This is one of my favorite recipes to use when making cutout cookies for the Holidays.
The cookies keep their shape after baking and they also taste delicious.

A cute gift idea is to make these into cookie pops easily by inserting a large popsicle stick before baking.

I love to have a day around Christmas time where we bake and decorate the cookies.
You can make the dough ahead and refrigerate til ready to use.

I use these squeeze bottles to put the royal icing in… it makes it so much easier for the kids to decorate their cookies.
This brand of Sprinkles is our favorite since it has a lot of shapes and colors in one bag.

Our favorite Christmas Cookie cutters are this Gingerbread Man and this Snowflake. These are the exact ones I used to make the cookies in the top photo.

Chocolate Cutout Cookies

3 cups All-purpose Flour

3/4 Cups Cocoa powder (Dark or regular works fine)

Pinch of salt

2 sticks of salted sweet cream butter, softened

1 cup Granulated Sugar

1/2 cup light brown sugar

I/2 of 3 beaten eggs (crack eggs in bowl and beat...add only half to the cookie mix)

1 teaspoon pure vanilla

In a bowl, whisk together Flour, cocoa powder and salt. Set aside.

In a mixer, beat Butter until creamy, add in sugars and beat about 5 minutes. Beat in eggs ( remember we are only using half of the beaten eggs). Add vanilla.

Add Flour one cup at a time and Mix until combined thoroughly.

Separate into two balls in plastic wrap and flatten down into a 2 inch depth disc. Refrigerate for 40 minutes.

Remove and unwrap one disc from fridge and place on parchment. Cover with another piece of parchment and roll out to 1/4" thickness. You can add these to your rolling pin or use 1/4 inch dowel rods on either side of dough and roll. Place rolled out dough with parchment underneath on baking sheet and refrigerate for for 15 minutes.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Remove dough from fridge and cut out shapes . * If making Cookie Pops …. insert a large popsicle stick from the bottom of cookie to about midway. Flip cookie over and add a small piece of dough (be sure to flattened it out) to cover the popsicle stick where you pushed it in. This will reinforce it to make the stick stay put . Place the cut outs back on the parchment and refrigerate for 30 minutes or freeze for 15 minutes.

Remove from fridge and bake for about 15-16 minutes. Cool and Decorate with royal Icing.

Recipe adapted from one I found years ago but not sure of source.

@denmarkcottage