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★ Why You'll Love this Recipe ★
If you're looking for delicious, old-fashioned, frosted oatmeal Christmas cut-out cookies. This is the recipe!
Our family recipe for Christmas Cut-out Cookies
This Christmas cookie recipe is what we use year after year. It's become a holiday tradition for my kids and their cousins.
Soft and Buttery
These Christmas cutout cookies are soft and have that melt-in-your-mouth quality.
They have a subtle oatmeal texture and nutty, buttery flavor. The cookies are frosted with buttercream which you can color and use to decorate in any way that you'd like.
These cookies are fun to make, decorate and of course, eat. They are always the first to get eaten up among all the different kinds we make.
They're Santa's favorite too, so I've heard. 😉
★ Ingredients You'll Need ★
Here's a look at everything you'll need to make the cookies and homemade buttercream frosting.
For the Cookies
You'll need your cookies basics like: flour, sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, baking powder and a touch of milk. Oatmeal makes these a bit unique.
For the Frosting
You'll need plenty of butter and powdered sugar, vanilla extract, milk and then an assortment of food coloring to create different colors of your frosting.
Green, yellow, red, brown and white are good colors to start with but we've also done blue, orange, and even pink and purple. We let the kid decide but you may have a design in mind, so go with whatever colors you want.
★ How to Make this Recipe ★
Follow these steps and you can't go wrong.
Watch this video that shows the whole process of making these Christmas cut-out cookies, start to finish:
★ Tips & FAQs ★
Yes. You can't make the best Christmas cut out cookies without starting from scratch.
Before you get discouraged or worse, grumpy, about the thought of making cookies from scratch, let me just take a minute to tell you—I feel you! With the hustle and bustle of the season, there never seems to be enough time to get it all done, much less do anything "extra" like making cookies from scratch. But those "extra" things are the ones that you're going to look back on and remember.
Don't we have enough work to do around the holidays? Over the years our family has made these and it's become a tradition. They are not hard to make but they do involve several steps—prepping the dough, cutting our the shapes, baking the cookies then preparing several colors of frosting.
The last step though, is the most fun. We take all of our miscellaneous sprinkles from the year and we use those to decorate the cookies after we frost then. We come up with crazy patterns and color combinations, we make cookie boys and girls to looks like each member of our family and we don't fret if they don't look perfect.
Everyone participates and all the cookies look different. The kids eat half the toppings straight out of the bowl and sneak bite of cookies while we're not looking. Everything gets covered in flour and it's a giant mess. So, is it a lot of work? Yeah. Does it feel like work though? Sometimes.
Point is, you can decorate these according to your stage of life. If you have little kids, let them go wild! If you love the look and beautiful, delicately detailed cookies and that's relaxing for you, go for it!
We normally use quick oats since they are softer and thinner and probably help the cookie hold together better and might offer a cleaner edge when cut out. But rolled oats or old fashioned oats should work fine too, you'll just have thicker chunks of oatmeal and the cookies might be a little more dry tasting.
I would not recommend steel cut oats. Because steel cut oats are so thick, there's not enough moisture in this cookie recipe or a long enough cook time to really bring those to life.
First, you'll need a collection of Christmas cookie cutters. The larger the cookies, the easier and more fun the cookies are to decorate. I recommend a set of cookie cutters with a variety of shapes.
The other item that you don't necessarily need but I highly recommend is silicon baking sheets. The bottoms of your cookies will come out perfect if you use them and they are much easier to deal with than parchment paper. Plus they're reusable year after year.
A thin metal spatula is also very helpful for removing cookies from the pans after baking.
Storage
These cookies can be kept at room temperature for up to 3-4 weeks, in an airtight container.
These cookies keep longer in the fridge. They will last up to 2 months if stored in the fridge. Be sure to place in a container that is sealed.
You can also freeze these cut out cookies. In the freezer, these will last up to 1 year!
★ More Holiday Recipes ★
Hosting or going to a holiday baking party?
Check out my other cookie recipes. You might also fall in love with my easy yule log cake and my fun and easy Christmas pinwheel cookies!
These best Christmas cut out cookies were featured on Big Bear's Wife's Cookie Plan!
Frosted Oatmeal Christmas Cookies
Ingredients
- ¾ cup butter
- ¾ cup sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 2 tablespoon milk
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 cup oatmeal
- 2 ½ cups flour
BUTTERCREAM FROSTING
- ⅓ cup butter
- 4 ½ cups powdered sugar
- ¼ cup milk
- 1 ½ teaspoon vanilla
- food coloring
Mighty Mrs. is a #WalmartPartner.
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350ºF.
- Make the cookie dough. In a large mixing bowl, cream butter with sugar and egg. Add vanilla and milk. Slowly mix in salt, baking soda, oatmeal and flour until dough forms.
- Roll out dough. Take a large chunk of dough and place on a floured surface. Roll out to about ½" thick.
- Cut out shapes. Press cookie cutters into dough to create shapes. Using a thin spatula, lift the shapes and place onto an ungreased cookie sheet. You can put them close together, they don't expand much at all.
- Bake at 350˚F for 7-8 minutes (they should not brown at all). Remove cookies from pan with thin spatula and move to a wire rack to cool.
- Make the frosting. Cream together ingredients for frosting and put about ⅛-cups of frosting into separate bowls. Add food coloring to achieve desired colors.
- Frost cookies using a flat knife, small spatula or piping bag with special tips, frost the cookies.
- Decorate cookies. Before frosting hardens, decorate cookies with mini chocolate chips, sprinkles, candy cane crunch or anything else that looks and tastes lovely!
Video
Notes
- Let cookies cool before icing to prevent frosting from melting.
- Allow time for frosting to dry and harden before moving them to a storage container.
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