If you’re looking for the best Christmas cut out cookies. This is the recipe!
Here’s our family recipe for Christmas Cut-out cookies!
I’m so excited to share with you our family’s favorite Christmas cookie and holiday tradition, these Christmas cutout cookies with made with oatmeal and buttercream frosting. They’re really fun to make, decorate and of course, eat. They are the absolutely best and always are the first to get eaten up among all the different kinds we make.
They’re Santa’s favorite too, so I’ve heard. 😉
Homemade. From scratch.
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.
For us, making cookies is something we carve out time to do. We set aside a full day each December to make a bunch of different cookies and we share the work. It’s a cookie-making party, complete with mimosas and snacks! So, it’s actually quite fun and is a nice distraction from the inevitable holiday stress.
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:
Why make Christmas cookies if it’s so much work?
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. Do we do it every year anyway? You bet!
What type of oatmeal works best with the cut out cookies?
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.
What do I need to make these Christmas cut out cookies?
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.
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!
These best Christmas cut out cookies were featured on Inspire Me Monday, Big Bear’s Wife’s Cookie Plan, South Your Mouth, Inspiration Monday, Meal Plan Monday!
Christmas Cutout Cookies with Buttercream Frosting
Ingredients
- ¾ cup butter
- ¾ cup sugar
- 1 egg
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 2 tbsp milk
- ½ tsp salt
- 1 tsp baking powder
- 1 cup oatmeal
- 2 ½ cups flour
BUTTERCREAM FROSTING
- ⅓ cup butter
- 4 ½ cups powdered sugar
- ¼ cup milk
- 1 ½ tsp vanilla
- Food coloring
Instructions
- 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.
- Take a large chunk of dough and place on a floured surface. Roll out to about 1/2" thick. 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˚ 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.
- Cream together ingredients for frosting and put about 1/8-cups of frosting into separate bowls. Add food coloring to achieve desired colors. Using a flat knife, small spatula or piping bag with special tips frost cookies. Before frosting hardens, decorate cookies with mini chocolate chips, sprinkles, candy cane crunch or anything else that looks and tastes lovely!