This recipe showcases our Easter embossed rolling pin and NEW Easter cookie stamps! The cookies are easy and fun to paint with luster dust, as the pin and stamps provide the designs baked right into the dough!

Every Easter my family makes “Bunny Cake”. Yellow cake frosted with homemade buttercream topped with sweetened shredded coconut, tinted in pastel colors to make pink ears and a colorful bow tie for bunny. I ADORE the flavor of buttercream and coconut. It’s a serious comfort food that I vividly, so fondly remember making with my mom.

These cookies are inspired by bunny cake! Instead of being slathered on top of yellow cake, the buttercream-and-coconut wonder is sandwiched between light, airy vanilla cookies. Oh my goodness, it is a fabulous combination! Bunny Cake may have a new rival in family Easter traditions!

The decorating for these is truly easy. I cannot paint worth a darn but I can color a coloring book and do paint-by-number. These cookies are the same way! You’re just adding a little color to designs already on the cookies. Super easy and honestly fun!

The 3 cookies on the right are a little bigger than the sandwiches. I used a bigger cookie cutter to give me space to paint a scene! The chick, bunny, and lamb got to frolic in a grassy field in sunny blue skies! With the animal shapes being raised, it was simple to paint them and then paint around them. SO fun! I added some egg and carrot decors, too.

I sandwiched these insanely thick. You could choose to be a reasonable person and use less buttercream and coconut, but I couldn’t help myself and just had to indulge. Look at those crazy cookies. LOL

This is the second post using our new 2 1/4″ cookie stamps! As the year goes on we will be rolling out (pun intended!) stamps for all four seasons and many holidays. They’re available on our website and Etsy shop. You can make many sizes of cookies with them, from the small-medium sandwich cookies shown here to big 3 1/2″ cookies!

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

All products are on our Etsy shop.

Our  Amazon store has our cookie press and disks and embossed rolling pins .

Let’s bake! I have videos below of how to roll with our embossed pin and stamp with the cookie stamps if you’re new to this!

Powdered Sugar Rolled Butter Cookies

1 cup (2 sticks) butter

1 cup powdered sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 cups all-purpose flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

In a large bowl, combine flour and salt. Set aside. Using an electric mixer, cream the butter. Add the sugar and cream together very well, until it is light and fluffy. Add the vanilla, then the egg, re-creaming the mixture after each addition. Add the flour mixture slowly, mixing on a slow speed until a workable dough forms. Make sure all of the flour is incorporated evenly. Knead it a bit by hand to make sure it is uniformly smooth and mixed. This dough may seem crumbly at first but it kneads together well. Perfect rolling dough has a clay-like, workable texture that is not too sticky or too stiff. If it feels difficult to knead, it is probably too stiff. Add a little water or vanilla extract a teaspoon at a time until you achieve a workable texture. If it is too easy to knead or is sticking to your fingers, it is probably too soft. Add flour a tablespoon at a time until it is workable like clay.

Divide your dough into balls a little bigger than your fist. Work with one portion at a time to keep it manageable. Cover the unused portion to keep it from drying out.

You can use an embossed rolling pin or cookie stamps or both to make patterns in the cookies.

To use the rolling pin:

Use a regular rolling pin (lightly oiled with canola/similar oil, preferably one with thickness spacer rings to make a perfect thickness, picture of ours at bottom of post) to roll your dough on to a silicone baking mat, glass cooktop, or lightly floured surface. Roll to a 1/4” thickness, and wide enough to accommodate the designed pin. Create a long rectangular slab of dough. The patterns on the embossed pins are designed to repeat, so you will be rolling a long rectangle of patterned dough.

Oil your embossed pin with canola (or similar) oil before rolling. Make sure to get it down into the engraved areas. Wipe off any excess with a paper towel. Oil should be down in the patterns, but not pooling in them! You can use a pastry brush or apply by hand, gently squeezing the pin to get oil into the shapes, and rubbing the surface to coat.

Roll with your embossed pin, pressing down with a steady pressure that leaves a deep impression in the dough. The designs should be as raised up on the dough as deep as they are in the pin. If the pattern is not deep enough it will disappear as the cookies bake and puff. As this dough is not cold or stiff, you do not have to press terribly hard! Just an even pressure.

Here’s a quick video clip of me oiling the pin, rolling this dough, cutting shapes and lifting them. 

To use the cookie stamps:

This time, roll the dough out flat to 1/8″, as described above. Oil the stamps the same way as the rolling pin, as described above. Gently press the stamps into the dough as shown. Use cookie cutters to cut out the stamped shapes. I used our round 1 3/4″ cutters for the small sandwich cookies. You can use many different sizes, especially if you’re not doing sandwich cookies go ahead and cut out BIG cookies and decorate them!

For the sandwiches I used our 2 1/4″ round cookie cutter, and for the bigger scene painted cookies I used our 2 3/4″ round cutters.

