Strawberry Sugar Cookies

If you love strawberries and sugar cookies, these strawberry sugar cookies will satisfy your sweet tooth! the fresh strawberry icing on these cookies is bursting with flavor to compliment the satisfying texture of sugar cookie and buttercream icing. 

If you’re familiar with making sugar cookies, you know that there are two basic types – thin and soft. 

I’m personally a fan of the soft, pillowy type, and this is my favorite recipe for soft gluten free sugar cookies. They’re excellent for Christmas or any other time you want to treat yourself. 

These strawberry sugar cookies have a bit more of a rustic feel. Even though they’re the same basic concept – soft. They’re made to be unfussy and have a built-in holder for your fresh strawberry icing. 

One of my favorite things about these cookies is that they give you the traditional soft sugar cookie texture and flavor, but they’re very low maintenance. You don’t need a rolling pin, cookie cutters, or to get flour all over your kitchen rolling them out. 

Just scoop up a walnut-sized bit, and roll it into a ball. 

Then use the bottom of a small jar or glass to press the middle flat, leaving an indentation for where your icing will go later and creating those rustic, jagged edges.

Strawberry sugar cookies

You may notice that the cookies themselves don’t have real strawberries in them. This is partly so you have a nice visual contrast between the cookie and the icing. However, if you want to make them pink, you can add a drop or two of food coloring or replace a tablespoon of flour with 2 tablespoons of strawberry powder (puree freeze-dried strawberries). 

They do pack strawberry flavor, however, thanks to strawberry extract. You can use LorAnn flavoring oils or McCormick strawberry extract. (it’s like vanilla, but somehow a lot cheaper?)

The icing, however, does use fresh strawberries. Having a few chunks of strawberry showing up does help with that rustic feel after all, and let’s face it – there is just nothing quite like the flavor of fresh strawberries! We used almost the exact same icing in our strawberry lemon blondies, by the way, and if you like strawberries, I highly recommend trying that recipe as well. 

Is this recipe gluten free? 

That’s up to you. I give you instructions for using both traditional all-purpose flour and gluten free flour in the recipe card below. 

The main difference between gluten free and traditional cookies is going to be the way you handle them. Gluten free sugar cookies can be a little easier to break while they’re hot, so you need to be gentle with them. 

Secondly, they can dry out faster, so you’ll need to store them in an airtight container. 

The other difference besides the flour will be the addition of xanthin gum. If you’re gluten free and like to make your own flour mixes, you probably have some on hand. If you use prepackaged mixes, though, and don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry! Look at the ingredients of your mix. most mixes contain a binder or blend of binders like xanthin or guar gum. In that case, just ignore that ingredient on the recipe list. 

Print