Pressed with re-purposed heart disks, freeze dried real strawberries and strawberry jam make these cute cookies super strawberry! Jazz up your Valentine’s Day with these utterly decadent treats. They’re as fun to make as they are to eat.

I used 3 of our heart-shaped disks to make the strawberry shapes. The Outline Heart and Heart are from our Valentine’s Day Set and the Serrated Heart is from the disk set that comes with our Impress! Cookie Press. All together they make a great presentation, as the variations in their shapes mimic the variations you see in fresh strawberries! (Photos of both disk sets at the bottom of the post.) NOTE 2023: We added a “Fruits” Disk Set last summer that has a strawberry disk! One more option to make these yummy cookies! Photo at bottom of post.

Where can you find our disks?

Our website has all of our 200+ disk shapes, cookie press, embossed rolling pins, baking accessories plus more about our Women/Family Owned company! impressbakeware.com

All products are on our Etsy shop.

Our cookie press and disks and embossed rolling pins are also available on Amazon .

For this recipe you’ll need a couple of ingredients beyond the usual ones. Freeze dried strawberries are available online or at stores like Whole Foods. Strawberry jam is the other flavoring and make sure you get jam and not preserves or jelly! Jam has the right consistency and no lumps. 😉

Let’s bake!

Impress! Super Strawberry Spritz

1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter, softened (not melted) (I recommend Land O Lakes brand as I know it creams well. I have had trouble with some generic butters not creaming properly and making the dough hard to press)

1/2 cup granulated sugar plus 1 Tablespoon, divided

1/3 cup strawberry jam

1 Tablespoon vanilla extract (you may need an extra teaspoon or so)

1 egg

3 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

2 Tablespoons corn starch

3 Tablespoons pulverized freeze dried strawberries (plus 1 Tablespoon for sprinkling and if making sandwiches 2 more for the filling)

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

GEL food coloring (NOT liquid)

Green, white, and yellow decorating icing, store-bought or your favorite recipe is fine. You only need a little.

For sandwich cookie filling:

2 Tablespoons butter

3 Tablespoons strawberry jam

2 cups powdered sugar

1 teaspoon water

2 Tablespoons pulverized freeze dried strawberries

Preheat oven to 400°F.

Gather your ingredients and disks.

Start by pulverizing the freeze dried strawberries with a blender, food processor, or such. I used a Magic Bullet. It took just a few seconds to turn it into a fine powder. Pick out any chunks that remain that are too big to go through the disk holes! Measure out 3 tablespoons for the dough, 1 tablespoon that you’ll mix with sugar for sprinkling on top, and if you’re doing the sandwich cookies measure out 2 more tablespoons and set it aside for later.

In a large bowl, combine flour, corn starch, baking powder, pulverized freeze dried raspberries, and salt with a whisk. Set aside.

Using an electric mixer, cream the butter very well. I say this in every post so sorry for being repetitive! Creaming your butter until it is fluffy is the key to great spritz cookies. I like to pretend I’m making frosting and use the “whip” setting on my mixer. Butter turns a slightly lighter color when it’s creamed well.

Add the sugar and cream it very well again. Add the strawberry jam, the extract, and egg, re-creaming the mixture after each new addition.

Next add the flour mixture a little at a time, mixing on a slow speed until a soft dough forms. Perfect spritz dough has a soft malleable texture that is not too sticky or too stiff. You can always knead it by hand at the end if your mixer is leaving any flour unincorporated. Smooshing it into a play-dough like texture by hand is actually pretty fun. 🙂

You can always troubleshoot a spritz dough by adding water or vanilla extract a teaspoon at a time to stiff, dry dough, or adding flour a tablespoon at a time to overly sticky or soft dough. Perfect spritz dough has a soft malleable texture that is not too sticky or too stiff.

Watch some of my videos to see what a correct spritz dough texture looks like.

Add red GEL food color a little at a time until you reach the strawberry color you desire. I made mine pretty red. I always recommend gel food dye as liquid will change the consistency of your dough too much.

