pistachio sugar cookies
It’s such a good cookie, with a classic soft, sugar cookie texture, crisp edges, very minimal to no spread, and SO MUCH nutty pistachio flavor. This recipe is perfect for cut out cookies decorated with royal icing, for stamping with cookie presses, for sandwiching with pistachio paste, or for covering with sparkling sugar and baking until crunchy.
- Yield: 2-3 dozen (depending on size) 1x
Ingredients
226g (16 Tbsp / 1 cup) unsalted butter, room temperature
150g (3/4 cup) granulated sugar
1 1/2 tsp Diamond Crystal kosher salt, or 3/4 tsp regular table salt
1 egg, room temperature
2 tsp vanilla bean paste or extract
1 tsp almond extract, optional
270g (2 1/4 cups) all purpose flour
150g (1 1/2 cups) pistachio flour
if you’re making them sparkling:
egg white, for egg wash
sparkling sugar
Instructions
Cream the butter, sugar, and salt until combined and only slightly fluffy, making sure there are no butter lumps. Add the egg, vanilla, and almond extract until combined and emulsified. Add the flour, pistachio flour, and baking powder all at once and mix until it forms a dough. If it seems too sticky, add up to 30g (1/4 cup) flour and mix again.
Drop the dough onto a lightly floured piece of parchment paper, gently flattening it with your hands. Sprinkle lightly with flour and place another piece of parchment on top. Roll the dough to your desired thickness, 1/4″-3/8″ for thicker, soft sugar cookies, and 1/6″-1/8″ for thin, crunchy cookies.
Refrigerate the sheets of dough for an hour or two, or even overnight. Refrigerating is an important step that chills the butter and keeps the cookies from spreading in the oven. If you’re pressed for time, 15-30 minutes in the freezer will chill it fast.
Using cookie cutters, cut out shapes from the dough, placing the cut cookie dough on a parchment lined baking sheet. Pair similarly sized cookies together on the baking sheets, giving them an inch or two of space between them.
Bake the cookies at 375 F for 8-10 minutes for larger cookies. They should look set and not shiny on top. For soft cookies, don’t bake any longer from the time they are no longer shiny. For crunchy cookies, bake until the edges are golden brown.
Cool them on the baking sheet for a few minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool completely before frosting or icing.
Decorate the cookies how you’d like! I used royal icing to make these St. Patrick’s Day cookies. Here is my royal icing recipe if you’d like to give it a try! It’s salted and flavored with vanilla bean paste, so it is extra delicious. Add a little butter extract, and it will practically taste like buttercream.
To make pistachio sugar cookie pretzels, roll the dough more thinly than you would roll a regular sugar cookie so that it can become a crunchy texture rather than soft. I like to roll these to 1/6″ or 1/8″ depending on what I’m feeling like. I really recommend getting a guided rolling pin to make rolling easier.
Make an egg white wash by whisking an egg white with a teaspoon of water. Brush the egg white over the surface of the cookie dough and sprinkle with sparkling sugar.
Bake the cookies at 375 F for 8-10 minutes, or until the edges are golden brown. They may need more time depending on your oven and depending on how thick you rolled the dough. Let them cool on the sheet for a few minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.
If desired, pipe pistachio cream over the surface of a non-sparkled pretzel and sandwich with a sparkling pretzel.
Notes
- Mise en place’ is a French phrase with the idea of putting everything in its place before beginning to make a recipe. It helps everything to go smoothly and eliminates so much possible stress. Getting all of your supplies and ingredients together beforeever starting the recipe will help tremendously.
- Weigh your ingredients, particularly the flour. It is the most important measurement in this recipe to weigh. Flour can be off in volume measurements by up to 30g, which is a quarter cup! Having incorrect flour measurements can cause your cookies to spread too much or, alternatively, be dry and crumbly. Weighing your ingredients makes everything so much easier, as you don’t have to wash all the measuring cups at the end. However, I do not use the scale to weigh out teaspoon or tablespoon measurements for things like baking powder, salt, vanilla, or cornstarch, for example.
- Chill your dough to help it keep its shape. I’ve found that the best method is to roll the dough between parchment right after mixing before chilling it for a couple hours, if possible. Once it’s been chilled, I cut the shapes and put them on a parchment lined baking sheet. If I’m fast, I don’t chill again. But if the dough feels soft or “bendy” after cutting the cookies, I put the tray in the freezer for five minutes before baking. This ensures that the cookies keep their shape.
- If you are using this dough for cookie decorating, and you really want crisp edges, you can add 30g (1/4 cup) all purpose flour to the dough and remove the baking powder.
- For soft cookies, roll the dough to 1/4″ (or even thicker, like 3/8″ or 5/16″- guided rolling pins really help with precision) and bake them just until the tops are no longer shiny.
- For crispy cookies, roll the dough to 1/6″ or 1/8″ and bake until the edges start to brown.
- To freeze, place the cut cookies in a single layer on a piece of parchment paper in a freezer-friendly container. Place a piece of parchment paper on top of the cookies and begin another layer of cookies. Make sure the cover for the container is airtight before putting in the freezer. For extra protection, wrap the container in plastic wrap. You can store cookie dough in the freezer for several months.
Find it online: https://linenandgray.com/pistachio-sugar-cookies/