Linzer-Style Brownie-Roll Out Cookies: Show off Your Favorite Frosting

Who doesn’t love cookies cut into cute little Christmas-themed shapes? I mean really.

My only issue is that they’re usually sugar cookies. As in, not chocolate. How to solve this problem?

Duh. Scharffen Berger cocoa powder. And a recipe for Brownie Roll-Out Cookies from Smitten Kitchen. I whipped up four batches of this stuff since Thanksgiving. I admit, I ate some of the dough.

You would too.

Now if you decide to actually BAKE some of these cookies, or any other cutout cookie, let me recommend reading Gail’s site for easy but valuable tips. Five minutes on her site will save you hours of baking misery later. One of her best tutorials is one on how to more effectively roll and cut cookies by using parchment paper and your freezer. I gave it a try.

Un-chilled dough goes between two sheets of parchment paper.

Roll the dough unchilled. Trust me. This is a million times easier than fighting refrigerated dough.

Freeze the prepared sheets of cookie dough until you are ready to cut them out. Then go to town. Bake cookies while still quite cold; this helps them retain their shape.

Thanks to these helpful hints from Gail, this was by far the easiest experience I have ever had with cutout cookies. And that’s just ONE of her tutorials. She’s got more. She’s amazing. She’s on The Today Show this morning. She may or may not be one of my idols.

Enough of that, back to the chocolate cookies. While these cookies are perfectly delicious on their own, I wanted a way to feature my mad new meringue buttercream frosting skills. A linzer-style cookie seemed to be the obvious solution, so when Marsea came over to make the zebra cake, we also worked on our collective contribution to the DC Blogger Cookie Swap by cutting out plain circles and window circles and baking them.

Then it was time to get down to business. Raspberry meringue buttercream, for which I used the base meringue buttercream recipe from Nick Malgieri’s Bake! and added a bit of pureed and strained raspberries, goes on the solid circles.

Window circles go on top. Frosting featured. Sandwiched between wonderful chocolate cookies.

And I needed to show off my cookie dough frosting as well, right?

And for grins, I also made some cooked flour frosting and mixed in a bit of crème de menthe to make a mint version.

Fortunately, these are almost all out of my freezer now, happily in the hands of those who attended the DC Blogger Cookie Swap. These are seriously tasty. And so versatile – fill them with any frosting, jam, cream, nut butter, or anything else that would make you as happy as a soft rolled chocolate cookie.

Have you ever made linzer-style cookies? What kind of filling did you use?