Strawberry Shortbread Cookies

I hadn’t brought cookies to work in a while, and I figured that I would have some time to bake. Of course, I chose a recipe that looked great but then didn’t actually make that many cookies! This recipe makes less than two dozen cookies, and not all of them were ready for prime time, so I just took some to my friend at work rather than bringing the entire batch. Soon I will bring something for the bigger group!

This recipe is a roll-out cookie, which isn’t something I make that frequently. They really aren’t that hard to make, and I have made more recently so I am starting to feel more comfortable with the process. These are roll-out shortbread cookies, with some added freeze-dried strawberries. I had those on hand since I had used them previously, so I didn’t have to get any additional ingredients to make these. I used my egg cookie cutter since Easter is so soon, but you could honestly use any shape.

The dough for these is very simple, and you hardly need to crush the freeze-dried strawberries as I added to the dough and the mixer does a good job of crushing them. The first roll is the hardest, when the dough is cold, but it gets better. The original recipe used a white chocolate glaze, but I changed that to a powdered sugar icing. I was a little short on glaze, so I did end up sprinkling the cookies with additional crushed freeze-dried strawberries to make them look fancy. I like these cookies, I don’t think that the strawberry flavor is strong, but they look lovely.

Strawberry Shortbread Cookies
1 cup butter, room temperature
½ cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 ¼ cups flour
¼ teaspoon salt
⅓ cup freeze-dried strawberries, crushed

¾ cup powdered sugar
1 tablespoon freeze dried strawberries, crushed into powder
2-4 tablespoons milk

In a large mixer bowl, beat the butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla on medium until light. With the mixer running on low, gradually add the flour and salt. When the dough is almost fully formed, stir in the crushed freeze-dried strawberries. Divide the dough into two halves. Shape each half into a flat disk and wrap in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for 1 hour.

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Line two baking sheets with silicone baking mats.

On a lightly floured surface, roll one piece of the dough until about ¼” thick. Cut the desired shapes out and place on the prepared baking sheet. Reroll the dough one additional time, then repeat with the second piece of dough. The number of cookies will depend on the size of your cookie cutter.

Bake the cookies 15-20 minutes, until beginning to turn golden. The thickness of your cookies will impact whether your cookies bake for a shorter or longer time.

Once the cookies come out of the oven, allow then to cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.

Once the cookies are cool, make the glaze: in a small bowl combine the powdered sugar and powdered freeze-dried strawberries. Add 2 tablespoons milk, whisking frequently, until the glaze is the right consistency. If too thin add additional powdered sugar, additional milk if too thick.

Drizzle the icing over the cooled cookies. Sprinkle with additional crushed freeze-dried strawberries if desired. Allow the glaze to set before serving.

Recipe from Little Vintage Bakery

Cinnamon Crisps

One of the first things I ever posted on this blog was a trick that I had learned when I was a kid: when you have leftover pastry, you cut it in pieces, top with cinnamon sugar, and bake it. They aren’t fancy and don’t really have a recipe, it’s just a tasty way to use up leftovers. When I came across this recipe for a cookie version of cinnamon sugar pastry, I was excited to give it a try.

I don’t roll out cookies all that much, but I was curious how these would turn out, so I didn’t let that stop me. The ingredients here are for half a batch, so I knew it wouldn’t take too long to roll out the cookies. I made 18 cookies, which was perfect. I used the full amount of the egg/milk mixture as it wasn’t worth it to change the ratio. You will have egg mixture left over, but it’s just one egg. I suppose you could also simply brush them with milk, but I didn’t try that.

As these cookies are covered in cinnamon sugar, it is difficult to tell when they are done. I typically start with a minute or two less than the minimum time, so that I can judge how my oven is doing. When I first looked at the cookies, they looked ok, but were so soft that I was pretty sure they weren’t baked enough. I added a few minutes, and they were good. My cinnamon sugar mixture had a lot of cinnamon, and pairing that with a cookie that isn’t as sweet makes these a lovely afternoon treat.

Cinnamon Crisps
½ cup butter, softened
6 tablespoons sugar
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1-1/2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1-1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 egg
2 tablespoons milk
Cinnamon sugar

In a large mixer bowl, beat the butter, sugar, and brown sugar on medium until light. Add the egg, vanilla, and lemon zest and stir to combine. With the mixer running on low, gradually add the flour, salt, and cinnamon. Stir until the dough comes together.

Divide the dough in halves and wrap each half in plastic wrap. Refrigerate at least an hour.

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Line two baking sheets with silicone baking mats.

On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough until it is ¼” thick. Cut the dough into shapes or squares and place on the prepared baking sheets.

Before baking, top the cookies: in a small bowl, whisk together the egg and milk. Using a pastry brush, coat the cookies with the egg mixture, then sprinkle with cinnamon sugar.

Bake for 10-12 minutes, until the cookies are set. Cool on the baking sheet for 10 minutes before moving to a wire rack to cool completely.

