These penguin cookies are buttery, melt in your mouth, shortbread cookies dipped in a luscious layer of creamy chocolate and will dazzle at your next holiday celebration! These cookies are delicate, buttery, crisp, and perfect for Christmas celebrations! They are fun to make and delicious to eat. They are absolutely adorable and cute. These cookies are surprisingly easy to make and only require 10 ingredients. Make these for a special occasion and enjoy with friends and family during the festive season!
Ingredients you’ll need to make penguin cookies:
- Unsalted Butter: Since butter is a main flavor here, I would really recommend springing for a higher-quality brand. It is very important to have your butter at room temperature. You can ensure this by lightly pressing your finger on the block of butter. It should slightly leave an imprint. I also prefer to use unsalted butter because salted butters have varying amounts of salt content in them and it is always a good idea to add it on your own and avoid your bakes from being too salty.
- Granulated Sugar: Sugar acts as a binding agent to your muffins along with adding sweetness. You can use either granulated sugar, powdered sugar or caster sugar to make these cookies. Make sure you only use superfine sugar to get that melt in your mouth texture.
- Almond Extract: You must use a high quality pure almond extract in your recipes. This helps to add a rich flavor to your baked goods especially when they contain chocolate. This enhances the flavour of all ingredients (especially chocolate) and you should never leave it out. You can alternatively swap it with vanilla extract. Pure vanilla extracts are typically dark brown in color.
- All purpose flour: I highly recommend weighing all your ingredients using a kitchen scale for accurate recipe results. If you’re using cups, don’t scoop your cup into the flour. Spoon the flour into your cup and level it off with the back of a knife. You can also use a mix of all purpose and hazelnut flour alternatively.
- Kosher Salt: Adding a pinch of salt helps to balance out the flavours in the cookies. I have added sea salt for a little extra flavour however you can use normal iodised salt too.
- Chocolate: I highly recommend using good quality couverture baking chocolate chips or chocolate bars (I use callebaut) to ensure the best flavor. Couverture chocolates are made of cocoa butter as compared to regular compound chocolates which are made of saturated fats like oil. This will also help you get those melty pools of chocolate.
- Candy Eyes: Use leftover (from Halloween) goggle eyes to give the looks of buttons and are candies you can enjoy to the fullest other than just decorating these penguin cookies.
- Powdered Sugar: You will need powdered of confectioners’ sugar to make the buttercream for beaks.
- Orange Gel Coloring: It is very important to use gel coloring as liquid food coloring will make your buttercream watery and hence not pipeable.
FAQ
1. Whisk together all the dry ingredients and wet ingredients to make the shortbread linzer cookie dough using a hand mixer, stand mixer or a food processor.
2. Chill it in the fridge for at least one hour or up to a few days.
3. On a lightly floured surface, roll out one disk of dough to ⅛” in thickness. Use a round cookie cutter to cut 3 inch cookies from the rolled dough.
4. Place all cutout cookie dough on baking sheets. Place the scrap cookie dough back in the fridge for about 15 minutes before re-rolling.
5. Bake cookies at 350 degrees F for about 10 minutes. Bake the tiny rounds for about 8 minutes. 6. 6. Allow cookies to cool completely on the baking sheet.
7. Repeat with the remaining cookie dough.
8. Dip the cookies into the melted dark chocolate to get the pattern you can see in the pictures above. To do this, dip half of the cookie into chocolate, then rotate it and dip in the other half, leaving a small triangle of the cookie uncovered.
9. Pipe small dots of chocolate onto the triangles not covered by the chocolate to make “buttons”.
10. In a small bowl, cream together butter and powdered sugar until light and fluffy. Add a drop of orange gel coloring. Set aside.
11. Place goggle eyes and pipe beaks with a triangle piping tip using orange buttercream onto the cookies (see pictures in post).
12. Allow the chocolate to firm up. Enjoy!
Since shortbread cookies are meant to be crisp, store them at room temperature covered loosely with aluminium foil for upto a week.
You can double or half this recipe as per your needs. However I have to warn you, these cookies are really so addictive that you’ll finish a batch in no time.
If you don’t have orange food coloring at hand, I’ve got you. You can always use a mix of other colors to make orange food coloring. Here are three options:
1. Bright Orange: add 1 part yellow to 1 part red
2. Dark Burnt Orange: add 2 parts yellow, 2 parts red, and 1 part blue or brown
3. Light Orange: add 3 parts yellow to 1 part red
1. Dip the cookies into the melted dark chocolate to get the pattern you can see in the pictures above. To do this, dip half of the cookie into chocolate, then rotate it and dip in the other half, leaving a small triangle of the cookie uncovered.
2. Pipe small dots of chocolate onto the triangles not covered by the chocolate to make “buttons”.
3. In a small bowl, cream together butter and powdered sugar until light and fluffy. Add a drop of orange gel coloring. Set aside.
4. Place goggle eyes and pipe beaks with a triangle piping tip using orange buttercream onto the cookies (see pictures in post).
5. Allow the chocolate to firm up. Enjoy!
Tips to make the prettiest penguin Christmas cookies:
- Do not over mix the dough. Because we do not want to incorporate much air into the dough, be sure to mix the butter and sugars together on low speed. Mixing at a higher speed for too long will aerate the dough and leave you with cookies that spread too much in the oven.