Get your disks and pack your dough into your cookie press barrel, using the back of a spoon to press the air bubbles out as you add dough. This helps create consistent pressure to avoid mis-shaped cookies.

Place the disk in the bottom ring, attach to your press, and start pressing onto an un-greased cookie sheet. Use a consistent rhythm to keep the shapes a uniform size. It’s not at all uncommon for your first few cookies to be mis-shaped, as pressure needs to build in the barrel to make consistent shapes. It’s totally ok! Just throw them back in the bowl to be re-pressed.

This presses beautifully in these shapes!

If you’re still having trouble pressing (mis-shaped cookies, trouble sticking to the pan, etc) press one cookie into the air and wipe it off and toss back into the bowl to re-set your pressure in the press. You can also refrigerate your cookie sheets for 5 minutes if sticking is an issue. (There are more troubleshooting tips on the Troubleshooting and Decorating Tips page- see the top menu on the homepage. 🙂 )

After pressing you need to flatten the hearts out to look more like strawberries. So use a fingertip to flatten all of the ridges, creating a smooth cookie surface. For the outline hearts, simply push the outline ridges toward the center, pinching the dough together then smoothing it out.

For the Serrated Hearts, run the back of your fingernail along the ripples, then smooth the whole surface. It’s kind of cool how the ridge edges poking out look like a real strawberry’s indentations where the seeds are! Just smooth out the regular hearts.

Ok, to make these easy to decorate and bake with a gorgeous texture, poke holes in the dough where you’ll put dots of white icing for “seeds”. The cookies actually look cute with just the holes, so if you want to skip the white icing go for it! It just made my pictures pop more. 🙂 I used the tip of a chop stick to poke holes into the surface of the strawberries.

You can also shape the cookies to give some of the tips a slight curve, mimicking real strawberries. So cute!

One more step before baking. Give these an even more sweet strawberry kick and textured color by sprinkling the pressed dough with a mixture of sugar and freeze dried strawberries. Take the 1 Tablespoon of strawberry you set aside and combine with with the 1 Tablespoon of sugar and blend them in your machine (for me the the magic bullet again.)

You can use a spoon or I like using a mesh spoon. Tap the side and the sugar mix falls.

Bake in a 400 degree oven for 6-10 minutes or until the edges just begin to brown slightly. Check early and often as all ovens are different and spritz cookies brown quickly once they start. Let cool for two minutes before removing to a cooling rack.

Now decorate!

Use decorating tips, round and star. I used Wilton #2 and #3 round and a # 16 star top for the small white strawberry blossoms. Draw on the green tops and smooth them with a slightly damp finger. Put white dots for “seeds” in the pre-spaced holes (how easy is that?). Make little white flowers and give them a yellow dot center. Easy.

For the Sandwich cookie option, make the filling by slowly combining the ingredients with an electric mixer. It will be very thick and stiff! Start by creaming the butter and jam and slowly add the rest. When you’re adding the powdered sugar, do so a little at a time and stop when you reach a consistency you like. Honestly just add as much or as little as you like. Feel free to experiment! Pipe it on to the bottom of upside down cookies that are size matched to top cookies. I used a Wilton #10 round tip. You can also spread it on with a knife. I pipe it because I like the clean edge that technique makes.

Don’t forget the flowers. 🙂

If you are feeling adventurous and want to turn these into utterly decadent treats, use chocolate melting wafers or other melted chocolate to dip the cookies in or for drizzling over them. ❤ It’s insanely good!

That’s it! Super Strawberry Valentine’s Spritz Cookies made with heart disks.

Sending all of you much love and hoping your 2021 is off to a good start!

Happy Baking! Press the Possibilities this year. 🙂

~Susie

Disk Designer/Co-Owner at Impress! Bakeware, LLC

Our website has all of our 200+ disk shapes, cookie press, embossed rolling pins, baking accessories plus more about our Women/Family Owned company! impressbakeware.com

All products are on our Etsy shop.

Our cookie press, disks, and embossed rolling pins are also available on Amazon

Follow us on facebook! 

The Valentine’s Day and Impress! Cookie Press disk sets: