Stamped Cookies

May Day and Mother’s Day are perfect opportunities to try this “food as art” project called Stamped Cookies. In essence, they are shortbread cookies imprinted with a rubber stamp. There are “official” cookie stamps that you can buy, which cost extra and create a more uniform, picture perfect design for your cookies. Using rubber stamps, however,  yields a more rustic and artsy-looking treat. The other advantage to using rubber stamps is that you have many more choices for designs and patterns.

May Day is a great holiday for making these – you could tie a stack of stamped cookies together to put in a May Basket. They are also wonderful treats  for Mother’s Day or for sharing with friends over coffee or tea.

Materials Needed to Make Stamped Cookies:

• A batch of shortbread cookie dough
• Rubber stamps of your choice
• Circle, square, or heart shaped cookie cutters
• Rolling pin
• Powdered sugar
• Spatula
• Parchment paper

Directions for Making Stamped Cookies:

1. Wash and dry your rubber stamps prior to use.
2. Sprinkle powdered sugar on a clean, dry, and flat surface.
3. Place your shortbread dough on the powdered sugar.
4. Sprinkle more powdered sugar on top of the dough (this will help to keep the dough from sticking to the rolling pin).
5. Roll out your shortbread dough to a 1/8″ – 1/4″ thickness.
6. Lightly coat your rubber stamp with powdered sugar. If any sugar gets stuck in the stamp, tap the stamp to release the sugar.
7. Stamp your cookie dough. If you are using alphabet letter stamps, you may need to go back and re-stamp some of them – sometimes the letters get compressed or distorted as you write out a word (if your dough is soft, this is more likely to happen).
8. Use a cookie cutter to cut out a shape around your images and words.
9. Line a cookie sheet with a piece of parchment paper.
10. Use a spatula to move the cookies to a cookie sheet.
11. Bake your cookies according to the recipe you used.
12. Allow the cookies to cool throughly.

As you can imagine, there are endless ways to combine shapes of the cookie with varied images.  For example, heart shaped cookies with a rose image stamped in the center could be made for Valentine’s Day.  Have fun coming up with your own unique design for Stamped Cookies!