- Roll the dough before chilling. For best results I like to roll the dough as soon as it’s ready. Roll the dough to 3/8 inch thick between two pieces of parchment paper and then pop it in the freezer for at least 15 minutes before cutting the shapes. Once the shapes are cut, place the cookies on a parchment lined baking sheet and return them to the freezer for 10 minutes before baking them in a preheated oven. The extra chill time will help to prevent any spreading in the oven.
- Do not over bake. For those soft, buttery, melt in your mouth cookies be sure to pull them from the oven when the edges are set and lightly golden brown and the center of the cookie is puffed and pale. The middle of the cookies might seem slightly under baked but the residual heat from the pan will continue to bake the cookies once they are removed from the oven.
- Cool the cookies completely. Be sure to let the cookies cool for 10 minutes on the cookie sheets once removed from the oven. Then transfer them to a wire rack to cool completely.
- Do not overheat the chocolate: It is very easy to overheat couverture chocolate and break down the cocoa crystals in it. This can cause it to not firm up and you will need to store these cookies in the refrigerator in that case. To properly melt chocolate and retain it’s shine which it gets from the cocoa butter crystals, melt the chocolate in the microwave at 15-30 second intervals and stir vigorously in between. Dip the penguin cookies in melted chocolate and decorate!
- Use gel coloring: Using gel or powdered coloring is very important while making your buttercream. Liquid coloring can make your buttercream watery and thus not pipeable. Watery buttercream will not hold it’s shaped and will lead to crooked beaks.
HOW TO GET THE BEST RESULTS FROM THIS RECIPE?
All of the recipes on the blog are thoroughly tested multiple times and carefully designed so that anyone can reproduce these delicious baked good in their own kitchen and enjoy them to the fullest. The only way to make this possible is when anyone can exactly replicate the measurements and temperatures.
- In order to standardise the way ingredients are measured, I highly recommend that you weigh them in grams. Volume measurements are nearly not as accurate and have a lot of scope for errors. To precisely be able to replicate the recipes, all you will need is a kitchen scale!
- Every oven heats up differently. Your oven might be over heating or under heating by around 50 degrees or more and you might not even know. In order to ensure that you are baking at the right temperatures, I highly recommend investing in an oven thermometer!
If you would still like to bake using volume measurements, I mentioned those below. However, I primarily test my recipes in grams and cannot promise the best results if you do so. Trust me, once you’ll start using these tools you’d never want to go back!
I hope you’ll enjoy these easy Penguin Cookies this Christmas and don’t forget to bookmark this sugar cookies recipe for the holidays. These cute cookies are my favorite and perfect to celebrate any occasion with friends and family!
Happy baking! x
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Penguin Cookies
- Total Time: 40 minutes
- Yield: 10 penguin cookies 1x
Description
These penguin cookies are buttery, melt in your mouth, shortbread cookies dipped in a luscious layer of creamy chocolate and will dazzle at your next holiday celebration!
Ingredients
Shortbread Cookies
- 218g (1¾ cups) all purpose flour, spooned and levelled
- ½ teaspoon kosher salt
- 170g (¾ cup) unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 100g (½ cup) granulated or caster sugar
- 1 teaspoon pure almond or vanilla extract
To decorate cookies
- 97g (⅓ cup) couverture chocolate, melted
- 20 candy eyes
- 2 drops orange gel coloring
- 56g (¼ cup) unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 120g (½ cup) powdered sugar, sifted
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350° F and line two cookie sheets with parchment paper. In a small bowl, whisk together the flour and salt. Set aside.
- In a large bowl, cream the butter and granulated sugar until the mixture is fluffy and pale yellow. Add the almond extract. Then, add the flour a cup at a time, until you have a crumbly dough that’s starting to come together.
- Turn the dough onto a pastry or cutting board. Press the dough together with clean hands until you have a smooth ball of dough. Cut the dough into two, and flatten each portion into a 1/2” disc. Wrap with plastic wrap, and freeze for about 15 minutes or refrigerate for 30 minutes.
- On a lightly floured surface, roll each disc of dough until it’s 1/4” thick. Cut out an even number of 3” circles with a cookie cutter.
- Place the cookies 1” apart on the prepared sheets, and bake for 10-12 minutes, until the bottoms and edges are lightly browned. Let cool for about 5 minutes on the pan, and then move the cookies to a wire rack to completely cool.
- Place the chopped dark chocolate into a heat-proof bowl. Heat the chocolate in the microwave in 15-30 seconds intervals until completely melted. Allow to stand for 2 – 3 minutes, then stir well until you get a smooth chocolate. Allow to cool slightly until it reaches the consistency at which it can be piped.
- Dip the cookies into the melted dark chocolate to get the pattern you can see in the pictures above. To do this, dip half of the cookie into chocolate, then rotate it and dip in the other half, leaving a small triangle of the cookie uncovered.
- Pipe small dots of chocolate onto the triangles not covered by the chocolate to make “buttons”.
- In a small bowl, cream together butter and powdered sugar until light and fluffy. Add a drop of orange gel coloring. Set aside.
- Place goggle eyes and pipe beaks with a triangle piping tip using orange buttercream onto the cookies (see pictures in post).
- Allow the chocolate to firm up. Enjoy!
- Prep Time: 30 minutes
- Cook Time: 10 minutes
- Category: Penguin cookies, Christmas cookies
- Method: Baking
- Cuisine: American
Keywords: penguin cookies, penguin christmas cookies, penguin shortbread cookies
These are the best cookies I had in a While 🥺💖 Thank you for such a beautiful recipe
★★★★★
Hi Rahul,
Thank you, so happy to hear this!