These patriotic sugar cookies are the red white and blue dye free shortbread you didn’t know you needed in your life. Rich with vanilla and buttery crisp edges, these cookies are great on their own or on top a cup of good ice cream.

Colored with vegetable colors (with no added taste), these fun to make cutout cookies are a great add to your 4th of July BBQ desserts.

Taste	Texture
Buttery, vanilla	Crisp, delicate

Active time	Total time	Yield	Difficulty
40 min	50 minutes	4 dozen	Easy

Why you’ll love these 4th of July star cookies

So fun to make: Rolling the colors together to create the stripes is genuinely fun. If you have kids, this is a great cookie to make with them. My students and my kids both love making multi-color cookies like this.
Natural food coloring, not fake coloring: Despite the bright colors, I do not love baking with artificial dyes. While a little bit of dye is probably not going to wreck your health, we all probably consume more than we know and should probably cut back. Using food colors in baking made from real food is an easy way to do just that. I’ve grown to love the muted palette these colors bring to the party. Like my shamrock cookies, strawberry matcha shortbread, or my strawberry vanilla hearts, these cookies have a beauty all their own.
Frustration free sugar cookie making: As a young baker I was so aggravated by sugar cookies. They always stuck, always distorted, often spread into disastrous ugly cookies. When my Mom and I started buying parchment
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in pre-cut sheets from our local restaurant supply, I perfected my sugar cookie technique. You will get perfect cookies every single time and no frustration in the process.

How to get red and blue colors from natural food colors

You have a few options when you’re working with natural food colors for red and blue. I have not experimented with liquid natural food colors yet, though I’d trust the Watkins natural colors. I’ve used their natural colored sprinkles many times, and they are all lovely.

Red natural food coloring

Freeze dried strawberry powder
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: gives you a pink.
Beet powder
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: Color degrades very little in baking, makes a reliable darker red. This is my choice for these cookies.
Freeze dried raspberry powder
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: A little less strong than beet powder
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, but still bakes into a deeper red.
Color Kitchen Natural Food colors
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Red: turmeric and beet based. Makes a warmer red than beet powder
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alone.

Blue natural food coloring

Butterfly pea flowers: Buy the dried flowers whole and whiz them in a coffee grinder
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into a powder. Try to only grind what you need as the color oxidizes quickly.
Blue spirulina powder: More expensive, but it makes an excellent blue that bakes without losing too much color.
Color Kitchen Natural Food colors
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Blue: Spirulina-based. I used this in these cookies.

Ingredients for Patriotic Sugar Cookies

Butter, at room temperature
Powdered sugar
Vanilla paste or vanilla extract
Almond extract
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(optional for more of a bakery cookie flavor)

All-purpose flour
Beet powder
Color Kitchen Natural food colors
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blue, butterfly pea flowers (grind in a coffee grinder
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), or blue spirulina powder.

How to make 4th of July shortbread cookies

Make the base dough: Beat the butter with the powdered sugar and vanilla paste until smooth. Add in the all-purpose flour and mix just until the dough comes together.
Divide and color: Divide the dough into 3 parts. Mix the blue color into one part and the red into another by folding the dough around the color until it is evenly distributed. Divide each of these pieces into 4.
Roll the pieces: Roll each piece into a rope on a lightly floured surface, about 1/2″ in diameter. Cut these pieces in half.
Line up the colors: Lightly flour a piece of parchment
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. Line up the stripes red-white-blue-red-white-blue, leaving a little bit of a gap between each rope. Sprinkle the dough with a little more flour and then place a second piece of parchment
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over the top.
Roll: Roll the dough slightly along the stripes and then across the stripes to flatten the dough into dough that is about 1/8″ thick. Pop this parchment package in the freezer for 10 minutes. Repeat this process of rolling the rest of the dough.
Cut: Preheat the oven to 350 F (180 C). Cut out star shapes with whatever star cutters you have. Use a small spatula to lift up the cold dough onto a parchment lined sheet tray.
Bake: Bake the cookies for 8-9 minutes, rotating the sheet halfway through baking.
Roll scraps: With whatever colors you have, unstick the different colored doughs from each other. It’s okay if there’s a little bit of another color sticking to a different one (this will make a marbled effect). Reroll the colors into ropes and roll them out again to cut more stars, chilling before you bake. You should be able to do this about twice before you run out of dough.

Patriotic sugar cookies

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Author: Elizabeth Farr
Total Time: 1 hour 26 minutes
Yield: 4 dozen cookies 1x

Print Recipe

Description

Make naturally colored shortbread cutout cookies cut into stars for the 4^th of July.

Ingredients

Scale

2 sticks butter, at room temperature (227 g)
1/2 cup powdered sugar (60 g)
2 teaspoons vanilla paste or vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract
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(optional)
2 cups all-purpose flour (260 g)
1/8 teaspoon salt (optional)
1 tablespoon beet powder (or Color Kitchen natural colors red)
1 tablespoon blue spirulina powder (or Color Kitchen natural colors blue)

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Instructions

Make the base dough

Beat the butter with the powdered sugar and vanilla paste until smooth.
Add in the all-purpose flour and mix just until the dough comes together.

Divide and color

Divide the dough into 3 parts.
Mix the blue color into one part and the red into another by folding the dough around the color until it is evenly distributed.
Divide each of the dough logs into 4. It’s best to cut them lengthwise since you need to roll them into ropes in the next step.

Roll the pieces

Roll each piece into a rope on a lightly floured surface, about 1/2″ in diameter.
Cut these pieces in half.
Lightly flour a piece of parchment.
Line up the stripes red-white-blue-red-white-blue, leaving a little bit of a gap between each rope. Sprinkle the dough with a little more flour and then place a second piece of parchment over the top.
Roll the dough slightly along the stripes and then across the stripes to flatten the dough into dough that is about 1/8″ thick.
Pop this parchment package in the freezer for 10 minutes. Repeat this process of rolling the rest of the dough, freezing the second piece of striped dough after rolling.

Cut and bake

Preheat the oven to 350 F (180 C).
Cut out star shapes with whatever star cutters you have. Use a small spatula to lift up the cold dough onto a parchment lined sheet tray.
Bake the cookies for 8-9 minutes, rotating the sheet halfway through baking.

Re-roll the scraps

With whatever colors you have, unstick the different colored doughs from each other. It’s okay if there’s a little bit of another color sticking to a different one (this will make a marbled effect).
Reroll the colors into ropes and roll them out again to cut more stars, chilling before you bake. You should be able to do this about twice before you run out of dough. Bake the rest of the cookies as the rest.
Cookies can be stored at room temperature in a closed container for up to a week or frozen in plastic bags for up to 3 months.