The natural beauty of our hometown, Colorado Springs, inspired this recipe. 🌻Thanks to a super rainy summer, Colorado is bursting with wild sunflowers! We are blessed to live along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, with views of Pikes Peak and our beloved red rock park Garden of the Gods. In my spare time I’m an award-winning nature photographer/avid hiker. Out on the trails I’m seeing animals enjoying the sunflowers, too. The bighorn sheep are munching them up! They inspired me to Include animal shapes in this recipe. 😊 I included some photos of the beauty that inspired me, and of bighorn rams eating sunflowers. And you know what? I just realized I don’t have a bighorn sheep disk… hmmm… I may need to make one!

I put a gallery of sheep, sunflowers, red rock & mountain pics at the bottom of the post. Enjoy! 😉

If you’ve never tried the combination of sunflower seeds & dates you’re in for a treat. Mellow, sweet, soft and chewy, these cookies are a wonderful end-of-summer treat. This recipe is especially good straight out of the oven. The cookies are crispy on the outside and soft and chewy in the middle. A combination of sugar, brown sugar, and honey creates a balanced, nuanced sweetness. Rolled oats provide some texture and crunch and sunflower seeds give the cookies a mellow nutty flavor. Honestly the base cookie (before the oats and sunflower seeds are added) is so good I’m going to blog it for Halloween in a few weeks!

This is a pretty straightforward recipe. All I did was pulverize some rolled oats, raw sunflower seeds, and chopped dates, and add some yellow and brown food coloring to the dough. No fancy decorating.

I used the chopped dates to make the centers of the sunflowers brown and fairly realistic! If you’re not into dates or find you don’t like the combination, the other way I colored the sunflower centers was painting with luster dust. It’s a super easy and quick technique.

I used our actual Sunflower disk from The Press Box Set but I included 2 other flowers, since many of our customers have other sets with flowers. The Daisy is from the Flowers Set, the 6 Petal Flower is from Woodland Two Set. I used wildlife disks from Woodland, Woodland Two, The Press Box Set (which can be purchased separately from the press), and Turkey 2 from the Birds Set.

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 Amazon shop has our cookie press and disks and embossed rolling pins.

Let’s bake!

Before making the dough you’ll need to pulverize the sunflower seeds, rolled oats, and chopped dates.

Important TIP: You can use any brand of sunflower seeds or rolled oats. I used Sunsweet brand CHOPPED dates and a Magic Bullet to pulverize them as fine as I could. Using whole dates turns them into something more like date paste. It just becomes a mess. 😂 The chopped dates have a little dextrose dusted on them to keep them from sticking together, and that powder coating helps them not smoosh together when pulverized. I used the Magic Bullet to pulverize the oats and sunflower seeds, too.

For the oats and sunflower seeds, use your disk to help you judge when the pieces are small enough to pass through the disk holes. You don’t want chunks clogging your disks when pressing! See how big the date chunks are, even after pulverizing? That’s why I put them on top instead of IN the cookies.

Sunflower Seed & Brown Sugar Spritz Cookies

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)

2/3 cup granulated sugar

1/2 cup light brown sugar, firmly packed – GET ALL LUMPS OUT before measuring!

1/3 cup honey

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 egg

4 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup pulverized rolled (old fashioned, NOT QUICK) oats

1 cup pulverized raw sunflower seeds

Preheat oven to 400°F.

In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt. Using a big wire whisk is a good way to mix them evenly. 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 white sugar and cream it very well. Add the brown sugar, making sure there are no big lumps that will clog your disks. Then add the honey, the extract, and egg, one at a time, 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. 

Now add the pulverized oats mixing in until thoroughly combined. Last add the pulverized sunflower seeds and mix thoroughly.

Spritz dough has a beautiful breakable texture. It is malleable in your hands but it breaks nicely as you press it. It should not be super sticky and stuck to all your fingers. You should be able to handle it like a soft clay. If you’re new to this watch any of my videos to see how it should look and feel! 

