Eleanor Rycraft's

Almond Butter Cookies

Eleanor Rycraft’s Almond butter Cookie Recipe is our customers’ all-time

favorite which they’ve been using for over 50 years with great results!

Ingredients

1 or more Rycraft cookie stamps (shown above #029 – Angel Praying)

1 cup butter or margarine

1/2 cup sugar

1 tsp almond extract

2 cups flour

1/4 tsp salt

Method

Cream butter and sugar. Add extract. Add salt and flour and mix well. Chill dough.

Form 1″ balls. Stamp immediately with cookie stamp. Bake at 350ºF for 12-15 minutes.

Your Comments on This Recipe

12/4/12 Form: Comment on a Recipe

I used margarine instead of butter. My summary of this recipe: Excellent.
These cookies are delicious! I’m 23 years old and have just only really started baking in the past year or so, and I was at my parents’ house one day and my mother and I started going through her cookie cutters. I found a handful of cookie stamps she got when I was 15 or so, which brought back tons of Christmas nostalgia of when we would bake together for the holidays.

The only thing is that the impressions didn’t stay very clear after baking. After some research in the “Baking Tips” section of the site, I found out that it was because I used margarine and all=purpose flour. Will be making these again, except with butter and possibly bread flour! Thanks for the recipe!

Katie B
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Canada

1/9/14 Form: Cookie Photo Submission

[This was the] first time [I used this recipe]! I bake cookies for our monthly family gatherings and wanted to add something new to the usual cookies that I make.

No changes were made to the ingredient amounts listed in the recipe. The only thing added to the procedure was the chilling of the dough before rolling into balls to be stamped. To chill the dough, flatten it into a disk about 1/2 inch thick, wrap it with cling film, and let it chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes. After rolling and stamping, chill the stamped dough again for 15 minutes in the refrigerator before baking as directed. The cookies tasted very good and I did not experience the dreaded “melting away” of the stamped design.

The backs of half the batch were coated with melted semisweet chocolate.
Thank you for making such a quality product! The stamps are quite a lot of fun to use.

Mary C
Rancho Cucamonga, California

#249 – Hummingbird

4/23/12 Swedish Stamped Cookies from In A Nutshell blog

A brief history:

Around 150 years ago or so, it was common of the people of Sweden to hand make furniture and useful tools to help them get through the long dark days of winter. Among the tools they made were cookie stamps. These stamps had designs inspired by daily life, nature, and symmetry, and were traditionally made from wood. They were so popular, practically every family had a set of stamps. In some cases, history has been well preserved and people are still using the stamps from generations ago today.

Cookie stamps were given away as gifts during the holidays. Christmas time was, and still is a traditional occasion on which to make stamped cookies. During the Christmas season, my family makes cookies similar to these every year in the German tradition. I plan on making some later this year, and will share my results with you then.

Since the recipe I used to make these stamped cookies requires that the dough be rolled into sugar, I thought it might be fun to make the sugar different colors. We went with traditional spring colors here.

Little hands will have fun rolling the dough around in the sugar. The dough is soft enough to where it can easily be stamped by little ones as well. Although, it may take a gentile grown up hand to peel the dough from the stamp.

There are several different companies that sell cookie stamps these days. I chose to go with Rycraft. I really liked their traditional Scandinavian designs. They have a fairly quick turnaround time on online orders too.

In this photo, you can see that the stamp in back is darker (from lots of use) and has less depth than the stamp in front. The one in back is a vintage stamp, the one in front is new. I prefer the new stamps because with them, the prints have more definition after the cookies have been baked.

My additions to Eleanor’s recipe:
Sugar for rolling: we used 3 – 4 drops of food coloring in 1/4 c. sugar

Cream butter and sugar. Add extract. Add salt and flour and mix well. Divide dough into two equal parts, cover and refrigerate for 1/2 hour. Use a tablespoon of dough to form a ball, roll in sugar coating evenly. Immediately stamp the cookie with the cookie stamp. Bake at 325ºF for 12 – 15 minutes.

L to R: #061 – Fuchsia Heart,

#215 – Love Birds, #361 – Swedish Hearts

1/15/11 Form submitted: Submit Your Cookie Photo

I inherited this recipe from my mother and her Rycraft Recipe Booklet and have been making these since Christmas 2005.

Growing up, my mother made these Almond Butter Cookies from the recipe in her Rycraft Recipe Booklet. She would tint the dough a soft green and then stamp them with her Rycraft Angel stamp (purchased in the late ’70’s). After I was married, I made these cookies a few times, using a fork to flatten them, but somehow they just didn’t taste the same without the Angel stamp on them! I was delighted to recently find the Rycraft website and ordered the Praying Angel stamp. The day my stamp arrived, I had a batch of Almond Butter Cookie dough already chilling in the fridge. I immediately baked them up using my new stamp. They turned out beautifully, tasted delicious, and the sight of them filled me with nostalgia and brought back many precious memories of childhood Christmases past.

The Almond Butter Cookie recipe is a tried-and-true recipe, used in my family for the past 30 years. There are two variations we make to this recipe:

– adding approximately 4 drops of green food coloring to softly tint the dough, feeling the pale green cookies look more festive, and

– rolling the balls of dough in granulated white sugar before stamping and baking them.

No additional decoration beyond the Rycraft Angel cookie stamp was used.

Sarah D
Prescott Valley, AZ

#029 – Angel Praying

12/31/10 Form submitted

I roll the balls of dough in Turbinado* sugar before stamping. It makes the release very easy and adds a great crunch!

Excellent. I’ve been making the almond butter cookies for years now for friends, family and co-workers. These little devils sneak up on people because when they are included among other types of cookies as a gift they look very unassuming. However, these are the cookies that everyone comes back raving about! They are so simple, so straight forward, and sooooo addictive.

I don’t ever give cookies (and I’ve given away hundreds of dozens some holiday seasons) without including some of these, and now I’m famous for almond butter cookies!

Thank you so much for sharing this recipe online. We’ve moved numerous times and at some point I lost my booklet. I would be devastated if I couldn’t bake my favorite cookie ever again!

*Turbinado sugar is a delicious alternative to table sugar. Unlike typical granulated sugar, Turbinado sugar crystals are much larger, and are made at an earlier period in the sugar cane processing method. It retains some of the flavor of molasses, a natural byproduct of the sugar process, which makes it a desirable addition to tea or coffee.

The first pressing of the sugar cane yields Turbinado sugar. It looks notably different from granulated sugar because it has much larger crystals and is golden to brown in color. It also is considered by some to be “healthier” since it receives less processing than does white sugar.

D S
Austin, TX

12/31/10 Form submitted

No changes. It’s perfect the way it is. Excellent. I’ve been using this recipe for over 20 years, and the cookies still get rave reviews wherever I take them. They’re a simple and delicious cookie.

Kelly M
Des Moines, Iowa