ChefSteps is a team of chefs, writers, and food lovers who develop recipes, techniques, and guides to help people cook better at home.

ChefSteps

This season, we made a lot of shortbread cookies and freeze-dried fruit so your cookie dreams will be made of bright colors and flavors that you will never forget. Sure, we’re all fond of those soft sugar cookies with overly vibrant frosting. You can pick them up in any grocery store or make them at home with the same recipe you have been using for decades. However, we wanted to find a way to make cookies that hold up well for the holidays, which are less overly sweet and more fully flavored than plain sugar cookies. And thus, we investigated the shortbread cookie. In the beginning, we set out on a journey to have a cookie bursting with fruity flavor. Why not use vibrant, freeze-dried fruit to create brightly colored, fruit-flavored cookies? We tried trials of cookies with freeze-dried fruit baked in. However, we found that the heat destroyed both the bright flavor and the color of the freeze-dried fruit. We didn’t want a cookie with a dull fruit flavor. So, we went back to making the best shortbread cookie—slightly sweet, crisp and crumbly both—we could create. We used <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/simply-perfect-shortbread-cookies">the ChefSteps perfect shortbread recipe</a> as our base, then decided to take out the toasted milk solids to ensure an even fruitier flavor. After we baked off trays and tasted, we had our cookie. We went back to the freeze-dried fruit drawing board. We found that when we made powders of the fruit we had freeze-dried, then mixed them into royal icing? Something magic happened. We kept all the fruity flavor we were seeking. Along the way, we made brightly colored, delicious icing without any artificial food coloring. Bonus! If you do have your own freeze dryer, you can create additional flavor combinations. We made freeze-dried pumpkins and cranberries. We added bourbon to pineapple and absinthe to quince. We also put mint and ginger in the freeze dryer with results we loved. The mint was still green and the ginger was crisp and spicy.Try adding spices—cardamom or cinnamon, whole caraway seeds or anise seeds—to your cookie. Or, try some citrus zest or citrus oil. We loved peach and mango icing as well as mixed berry combinations. Pear and ginger spice or maple and cranberry? You get to choose your adventure.So, make your own freeze-dried fruit or pick some up at the grocery store. Blend flavors and colors to mix into royal icing for a fruity flavor and natural food dyes. Make powders and crumbles from freeze-dried fruit to decorate those shortbread cookies. Whether you roll out these cookies or cut them into shapes, or slice them from a log of chilled dough, you can transform shortbread cookies into bright-colored and fruit-flavored wonders.