Here is the second cookie recipe I baked for December out of Dorie’s Cookies for Tuesdays with Dorie. This recipe uses Dorie’s Good For Almost Anything Vanilla Cookie dough as a base, adding spices to the dough at the end. Although the Spice Cookie recipe calls for one quarter of the base dough, I used all the dough so I would have enough cookies to give as gifts. Because of this, I quadrupled the spices and mixed them with the last addition of flour. (The recipe adds the spices to the completed dough to allow you to use the leftover dough for other types of cookies.)

The dough comes together easily, and rolls out nicely using Dorie’s technique of rolling the dough between two sheets of parchment before chilling. Chilling the dough before you cut out the cookies helps the cookies keep their shape when you push them out of the cutter onto the cookie sheet. (I didn’t chill on the final rollout; they turned out fine but were more difficult to get out of the cutter.)

I could not find sanding sugar so I used sugar sprinkles. The sprinkles are larger than sanding sugar, but they worked nicely with this cookie.

I have double ovens and the upper oven gets hotter when both ovens are on. I forgot this on my baking day. Consequently the first batch out of that oven was overly brown. We gobbled up the cookies anyway. I adjusted the temperature of the oven for later batches and they came out fine.

After the cookies cooled, I bagged them in cellophane to give to family members as an extra gift.


The recipe for Christmas Spice Cookies is in Dorie’s Cookies by Dorie Greenspan. Here is Dorie with me at her book signing at Coyle’s Bakeshop in Seattle. If you love baking, you need this book.