strawberry cut out sugar cookies with strawberry royal icing

This soft, strawberry cut out sugar cookie sprinkled with bits of crushed strawberries is perfect for Valentine’s Day cookie decorating. Switch up the flavors by either adding chopped dark chocolate for a chocolate covered strawberries vibe or by adding lemon zest for a strawberry lemonade flavor profile.

why you’ll love strawberry sugar cookies with strawberry royal icing

• The dough is extremely easy to mix together and very workable for rolling and cutting. The cut cookies hold their shape and have very minimal spread, so this dough is great for cookie decorating!
• The dough is only colored by powdered freeze dried strawberries, which have an incredible strawberry flavor. The color does dull after baking, but it is still noticeably pink.
• You can easily make variations on this basic strawberry dough, such as chocolate covered strawberry, strawberry lemon, and strawberries and cream. (See the variations at the end of this post.)
• Strawberry royal icing is DELISH and a unique way to decorate cookies. The flavor comes from powdered freeze dried strawberries, and the royal icing tastes very similar to melted strawberry ice cream.

ingredients in strawberry cut out cookies with strawberry royal icing

• unsalted butter– Make sure your butter is room temperature for the best results. If all you have is salted butter, it’s totally fine!
• granulated sugar– for sweetness and to make a soft texture
• Diamond Crystal kosher salt– This is the best type of salt for baking and cooking, so I totally recommend grabbing a box on Amazon. It will last a while. If all you have is regular table salt, use only half the amount of salt the recipe calls for. In this case, you would use ½ teaspoon of regular table salt rather than 1 teaspoon of Diamond Crystal kosher salt.
• egg
• vanilla– I use vanilla bean paste because the flavor is more intense and generally better, but vanilla extract is just fine here.
• lemon zest– If you’re making the strawberry lemon variation, a little lemon zest is all you need.
• all purpose flour
• freeze dried strawberries– I use Good & Gather or Trader Joe’s freeze dried strawberries and blend them in a food processor until fine. You could also use a spice or coffee grinder. Nature Restore is a good resource for freeze dried strawberries that have already been finely ground into a powder.
• dark chocolate– If you’re making the chocolate covered strawberry variation, you would omit the lemon zest and instead add chopped dark chocolate of your choosing. I like to chop up Ghirardelli 60% chocolate chips.
• baking powder– for a bit of lift
• royal icing– get the recipe here

supplies needed to make strawberry cut out cookies with strawberry royal icing

• scale– to measure the flour, sugar, and strawberries
• hand mixer or stand mixer
• spatula– to scrape the sides of the bowl
• food processor– to grind the strawberries into a powder
• microplane or zester– to zest the lemon
• parchment paper– for rolling the dough and baking the cookies
• rolling pin with a guide for ¼″
• cookie cutters

how to make strawberry cut out cookies

Pulverize the freeze dried strawberries to a powder and set aside for now. To a mixing bowl, add the butter, sugar, salt, and lemon zest (if you’re using it). Mix on medium-low speed until the mixture is “creamed”, which means lighter and a bit fluffy. Since this is a roll out dough, you don’t need to mix it for several minutes until it is very fluffy like you would for a cake. Look for a completely combined mixture with no lumps of butter or clumps of sugar.

Add the egg and vanilla and mix until emulsified. The mixture will be smooth, thick, and a bit shiny. All at once, add the flour, pulverized strawberries, and baking powder. Mix on low until the flour is nearly combined. Add the rest of the strawberries that are still in large pieces and mix until the dough has no dry, floury spots. Be careful not to over mix the dough!

Drop the dough onto a piece of lightly floured parchment paper. Sprinkle a bit more flour on top of the dough lump before covering it with another piece of parchment paper. Use a ¼″ guided rolling pin to roll out the dough.

