Buttered Rum Cookies

Bonjour! Guten Tag! Buongiorno! I’ve been absent from the blog, but it’s taken me a while to recover from the whirlwind that was three months abroad in Europe. I had the most fantastic time of my life but am glad to be at home and back in the kitchen again.

When the Kitchenarian approached me with the task of whipping up some delicious holiday treats to post on the blog, it was a no-brainer. I’d already been envisioning the festive cookies I could create since I am home this whole month of December.

You know how Christmas gets locked down into the family favorites, all the dishes you’ve made for years and years that are now considered tradition? At my household, there are some things we make that cannot be left out during December – the Kitchenarian’s homemade marshmallows, the freshly made peppermint bark, spritz cookies and upside-down french toast, to name a few. Well, as much as we love our traditional Christmas foods, I thought it would be a fun mission to widen my scope and find some other cookies that I could bring into the mix.

I dug through our shelves of cookbooks and found Rose’s Christmas Cookies, a perfect selection of old-fashioned classics. Every Christmas cookie you can think of is in this book, but what ended up catching my eye first was this simple, sweet recipe that seemed a great way to jazz up our preferred choices of Christmas cookies.

These particular Buttered Rum Cookies came with their own setbacks. My first mistake was to not make the dough until after work in the evening and then I realized the dough would have to refrigerate for at least 2 hours. My first night I spent hours working with too-warm dough to roll out just 12 cookies – and then I burned the batch! It’s been too long since I worked with cut cookies, and I let my attention wander one second too long. I gave up for the night and resolved to try again the next day.

What you see here is the success of my second try on these delicious cookies. Perfectly precious, these little snowflakes were exactly how I wanted them to turn out! They’re quite delicious, and the buttered rum frosting gives just a slight edge to your classic sugar cookie. If they didn’t take so long for me to make, I would whip up batches of these to give to my friends this holiday season. They’re so buttery that they crumble into your mouth; what a treat! This morning I had one with a cup of English black tea and it was a perfect combination.

Here is the recipe, adapted from Rose’s Christmas Cookies:

For the Cookie Base:

½ cup powdered sugar

1/3 cup of blanched sliced almonds

1 cup unsalted butter

½ teaspoon of vanilla extract

2 tablespoons light rum

1 2/3 cups flour

¼ teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 375F.

Soften the butter. Grate the almonds finely (or use almond powder instead). In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, grated nuts, and salt. In a mixing bowl, cream the sugar and butter until fluffy. Then beat in the almond extract and light rum until well blended. On low speed, incorporate the flour mixture.

Refrigerate dough for at least 2 hours, preferably overnight or until cold enough to roll out. Dough should be rolled out to 1/8-inch thickness to cut. Bake for about 8 minutes or until it just begins to become golden at the tips.

For the Buttered Rum Cream Filling:

3 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 cup powdered sugar

1 teaspoon light rum

2 teaspoons heavy cream

Soften the butter. In a mixing bowl at low speed, cream the butter and sugar until well mixed. Then add in rum and heavy cream still at low speed until fluffy.

Sous Chef Notes: For the design, I cut out the centers of the snowflakes for half the batch to use as front cookies, and left the other half of the batch whole to use as a back cookie. Therefore, you can see the frosting on the inside. Just make sure you cook an even number of cookies to match them up!

Also, the cookbook called for almond extract in the cookie base, but since we did not have any of that at home, I put in vanilla instead. They tasted great, so I don’t think you’ll go wrong either way!