Recipe: Rye Roll-n-Cut Holiday Sugar Cookies (Vanilla & Chocolate)
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Note: No Friday Bread Basket this week, because I want to get this recipe out before I take a much-needed break from the newsletter until 1/15/25. I am working on an amazing, super-easy cake recipe post from my friend Posie Brien that I may share during the holidays if I can find the time to write it up, so keep an eye out for that. Either way, I’ll see you in the new year, have a peaceful and bready holiday season, and thanks for all your support this year.
This is a reworking of a recipe I first developed at America’s Test Kitchen, with more than 50% whole-rye flour in it. Both the original and this version are among my favorite cookie recipes, not only because they are excellent and easy to make, but because you can whip up a full batch of dough in a matter of minutes in a food processor, using butter pulled straight from the fridge. (Emergency holiday cookies, if you will.)
And the technique I devised for rolling out the dough between two sheets of parchment is easy-peasy, once you get the hang of the rolling and pushing motion it requires. (I’ve used this trick on a bunch of other roll-and-cut cookies since.) The dough needs to chill for a few hours in the fridge after rolling out, but it can be held for up to five days before baking (and up to a month in the freezer), so you can basically have cookies on demand once you get it in there.
I’ve only made these with whole-rye flour so far, but I’m fairly certain that the rye could be swapped out with another whole-grain flour—whole-wheat, spelt, buckwheat, whatever.
Once the cookies are cut, the scraps of dough can be combined, rerolled, chilled, and cut and baked; they might end up a teensy bit tougher, but the difference is hard to notice.
The chocolate variation is made by simply adding a little cocoa and espresso powder to the vanilla recipe. Something I realized while making both this week is that if you make a batch of each at the same time, you can marbleize the scraps by chopping them up, tossing them together, and then rolling them out.
Also, as I mention in the recipe, after you cut the second batch from the scrap dough, instead of re-rolling it a third time, just bake the larger scrap pieces as treats for yourself, so that you can save the pretty ones for gift-giving. I kind of like the look of them, they resemble imaginary cookie states—like East Dakota or New Indiana—or heavily-gerrymandered congressional cookie districts.
I don’t have a royal icing recipe for you here because I didn’t have time to ice these myself (I will before giving them as gifts next week), but there are plenty of recipes out there and instructions on how to make them pretty (pretty is not exactly my forté anyway).
—Andrew