Perfect for celebrating the 4th of July or New Year’s Eve, these delicious sandwich cookies will be the hit of the party!

These Oreo-like chocolate cookies are sandwiched with an absolutely decadent thick vanilla buttercream. The cookies are made by rolling the dough with our Fireworks Embossed Rolling Pin, which leaves a beautiful pattern on the baked cookies! They’re wonderful plain, but painted with colorful edible luster dust they steal the show!

This cookie recipe is very rich and sturdy enough for sandwiches but also soft and fudgy. Adding some black food coloring to the already brown chocolate dough makes the cookies look like a dark night sky – the perfect background for fireworks! It’s up to you if you want to make all big cookies, or smaller cookies to sandwich. Or heck, why not do both. 😉

Here’s a look at the Fireworks pin, shown with plain vanilla, black chocolate, and royal blue cookies to give you some ideas of more ways to use it.

Our website has all of our 300+ disk shapes, cookie press, embossed rolling pins, baking accessories plus more about our Women/Family Owned company in beautiful Colorado Springs! Ordering HERE helps us the most and we appreciate it! impressbakeware.com

All products are on our Etsy shop.

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

🇺🇸🌞Summer Fun & Sun SALE!🎉15% OFF cookie press disks, our cookie press, embossed rolling pins, luster dusts, cookie cutters & baking accessories. Sale June 14-28 2025, on our website and Etsy shops ONLY! (Links above.) Sale excludes holiday gift sets and our recipe book.

Let’s bake!

Chocolate Rolled Cookies

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened (I always recommend Land-o-Lakes butter, as some generic butters have a different moisture content and can throw the dough texture off.)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
1/3 cup honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt

Black GEL type food coloring

Note: For a gluten-free option simply replace the flour with a 1:1 substitute like King Arthur’s Gluten Free Measure for Measure.

In a large bowl, combine flour and salt. Set aside. Using an electric mixer, cream the butter. Add the sugars and honey and cream together very well, until it is light and fluffy. Add the vanilla and egg, re-creaming the mixture after each addition. Add the cocoa powder to this wet mixture and mix thoroughly. Add the flour mixture slowly, mixing on a slow speed until it comes together. Make sure all of the flour is incorporated evenly. Add black food coloring, again mixing on slow speed, adding dye until you reach the desired color. If required, you can finish kneading the dough by hand until it is smooth and uniform and does not stick to your fingers.

Troubleshooting: 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. This dough can turn out soft so don’t be surprised if you end up adding flour! I added a third of a cup the day I made these as it was humid out. Depending on your humidity, the moisture content of your butter or flour, etc, it can be sticky. Add flour till it’s a workable dough like a soft clay. I show the right texture/consistency in the video!

You can also refrigerate the dough for 10 to 15 minutes if you’re working in warm conditions. This dough does not generally require any refrigerating. You should only need to on a hot day or in a particularly hot kitchen. Re-knead the dough making sure the temperature is even throughout so that it rolls and impresses evenly.

Divide your dough into balls a little bigger than your fist, and roll it into a log as shown above. Work with one portion at a time to keep it manageable. Cover the unused portion to keep it from drying out.

Roll it out!

I usually recommend that you oil your regular pin with canola (or similar) oil before rolling, but I am starting to prefer using waxed paper. Start by creating a log of dough that’s about the width that you want, then flatten it out with your hands a bit. Put the waxed paper on top and roll the dough flat to 1/4″ thick. OR lightly oil your pin and roll as follows:

If using an oiled pin instead of waxed paper, place a bench scraper or similar item at the far end of the dough to prevent it from pulling up as you roll.  See pictures below with embossed pin. Use a regular rolling pin (preferably one with thickness spacer rings to make a perfect thickness) 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 is a quick video from a winter recipe using this dough, showing me oiling our Snowflakes and Pine Trees pin, embossing the dough, cutting shapes with cookie cutters, and getting them off to parchment paper.

Once rolled, 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.

!!If you are making sandwich cookies, make sure to roll out some dough without embossing, as bottom cookies don’t need to be fancy. Cut them out in even numbers of sizes and shapes as your patterned cookies so you can match them up. NOTE: Consider going a little thinner than 1/4″. Embossing thins them out a bit and if you do 1/4″ bottom cookies know they will end up slightly thicker than the tops and take a little longer to bake.

Bake at 400°F for 7-10 minutes, checking at 7 minutes and every minute after. It’s hard to see these browning so I suggest doing your first batch with just a few cookies to figure out the time you like. They should be soft, but not mush in the middle. You don’t want them to be overly hard.

Move to a cooling rack after 5 minutes.

Painting

If you’re painting, do it now before sandwiching, I know this looks like it must be complicated, but it’s really quite simple. If you are leaving cookies plain, either move on to sandwiching or you’re done!

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 the look I show 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. We also sell a wonderful decorating brush set.

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!

Start adding vodka to the dust and swirl it around until it forms a paint. Not too thick, not too runny or transparent. You want the color to show up but not be gloppy. So start painting and experiment! It takes a little practice to not get it too heavy or too light. Be patient and take a few minutes to see how runny or thick your “paint” needs to be. If you want a more opaque or pastel color, add a little white dust.

These fireworks patterns are particularly easy to paint. I followed the raised patterns on the cookies themselves and treated them like a coloring book. It’s easy to keep the paint on the patterns because the designs sit high enough above the cookie surface.

I often paint with one color at a time. Do all of the blue fireworks, then all the white, etc. It seems faster to work one color at a time over multiple cookies. If you’d like a video showing how to paint (with brushes or your fingers!), I put one from 2023’s Gingerbread recipe at the bottom of this post. 

Sandwiches!

The sandwich filling is a buttercream so thick you can roll it out and play with it like play dough! Try not to eat it all before the sandwiches are done. 😉

Super Thick Vanilla Buttercream

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

Cream the butter with an electric mixer, then add the heavy cream and vanilla extract and mix thoroughly. Add powdered sugar a little at a time. Do not be alarmed or surprised! This mixture can be very dry and crumbly, or very stiff in the mixer, so finish kneading by hand until a smooth clay-like dough forms. It will be much stiffer than the cookie dough. Keep kneading even if it seems very stiff, until it forms a workable ball as pictured. It will warm and soften as you work it. 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, though still quite stiff, when it’s the right texture.

Roll it out on a clean silicone mat or surface, preferably with a spacing pin. Then cut out the shapes you need to sandwich your cookies. You can use the waxed paper technique I showed with the cookie dough on this buttercream filling.

I always use the same 1/4″ thickness spacing on my sandwich cookie fillings as I do for cookies. They’re crazy thick but oh so delicious. Use the same cookie cutter as you did for your cookies so it all matches up size-wise.

Lift them the same way you would lift cookie dough, getting under one edge first with your spatula/lifter. If needed you can use powdered sugar to keep your lifter non-stick the same way you use flour with cookie dough. As you go to put the filling on the cookie, wet the top and bottom surfaces of the buttercream slightly with a fingertip and it will stick to the cookies. I keep a small cup of warm water there as I work.

That’s it! I hope you enjoy these fabulous sandwich cookies as much as we do!

Whichever holiday or event you’re celebrating, be it the 4th of July, New Year’s Eve, or a big fun even with fireworks, may your celebration be sweet. ☺️

As always, Happy Baking!

~Susie

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

Our website has all of our 300+ disk shapes, cookie press, embossed rolling pins, 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.

Follow us on facebook! 

Here’s the Gingerbread painting video!

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