avoid dry cookies, try rolling out your cookie dough between 2 sheets of parchment paper or wax paper. No flour needed!!
You can also do several of these sheets at once, pile them up on a cookie sheet and slip the entire stack into the fridge to chill until you are ready for them. When you are ready to bake, just pull out one parchment section at a time and cut out desired shapes. Carefully transfer cut outs to a cookie sheet and place the cookie sheet into the refrigerator to chill for another 5 minutes before baking. This will help the cookies to retain their shapes.
Gather any leftover scraps, ball them up and roll them back out again between the same sheet of parchment and return to the stack of rolled dough in the refrigerator until you are ready for them.
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