Recipe from Baking and Mistaking

Light Spice Cutout Cookies

Sorry, this isn’t a very good photo, but I wanted to share the great ginger cookies that I made for a cookie decorating party that my boss hosted. I’m including here the recipe for the spice cookies, which was my contribution to the party. My coworker made sugar cookies and the royal icing, and my boss made some sugar cookies. An assortment of people decorated the cookies, and we all had a really great time!

I’ve made cookies one other time with the flooded royal icing, and I like all the creative designs that you can make with this type of icing. We had lots of colors, which was great. I think I was a little heavy handed with some of the icing, so they took a lot longer for the icing to harden. That’s ok, you just need patience. 

I don’t make a lot of roll out cookies, but these turned out really well. They don’t have a lot of molasses, so they aren’t as sticky as gingerbread cookies sometimes are. Do make sure that you chill the dough, or they will be too hard to cut out. Don’t reroll the dough too many times, or it will get tough. This recipe made just over 3 dozen cookies, and that total number will vary depending on the size of your cookie cutters. These cookies were a great canvas for icing, but they were excellent plain, straight out of the oven.

Light Spice Cutout Cookies

1/2 cup butter, room temperature

1/2 cup shortening

3/4 cup packed brown sugar

1/2 cup sugar

1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1-1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

1-1/2 teaspoons ginger

1/2 teaspoon allspice

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 egg

2 tablespoons molasses

3 cups flour

3 tablespoons cornstarch

In a large mixer bowl, cream the butter, shortening, brown sugar, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger, allspice and salt until light. Stir in the egg and molasses. With the mixer running on low, gradually add the flour and cornstarch. Beat just until the dough comes together. 

Divide the dough in two halves, shaping each half into a disk. Wrap each dough disk in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for at least an hour. 

 Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line two baking sheets with silicone baking mats. 

Working with one piece of dough at a time, roll the dough on a lightly floured surface about 1/8” thick. (You can roll the dough thicker if you’d like.) Cut into desired shapes. Use a small spatula to transfer the cookies to the prepared baking sheets. Repeat with the remaining dough.

Bake for 9-10 minutes, until firm. Allow to cool on the baking sheets for several minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely. 

Frost as desired. My friend from work actually made the icing, but I would suggest using the tutorial on Annie’s Eats .

Recipe from King Arthur Flour

Macadamia Nut Shortbread

My friend recently went to Hawaii and brought me back some macadamia nuts. She told me she brought them back for me and I immediately went searching for recipes! I’ve made a couple of things with macadamia nuts, but I don’t always find that many cookie recipes. So many macadamia cookie recipes are just variations of chocolate chip cookies. These shortbread cookies are not all that different, but I thought featuring the macadamia nuts in shortbread would be the perfect showcase.

The original recipe had you roll the cookies out between sheets of parchment, but I remembered a recipe I’d made long ago where you rolled the dough out in gallon-sized zipper bags. It saves a lot of mess, and it makes it a lot easier to shape the dough into a rectangle. My dough didn’t quite fill the entire bag once rolled out (I had about an inch of empty space on two sides) but I think it still made rolling out the dough easier. 

I cut these with a pizza cutter and a ruler, very scientific! I just trimmed off the edges that weren’t square, so my cookies looked great. I thought about just drizzling the cookies with chocolate, but my friend said that more chocolate was always better so I dunked them. It is hard to finely chop macadamias (I use the food processor) because they start to turn into macadamia butter if you aren’t careful! These cookies turned out really well and the flavor of the macadamia nuts is perfectly highlighted. 

Macadamia Nut Shortbread

1 cup butter, room temperature

3/4 cup powdered sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 cups flour

1 cup macadamia nuts, finely chopped

8 ounces dark or semi-sweet chocolate

2 tablespoons shortening

1/4 cup macadamia nuts, finely chopped

In a large mixer bowl, cream the butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla. With the mixer running on low, gradually add the flour. Once the flour is incorporated, continue mixing on low and gradually add the 1 cup of macadamia nuts.

Divide the dough in halves. Place each half of dough in a gallon-sized plastic zipper bag. Roll out the dough into a rectangle, ¼” thick. The rectangle with be slightly smaller than the dimensions of the plastic bag. Alternatively, roll the dough out between pieces of parchment paper. Do your best to roll the dough into a rectangle, but don’t worry too much as you will trim the sides of the shortbread when cutting into bars. Refrigerate the dough for 2 hours or longer.

 Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Line two baking sheets with silicone baking mats.

Cut the plastic bag away from the dough (or peel away the parchment) and place on a cutting board. Using a ruler and a pizza cutter, cut the shortbread into 1” x 2” rectangles.  Place the shortbread on the prepared baking sheets. You can put the shortbread fairly close together, as the cookies don’t rise or spread while baking.

Bake for 20-22 minutes, until the edges of the shortbread just begin to brown. The cookies may still be soft in the center; they will set as they cool. Cool the cookies completely on a wire rack.