These are cute plain with no food dye but I loved the way they looked tinted. Use a GEL food dye as liquid can change your dough consistency. Add a little at a time as you can always add more but you can’t take it out! I tinted my dough 2 shades of yellow for the flowers and 2 shades of brown for the animals. You can do this with your mixer or knead it by hand.

Another bonus to tinting the dough is it makes it easy to spot chunks that are too big to press! Pull those out so they don’t clog your shapes.

Time to press!

Pack the dough into your cookie press, using the back of a spoon to remove all air pockets as you go.

Spritz cookies have to stick to the pan as you press their shapes, so never grease cookie sheets and don’t use non-stick pans. 

Always remember that the first few cookies often come out wrong, as pressure needs to build up in the barrel. If you press out a few or even a row of goofy-shaped cookies, just toss them back in the bowl to be re-pressed. No biggie! Once you are achieving a good shape, try to press in a consistent rhythm. If any shapes start pressing lopsided, check that a sunflower seed bit might be clogging a hole. Unscrew the ring, check the disk and dough for chunks, remove any large pieces, screw it back on and keep going.

Remember that with one-click-per-cookie presses, some shapes might take a bit less than a full click yet others might require you to squeeze a little more after the click. A cookie press is simply a dough pump. Just think of it as a way to extrude the dough, regardless of “clicks”. If you seem to get out of synch and it just isn’t working, try pressing a cookie into the air, just letting dough come out. It will re-establish proper pressure. Just wipe the dough away and put it back in the bowl to be re-pressed.

If you’re adding dates to your flower centers, you can place them by hand or use a round 1/4 teaspoon or 1/2 teaspoon to make an even, pretty pile in the middle. Scoop up some dates, press them into the spoon a bit, and flip it over the flower center. The dates will get glossy during baking and also shrink a bit so don’t hold back on the amount you use.

TIP: Use a fingertip to tap down the centers of the flowers and any ridges on the animals that look too rough. It won’t matter on the flowers if you’ll be adding dates, but if you plan on painting them instead you’ll want a flat surface. See the difference here?

Do the same on any animals that look a little rough. Simply tap your fingers lightly across the surfaces to give them a neater appearance.

Baking TIP: These cookies take about 6 minutes in my oven on my small baking sheet, and about 9 on the big one. I recommend setting the timer for 6 minutes and checking often to figure out what works with your oven. Remember, small cookies bake faster and large cookies take longer. Keep that in mind when pressing. Group like sizes together if you can to avoid burned or under-baked cookies. OR put big cookies towards the edges and smaller cookies on the inside where they bake slower. Do NOT overbake this recipe! Once they puff up, look dry and not shiny, and start to brown a tiny bit on the edges they are done. 

Let them sit on the pan for just a few minutes and move them to a cooling rack. Keep your spatula flat under your cookies to avoid breaking.

Decorating for this recipe is easy. If you’re not using dates on the flower centers, paint them brown with luster dust. I used a mix of classic orange and moonstone black to make a lovely brown. (With those colors you’re ready for Halloween, too!) Use vodka or any clear extract (vodka works best by far though!) to make a paint out of your luster dust. Place small piles of dust on a plate and mix them with a food-safe brush till the color is right. Add a few drops of vodka. Paint onto the flower centers.

I use luster dust 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!

NOTE: Always make sure you are using EDIBLE dusts! Some lustre/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!

TIP: You can use black and white icing to make eyes for the animals, or go online and search for 3/16″ icing eyes or candy eyes. Etsy shops usually have a good selection!

Here’s some more pictures of the baked cookies.

That’s it for this recipe! I hope you all enjoy these as much as we do.

Disk set pictures below. 😊 Plus a gallery of Pikes Peak, Garden of the Gods, and bighorn sheep rams.

Happy Baking everyone!

~Susie

Disk 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 shop has our cookie press and disks and embossed rolling pins.

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The Press Box Disk Set:

The Woodland and Woodland Two sets:

The Birds Set: