How to Make St. Patrick's Day Shamrock Cookies

Have some fun this St. Patrick's Day with special cookies for the occasion. Bring them to a St. Patrick's Day party, and everyone will want to eat one of your lucky cookies. Eating these lucky treats is only part of the fun though. The most fun comes from making your St. Patrick's Day shamrock cookies.

Things You'll Need

• Green food coloring
• Sugar cookie dough
• Plastic sheet
• Rolling pin
• Cookie cutter or knife
• Cookie sheet
• Cooling rack
• Sprinkles
• White icing

Instructions

1. Mix sugar cookie dough from your favorite recipe. Add several drops of green food coloring to your sugar cookie dough. Knead the cookie dough thoroughly until the green color is distributed throughout the dough evenly. Or leave out the food coloring and just use the regular white-yellow colored dough.

2. Place the cookie dough on a plastic sheet. Put another plastic sheet on top of the cookie dough. Roll out the cookie dough to 1/4 inch thickness using a rolling pin.

3. Use a shamrock-shaped cookie cutter to press out your clover shape. You can also use a knife to carve out the shamrock shape. Kids can help press out the shapes with the cookie cutter for a fun St. Patrick's Day activity. Remove the pressed out shapes from the sheet of dough carefully.

4. Spread your cookies out on a cookie sheet and bake for 8 to 10 minutes. Look for the edges to be lightly brown. Remove cookies from the cookie sheet and place them on a cooling rack.

5. Decorate your cookies with fun St. Patrick's Day themed sprinkles or just use green colored sprinkles. You may opt to frost your shamrock cookies. Put green food coloring drops in white icing and mix well to make green frosting. Or spread white icing on them and sprinkle with lots of green-tinted sugar or green candy nonpareil balls.

Tips & Warnings

• For a variation on the shamrock-shaped cookie, use your lip-shaped cookie cutter from Valentine's Day and make green lip cookies. Bake and decorate according to the instructions in the steps above. Put in little cellophane baggies and attach cute tags that say "Kiss me, I'm Irish" to the bag with a green ribbon.

• Bake the cookies on baking parchment on the cookie sheet. This helps keep sugar cookies from burning.

Resources

• For green sprinkles, visit bulkfoods.com.
• More photos from Tracy Hunter