Red (& Green) Velvet Christmas Sugar Cookies
Every year I like to make a new holiday cookie. When I saw the vivid colors of Sarah Kieffer’s take on Red (and Green Velvet) Sugar Cookies, I couldn’t resist. I knew I had to make these bright Christmas-colored beauties. Sarah’s Baking for the Holidays book has a recipe for red velvet cookies, but she takes it a step further in this recipe and bakes the cream cheese into the cookies. And if you prefer your velvet green over red, there’s a mint variety as well. Put these out on Christmas Eve and you’ll be Santa’s favorite.
What makes red velvet red velvet?
Red velvet cake (or cookie in this instance) has a distinct chocolate flavor, but it’s a lighter chocolate flavor than other chocolate cakes or cookies. That’s because red velvet desserts call for only a couple tablespoons of cocoa powder instead of a larger quantity of melted chocolate. Traditionally red velvet cakes also included an acidic ingredient such as buttermilk or vinegar. The acid combined with raw cocoa powder and baking soda spurred a chemical reaction that released the natural reddish colors of the cocoa, making the cake a reddish-brown color. It wasn’t until the 1940s that red velvet cakes used red food coloring to achieve the bright red color that we associate with the dessert today. The most common frosting for a red velvet cake is a cream cheese frosting, which provides a bit of a tangy taste.
What’s so special about Sarah Kieffer’s Red Velvet Sugar Cookies?
The brilliant thing about these cookies is the cream cheese swirl that is baked into the cookie. You may think it would ooze out, but no, it bakes into the cookie and provides an authentic red velvet taste. You get a chewy red velvet sugar cookie version of red velvet cake, complete with a pretty swirl of cream cheese.
For the cream cheese swirl:
Let 6 ounces of cream cheese come to room temperature. Mix in a small bowl with 3 tablespoons of granulated sugar. Set aside.
Ingredients for the cookie base:
2 ½ cups plus 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
¾ teaspoon baking soda
¾ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon cream of tartar*
1 cup [2 sticks] unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 3/4 cups granulated sugar, plus ½ cup for rolling
1 large egg plus 1 large yolk
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
Red and green gel food coloring
1 tablespoon Dutch-process or Black cocoa powder
(* Has anyone ever used an entire container of cream of tartar? I think technically it may never really go bad, but I decided to buy a new container! Anything over 3-5 years makes me wonder…)
I didn’t need two batches (one can only eat so may cookies), so I made one bowl of dough (omitting the red food coloring for now), added the vanilla and cocoa powder followed by the flour mixture. Then I divided the dough into two equal portions, weighing on my scale cause I like exactness. To the first half, I added red gel food coloring a little at a time to get the color I wanted. In another bowl that fit on my stand mixer, I added mint extract and green gel food coloring a little at a time. Note that you should NOT use liquid green food coloring, or you’ll get a nasty brown color vs. the more vivid green achieved with the gel-based one. Also, make sure to use mint extract (and not peppermint) to achieve the right flavor.
Rolling the cookies
Here comes the fun part. Take a 1 ½ oz cookie scoop and spread a teaspoon of the cream cheese mixture into the scoop with the back of a spoon or your finger. Then fill the scoop with cookie dough so it’s slightly rounded. Drop the cookies one at a time into a bowl of sugar and roll slightly in your hands. I suggest having two bowls of sugar – one for the red and one for the green. Roll one color at a time. These make 20 big cookies. You could make them smaller, just be sure to adjust the amount of cream cheese for each cookie.
Pop them in a 350 degree oven for about 12 minutes. Turn your pan after 6 minutes. Let cool on the pan for 5-10 minutes and then transfer to a rack to finish cooling.
The full recipe can be found here: https://www.thevanillabeanblog.com/red-velvet-sugar-cookies-and-a-mint-version/
These are a fun cookie and such a pretty addition to a cookie tray … and to Santa’s plate.
Merry Christmas!
