Holiday Cheer Spritz Cookies

We've accumulated a good number of kitchen gadgets over the years, some great, some... not so great (there's a piece of ceramic cookware that won't be named). One of our absolute favorites has got to be our cookie press. Provided you've got the shapes, you've got a fun way to make cute and bite-sized cookies for any occasion.

The recipe we're using is from a booklet included with our cookie press (with a couple tweaks).

We also decided to make ours a little more festive this season by trying out a couple techniques to add some holiday colors. We can safely say that, no matter what, you'll have some incredibly fun and tasty cookies to munch on all throughout the holidays!

Holiday Cheer Cream Cheese Spritz Cookies

(makes 7-8 dozen cookies)

(approx. 45 mins)

1 cup (2 sticks) of unsalted butter (cold)
3 oz of cream cheese (softened)
1 cup of sugar
2 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour
1 egg yolk
1 tsp of vanilla extract
1/4 tsp of salt
1/4 tsp of cinnamon
1/4 tsp of nutmeg

Concentrated gel food coloring

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
Cream together the butter (cut into cubes) and cream cheese in a large, mixing bowl. Beat in the egg yolk and sugar followed by the vanilla.

In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, salt and spices and then slowly add to the cream cheese mixture until fully incorporated.

Here's where we decided to mix things up by adding some color. we first tried to spread some food coloring along the sides of the cookie press tube with a chopstick before inserting the dough.

This gave the cookies wonderful, little ribbons of red for our... ribbons.

We also tried cutting a channel into the dough that we could spread food coloring in for our snowflakes.

These came out with beautiful streaks of frosty blue adorning the tips of our snowflakes for a most excellent effect.

Bake for 8-10 minutes until the bottoms begin to turn golden-brown.

Using a combination of these techniques, we were able to give a festive flair to the rest of our holiday shapes and we must say, they turned out so adorable!!