Spritz up your cookies with sprinkles
These crafty sprits are tasty and fun to make
Photo: Dianna Walla
Sprinkles evoke Nordic sweater patterns in these sprits cookies. Use the templates provided or design your own crafty cookies.
Dianna Walla
Tromsø, Norway
In honor of the past month’s craft theme, these cookies are adorned with motifs from traditional Norwegian knitting and embroidery. They’re a bit more of a craft project than many cookies out there, but it’s a fun project and the results are worth it! They’re bound to be a hit at any crafty gathering, too.
The cookies themselves are based on a recipe from an old booklet in my collection called Scandinavian Goodies, published by Nordic Imports in 1955. The recipe is for “Swedish sprits” (also spelled “spritz”) and they’re usually pressed into different shapes with a cookie press. For these cookies, however, the dough is rolled out and circle shapes are cut. I chose round cookies because you don’t necessarily need to have a cookie cutter on hand (I cut my cookies out with a mug), but you could certainly adorn any shape you wanted! Rolling out the dough makes a nice flat base for the icing and sprinkle topping. The icing dries hard, acting like a glue for the sprinkles to hold them in place.
This recipe yields approximately 18-24 cookies, depending on the size.
Crafty Cookies
Photo: Dianna Walla
Cookies:
16 tbsps. (225g) butter
3/4 cup (150g) baker’s sugar
2 egg yolks
1 tsp. almond extract
2 1/2 cups (350g) flour
1/4 tsp. salt
Icing:
1 cup (120g) powdered sugar
2-3 tbsps. milk
1 tsp. vanilla extract
food coloring, optional
Sprinkles of choice
Templates: Dianna Walla
Preheat the oven to 400ºF / 205ºC and line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Cream the butter and sugar in a large bowl until light and fluffy. Mix in the egg yolks, salt, and almond extract. Sift the flour and add it to the mixture in the bowl a little bit at a time. A rubber spatula will help you keep the dough off the sides of the bowl.
In portions, roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface and use a cookie cutter (a glass or mug will also work) to cut out the cookies. Place on the parchment paper covered baking sheet and bake in the oven for approximately 10 minutes, until the edges begin to lightly brown. Transfer to a cooling rack and allow to cool completely before applying icing.
While the cookies cool, mix powdered sugar, milk, and vanilla extract in a bowl. If you’d like several different colors of icing, you can divide the icing between two or more bowls and add food coloring to each bowl individually.
Once the icing is mixed and the cookies have cooled, apply icing and sprinkles to each cookie. Because the icing dries hard, it’s best to work on one cookie at a time, first spreading the icing and then adding the sprinkles (if the icing dries before the sprinkles go on, they won’t stick). When the icing is still wet, it’s possible to shift the position of the sprinkles if you need to move them around a bit, so don’t worry too much about making mistakes. There are three templates included here, but feel free to get creative!
A dot indicates one sprinkle, while a line indicates several sprinkles should be placed in a row (but the exact number isn’t important).
Dianna Walla is a writer and knitwear designer living and studying in Tromsø, Norway. She writes about baking at cakeandvikings.com and about knitting at paper-tiger.net. Find her on Instagram at @cakeandvikings.
This article originally appeared in the Nov. 6, 2015, issue of the Norwegian American Weekly.