Refrigerate the dough for at least a half an hour to two hours to chill the butter in the dough. This makes it so much more workable and helps prevent spread in the final cookies. If you’d like to work ahead of time, leave the dough (well wrapped) in the fridge for up to three days. If you’re in a rush, freeze the dough for ten to fifteen minutes.

Once the dough has chilled, and you’re ready to start cutting cookies, preheat the oven to 375 F. Grab your cookie cutters and cut shapes from the dough, dipping the cutters in flour if they are sticking to the dough. Place the cut shapes on a parchment lined baking sheet and pop in the freezer for five minutes before baking. This helps the cookies retain their shape. Don’t skip this!

Bake the cookies for 6-8 minutes for smaller cookies, and 8-10 minutes for larger cookies. Keep an eye on them, and bake them until the tops are no longer shiny. Don’t over bake them, or they won’t be soft.

Once they’re done baking, let them cool on the cookie sheet for a few minutes before transferring them to a wire rack to cool completely. If you move them too soon when they’re piping hot, they could break easily.

Re-roll the dough scraps, preferably up to two times. If the dough is very soft after rolling, pop the dough in the freezer for five minutes to chill before cutting cookies again.

how to make a chocolate covered strawberry sugar cookie variation

To make a chocolate covered strawberry sugar cookie, omit the lemon zest and add chopped dark chocolate to the dough when adding the final additional of freeze dried strawberries. You can use whatever chocolate you like, but I think dark chocolate is nice contrast to the sweetness of the dough, strawberries, and icing. I like Lindt bars, Trader Joe’s bars, and Ghirardelli 60% chocolate chips. If you’re using chips, still chop them up, because whole chips are too large and cumbersome to deal with when cutting dough with cookie cutters.

how to make the strawberry royal icing

You are going to LOVE this strawberry royal icing. It tastes amazing, and very much reminds me of melted strawberry ice cream. Start by making a batch of thick salted vanilla bean royal icing. My recipe makes about 6 cups of icing. Determine how much of it you’d like to turn into strawberry icing, and then follow this basic ratio, and adjusting as needed. Weigh eight ounces (one cup) of icing into a small bowl. To the bowl, add 10g of freeze dried strawberry powder (using a fine mesh sieve to keep the larger crumbs of strawberries out of the icing) and a splash of water. Mix it together until it is fully combined. Thin the icing out to your desired consistency and use as normal.

This icing will have a bit of a gluey texture, but it isn’t difficult to use. You may just notice a slight change in texture. Feel free to adjust the amount of strawberry powder to your liking based on color and taste.

These are the strawberries I use, because they come in convenient little 10g pouches.

To recap, the ratio is one cup of icing to 10g of strawberry powder. If you were to turn the entire batch of icing into strawberry icing, that would be six cups of icing to 60g of strawberry powder. That would be two of these one ounce packages.

how to decorate strawberry cut out sugar cookies with strawberry royal icing

This is such a simple decorating technique, but it is also so effective and pretty. Start by piping an outline with a thicker consistency of royal icing and flooding with a looser consistency of icing. Smooth the icing around the surface of the cookie with a scribe tool, pushing the flood icing to meet the border icing. Using a different color of flood icing, like white vanilla or brown chocolate, pipe dots all around the edge of the cookie. Use your scribe tool to gently poke into icing, pulling the scribe tool through each of the dots. This creates a continuous heart pattern in a really simple way.

success tips for making strawberry sugar cookies with strawberry royal icing

• ‘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.
• Don’t over bake these cookies. They are meant to be on the softer side. Bake them just until the tops are no longer shiny.
• Don’t skip the chill time. Even a little bit is better than none, and a short time in the freezer is a good way to chill the dough fast.
• If you want a very sturdy cookie that doesn’t spread at all, add another 30g (¼ cup) of all purpose flour.
• If you want even more lemon flavor in the Strawberry Lemon variation, add a teaspoon of lemon extract or paste (NOT oil) to the dough when adding the vanilla. I love this one from Nielsen-Massey.

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