Also cut out plain, un-stamped or un-embossed bottom cookies to make the bottoms of the sandwich cookies.

Here’s a quick video clip of me stamping the dough, cutting shapes and lifting them.

Once rolled or stamped, use cookie cutters to cut out shapes. Remove any excess dough around the edges. Keep your spatula/lifter flat, dust the end with a little flour, and lift the shapes, beginning by lifting one edge slightly first, then sliding the spatula/scraper under the whole shape. Transfer them to a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, spacing them at least an inch apart. The rolling pin with thickness rings, bench/dough scraper and cookie cutters I’m using here are available at our website and Etsy shops. Links at bottom!

Bake at 400°F for 7-12 minutes, checking at 7 minutes and every minute after as cookies brown quickly. They are done when the edges are slightly brown. Your timing will depend on thickness, cookie size, spacing, and how big or how full your cookie sheet is.

Move to a cooling rack after 5 minutes.

With your cookies cooling make the decadent buttercream with coconut. You could also do the painting before sandwiching! Your choice. I’ll describe that after the stuffing.

Super Thick Buttercream with Coconut

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
4 cups powdered sugar
1 tablespoon heavy cream
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 bag of Baker’s Angel Flake Coconut

Cream the butter, then add the cream and vanilla extract and mix thoroughly. Add powdered sugar a little at a time. Do not be alarmed or surprised! This mixture will be very dry and crumbly, so finish kneading by hand until a smooth clay-like dough forms. Add cream to an overly stiff mixture, or powdered sugar to a soft sticky mixture, as needed to get a workable clay-like consistency. It will be fun to knead when it’s the right texture. It will be stiffer than the cookie dough.

This stiffness makes it a great mortar to hold the coconut. Add as much or as little as you like. I used about a 50-50 ratio of buttercream to coconut.

Add GEL food coloring to make Easter colors! To add color, use gel food dye and add a little at a time. You can always add more but you can’t take it out! I dip the tip of a toothpick into the gel, and add it to the buttercream and coconut.

Once you have your coconut and color mixed in, roll small balls of the mixture in your hand and flatten them. Make little disks that fit on the bottom cookies. Smooth the edges with a damp finger. Press down GENTLY on the top cookie. If they aren’t sticking together, slightly wet the tops and bottom surfaces of the icing and it forms a better bond.

Painting the cookies!

I know this looks like it has to be hard but I assure you, it is anything but!

Luster dust is what makes this beautiful presentation possible. I use it so often in my cookie press posts that in 2022 we started selling it on our website and Etsy shop! We chose to partner with an American company, Bakell, that makes dusts here in the USA. They make gorgeous dusts that are silky, vibrant, and a joy to work with. Their 4 gram jars last and last. A little goes a long way!

To get this look you’re going to paint with edible luster dust mixed with clear alcohol. You could alternatively use any clear extract. Vodka is definitely the best choice and makes the smoothest, fastest-drying paint! The taste disappears. As you experiment, you’ll get the hang of mixing dust and liquid. Piece of cake… or cookie. We also sell the wonderful brush set in the photos.

My technique (you may come up with a better one) is to put a small amount of vodka in a little dish or cup, then use a larger brush (always use food safe brushes) to drip the liquid a little at a time next to your piles of dust. I use a big plate and place small dust piles around it, then add extract a little at a time- it doesn’t take much! It also dries out quickly so you’ll find yourself adding more. I save that big brush and keep it clean so I’m always re-dipping it in a clean liquid.

NOTE: Always make sure you are using EDIBLE dusts! Some luster/pearl/glitter dusts on the market are “non-toxic” but that does not mean they are edible. Plenty of brands have actual food ingredients and are marked “edible”. ONLY use those for safety’s sake!

I didn’t do anything particularly fancy or surprising with these cookies. I painted yellow chicks and white lambs, brown bunnies and orange carrots. I painted some eyes and noses but all in all it was pretty straightforward. I don’t think I need to do too much explaining, so I’ll just show you some closer shots of what I did.

If you’re interested in in-depth tutorials on painting cookies with luster dust, I have 3 terrific posts from a few years ago: Spring Spritz Cookies https://creativecookiepress.com/2020/03/07/spring-spritz-cookies/ , Woodland Christmas https://creativecookiepress.com/2019/12/08/woodland-christmas-spritz-cookies/ , and a Halloween post with video https://creativecookiepress.com/2020/10/11/halloween-shimmering-ghosts-jack-o-lanterns-haunted-houses/ .

I hope you all have as much fun with this as I did. I am LOVING using the stamps and embossed pins after 8 years of only cookie press cookies! It’s fun to expand our horizons and have new ways to play with baking!

Happy Easter!

~Susie

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

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

All products are on our Etsy shop.

Our  Amazon store has our cookie press and disks and embossed rolling pins .

Follow us on facebook! 

If you’re not familiar with rolling pins with thickness rings, here’s ours: