Easy Christmas Butter Cookies Rolled in Festive Sugar

These holiday butter cookies are refrigerator cookies that are rolled in festive colored sugar, sliced into coins and baked. They're super easy to make since they don't require rolling out with a rolling pin, and are perfect for dessert trays and gifts.

Keep them simple by rolling in the colored sugar, or go more fancy with a glaze and decorations if you want. This is a fabulous basic butter cookie dough for all your needs.

Jump to Recipe

Jump to:

• 🍪 What's the difference between sugar cookies, butter cookies and shortbread?
• ❤️ Why you'll love this recipe
• Freaky Friday
• 👩‍🍳 The Family Around the Table Blog
• 🧅 Main Ingredients + Notes
• 🔪 Recommended Equipment
• 📝 Instructions Overview
• 🎯 Baking Tips
• 💡Ideas for Possible Variations
• 🤷‍♀️ Holiday Butter Cookies FAQ
• 📇 More Holiday Cookies For You!
• 🎉 What Did Everyone Else Make??
• Christmas Butter Cookies Rolled in Festive Sugar

The easiest holiday treats to make and eat are cookies (depending on how fancy you get with decorating them, of course). And these Christmas butter cookies are super-super easy, and addictive. So they need to be part of your holiday cookie baking this year.

And they're small, only 1 ½ inches in diameter, so anyone can justify having one. Or five. Kind of like these little Snickerdoodle Cookies with Figs.

🍪 What's the difference between sugar cookies, butter cookies and shortbread?

These are all popular doughs to use for cookies and cookie bars around the holidays, and they all use butter, sugar and flour in their recipes. The biggest difference is in the proportions and the temperature the cookies are baked.

Shortbread has the highest ratio of butter to flour, crumbles easily, and bakes at a lower temperature.

Butter cookie recipes call for a lot of butter of course, but have more flour and sugar in them than shortbread. This gives them stability to keep them from crumbling.

Sugar cookies have the highest ratio of flour to butter (or other fat), making them super stable. These are typically the cookie doughs you roll out, and use for cut-out cookies since they hold their shape so well in the oven.

❤️ Why you'll love this recipe

• Easy and just the right amount of sweetness.
• Since these are refrigerator cookies, you can leave them in the refrigerator for a couple of days before slicing and baking.
• The dough freezes well, allowing you to make the dough now, and bake the cookies in a jiffy over the holidays.
• Uses ingredients you probably have on hand.
• Ideal for hostess gifts, a cookie tray, a treat with ice cream, or a bake sale.
• Flexible recipe that allows you to add orange or lemon zest, or do some additional decorating on the face of the cookie, if that's your thing.
• Perfect for young kids in the kitchen who want to help make cookies. They will love rolling the dough in all kinds of festive sugars.

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Freaky Friday

What, you may wonder, is Freaky Friday??

For starters, it's how I found this very fun recipe that you must make this season.

Freaky Friday is a group of food bloggers who are secretly assigned one another’s blogs to make a recipe from. Then we all reveal who we had and what we made on the same Friday. And that's TODAY!

Many thanks to Michaela from An Affair from the Heart who created and hosts this blog hop. At the bottom of this post, you'll see a list of all of the other recipes our group cooked up - that's what makes it a blog hop :-).

These holiday butter cookies come from Ellen at Family Around the Table blog. On her blog, she calls them Holiday Coins because of their shape and size.

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👩‍🍳 The Family Around the Table Blog

Ellen at the Family Around the Table blog is a freelance writer, recipe developer and, if you live on the Gulf Coast of Florida, she wrote a regular TASTE section feature for the Tampa Bay Times, as well as reviewed cookbooks for them for more than 15 years. 

She's a pro in the kitchen, especially around baking. It's in her genes. Her grandmother was from Italy, and made fresh pasta for dinner and was a great cook. She passed her knowledge and skills down to her daughter, Ellen's mom, and then onto Ellen as she grew up.

If we hadn't all had the assignment of cookies or candy this month, I would have written this post about her Maple Cornbread or her Apple Cinnamon Scones. I have a particular love for cornbread, and really, who doesn't swoon for scones?!

This holiday season, I plan to serve this Cranberry Whiskey Sour. I make an Amaretto Whisky Sour several times a week, and her cocktail looks right up my alley.

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Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links to products and foods I use in my kitchen. This means that at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. To view my entire storefront of recommended kitchen tools and equipment, check out my shop on Amazon.

📝 Instructions Overview

Detailed instructions for making these holiday butter cookies are in the recipe card below, but here's an overview!

Step 1

Weight and whisk. Weigh the flour and whisk it with the salt.

Step 2

Cream. Cream the butter until fluffy using a standing mixer fitted with a whisk attachment. Add the sugar, and continue to mix until fluffy. Add the yolks, vanilla extract and orange zest.

Step 3

Combine. Add the flour to the butter mixture, and mix using a rubber spatula until it's completely absorbed by the dough.

Step 4

Roll. Divide the dough into quarters. Cover 3 of the sections with plastic, and mold the 4th one into a long cylinder using your fingers.

Sprinkle the decorator sugar on a work surface, and roll the dough in it so that it's completely covered with the sugar. Wrap in plastic. Repeat with the other 3 dough sections, and place in the refrigerator to chill for at least 2 hours, or up to 2 days.

Step 5

Slice and bake. Bring the rolled butter cookie dough out of the refrigerator. Unwrap one roll, and slice it into coins. Arrange on a cookie sheet. Repeat with the other rolls until the cookie sheet is filled.

Bake for 12 - 14 minutes.

🎯 Baking Tips

• Weigh your flour for a consistent result. It makes a difference.
• Bring the butter to room temperature before whipping it in the mixer. If you're in a hurry, and forgot to do this, here's a quick way to warm your butter a bit. Slice the butter into ½ tablespoon pats. Heat a bowl of water in the microwave oven. Empty the water out, dry the bowl, and turn it upside down over the butter for 5 minutes.
• Try not to overwork the flour when mixing it into the butter and sugar, and when creating the cookie rolls. Overworking flour can make the cookies tougher.
• My cookie rolls were 7 ½ inches long, and 1 ½ inches in diameter. I got 18 - 20 cookies from each roll. You can roll them as thick as you want, of course, but the baking time and yield will change.
• Make sure the cookie rolls are smooth and even, to get evenly shaped cookies that will bake up in the same length of time.
• The dough must chill in order to slice it into round coins. Chilling also helps them hold their shape (and size) during baking.
• Roll the dough lengths in the decorator sugar so that it's completely covered. If necessary, sprinkle additional sugar over bare spots and gently press.
• Wrap each cookie roll individually in plastic.
• Bake only until the edges of the cookies begin to turn a pale golden color. It will be subtle.

💡Ideas for Possible Variations

Eliminate the zest, or swap out the orange zest for lemon.

🤷‍♀️ Holiday Butter Cookies FAQ

Can I freeze the dough?

Yes. Wrap each butter cookie dough roll in plastic and place them in a sealed plastic bag for up to 2 months.

📇 More Holiday Cookies For You!

Spiced Persimmon Cookies with Dried Figs

Pennsylvania Dutch Spice Currant Christmas Cookies

15 Christmas Cookies From Around the World

This Pine Nut Brittle with Rosemary isn't a cookie, nor is this Chocolate and Pretzel Bark with Sea Salt, but they're both fabulous holiday treats for yourself or for gifts.

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