In a microwave or in the top of a double boiler, melt the chocolate with the shortening. Partially dip the cookie in the melted chocolate and place on a wire rack. While the chocolate is still soft, sprinkle with additional macadamia nuts. Refrigerate until the chocolate sets.

Recipe from Dieter’s Downfall

12 Days of Cookies Day 12: Cinnamon Cranberry Shortbread

Merry Christmas! Earlier in the Christmas season, my husband came home from the store with an inexpensive box of Christmas cookies. It had a selection of cookies: spritz, sugar cookies, that sort of thing. He asked if I could make a better version of the box of cookies. I thought that was a great idea and the last five cookies that I made were improved versions of those in the box. Here's the inspiration:

For the spritz, I made snickerdoodle spritz. There was a ginger cookie and I made the ginger cookies with rum glaze. I made fruitcake cookies for the cookies they had with fruit. For the sugar cookies, I made these cinnamon cranberry shortbread. None of the cookies are exact replicas, but I can tell you they taste a lot better than the ones in the box. The ones in the box all kind of tasted the same. Don't my cookies look better?

This dough comes together easily and it rolled out without too much fuss. Since they are shortbread cookies, you don’t want them to be too thin. I rolled mine ¼” thick and I think I would make them even a little bit thicker. It’s hard to get very clean edges when you make the cutouts, because the bits of dried cranberries don’t cut so easily. I just had a nice sharp knife available to neaten up the edges. These are a little bit different than sugar cookies, but a really great alternative!

Cinnamon Cranberry Shortbread

2-1/2 cups flour
¼ teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1 cup butter, room temperature
1/2 cup sugar
¼ teaspoon vanilla
1/8 teaspoon almond extract

1/3 cup finely chopped dried cranberries

Sugar

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Line two baking sheet with silicone baking mats.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, and cinnamon. In a large mixer bowl, beat the butter until light and fluffy. With the mixer running on medium, very slowly add the sugar. It should take several minutes to add the sugar. Continue to mix until mixture is very light, and nearly white in color. Add the vanilla and almond extract.

With the mixer running on low, add the flour mixture in three parts. Add the dried cranberries and stir until the cranberries are evenly scattered throughout the dough.

Divide the dough into halves. Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface until it is about ¼” thick. Cut into shapes with cookie cutters of your choosing. Place the cookies on the prepared baking sheets.  Sprinkle the cookies with sugar.

Bake for about 15 minutes, until the cookies are slightly golden around the edges. They should not brown. Allow to cool on the baking sheets for 10 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.

Recipe from Jane’s Sweets & Baking Journal

12 Days of Cookies Day 9: Orange Gingerbread Cookies with Rum Glaze

Ok, so I know that I just posted gingersnaps yesterday, but this was the original ginger cookie recipe that I had planned to make this Christmas! I almost always make a couple of ginger recipes this time of the year since I love ginger so much. So many people limit their baking with ginger to the holidays, but I bake with ginger all year long. The flavor is so great, how could you not?

These cookies are roll outs, but compared to the dough for yesterday’s cookies, this dough is not dry at all. It’s very soft dough and the cookies when baked are soft. You roll the dough between parchment sheets right after you make the dough, then chill it. I had thought about skipping this step, just refrigerating the dough and then rolling it out. It wasn’t too hard to roll out the dough and then it was very easy to cut into circles. Super easy clean up, too!

The orange gingerbread is fantastic. It’s amazing how adding orange brightens up the flavor so much. The glaze contains rum (that doesn’t cook out), so if you are making these cookies for kids, you might want to make the glaze with just powdered sugar and milk. I like the flavor the rum adds; I think it makes the cookies more sophisticated. 

Orange Gingerbread Cookies with Rum Glaze

¾ cup packed brown sugar

Zest of 1 orange

3 cups flour

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1 tablespoon ginger

½ teaspoon ground cloves

¾ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon salt

¾ cup butter, softened slightly and cut into pieces

¾ cup molasses

2 tablespoons milk

2 cups powdered sugar

2 tablespoons dark rum

2 tablespoons milk

Place brown sugar and orange zest in a food processor, process about 30 seconds. Stop the food processor and add the flour, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, baking soda, and salt; pulse until combined. Sprinkle the butter evenly over the dry ingredients and process until sandy. Add molasses and milk; process dough until it comes together.

Divide dough in half and roll into ¼ inch thickness between two sheets of parchment paper. Refrigerate until firm, at least one hour.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line two baking sheets with silicone baking mats.

Remove the chilled dough from the refrigerator and cut into circles. I used a 2” round cutter.  Place the cut cookies on the prepared baking sheets, about 1 inch apart.

Bake until centers are just set, 8 to 11 minutes. If you bake two sheets at the same time, rotating the baking sheets halfway through the baking time. Allow to cool on the baking sheets for 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack.

Once the cookies are cool, prepare the glaze: in a medium bowl, whisk together the powdered sugar, rum, and milk until smooth. If the glaze is too thick, add additional milk. Spoon a small amount of glaze on the center of each cookies and spread to the edges. Allow to set before serving.

Recipe from Sweet Pea’s Kitchen