Cinnamon Christmas Cookies (To Hang From The Tree)

Beautiful Cinnamon Christmas Cookies: These sweet cinnamon flavored cookies use coconut sugar to sweeten them and a little icing sugar (it is Christmas!). I've used some red and green ribbon threaded through the cookies so the kids can hang them on the tree. And they look so pretty with the fairy lights twinkling away behind them.

Cinnamon Christmas Cookies

Christmas can be hard work: All those decorations to hang and presents to wrap, it's no wonder the kids need a little snack to keep their energy levels up!

Although we eat cinnamon all year round and is our all time favorite spice, for some reason, these cinnamon cookies are reserved for Christmas only. The kids (used to!) get excited about making them, right down to the treading of the ribbon. They'd all be allowed an icing bag of their own and they'd sit with a batch of cookies and ice away to their hearts content. So sweet.

I still make these every year and it would feel like something was missing without them. They're soft cookies, they keep their shape well and are perfectly able to be used as Christmas decorations, but they're not rock hard.

Ingredients for Cinnamon Cookies

These are a very simple, easy cookie to make. It's more of a classic shortbread type recipe that's been adapted to make cinnamon cookies. There's no fancy ingredients involved here:

1. Flour

I've used buckwheat for these cookies. You can use Einkorn as well. I don't like to use whole grain for these as it makes them too dense and heavy, and buckwheat or einkorn work really well. The flours are all purpose, I don't use self raising or add any baking powder.

2. Coconut Sugar

Coconut sugar is something I use now and again in baking, and Christmas is one occasion I use it more than ever. Sugar's sugar, so we try and restrict most sugars but we didn't give up all sugars when we started Clean Eating and so now I use mostly maple syrup, honey, or coconut sugar. I'll use raw brown sugar if I can find it, but it can be expensive here and so I tend to use coconut sugar.

3. Butter

Real butter, always. I've used unsalted in this recipe, but if you only have salted butter that's fine. The butter needs to be super cold when you make these, and cut up into really small cubes. You need to rub the mix between your fingers and create 'breadcrumbs' and so using warm butter won't work!

4. Cinnamon

Big cinnamon fans here. I add 2 teaspoons of cinnamon here as we all love the stuff. If your's aren't as into it as we are, you can add one teaspoon and start there. 2 teaspoons gives you a good strong cinnamon flavor and gives the cookies a lovely dark color. Go with what works best for your kids here, the basic cookie recipe delicious on it's own anyway so add that you feel is going to work.

Variations

You could replace the cinnamon with 5 spice, or nutmeg if you like it, or you could even add a teaspoon of vanilla bean paste for vanilla cookies. Any extract (1tsp) would also be good in these cookies: Orange, Almond etc...

Decorations To Go On The Christmas Tree

Once these are baked and cool we hang them from the tree. I like to use ribbon in Christmassy colors, and thread the ribbon through the hole in the cookies. I use a straw to make a hole in the dough, I'm not sure if there's a tool that does this for you but if there is, I don't have it! A straw does the job just fine, and you need to do this after the dough is pressed and before it goes in the oven. Just press the straw in where you want the hole to be and then turn it gently and the hole will be nicely carved out.

Icing for Cinnamon Cookies

I've used a little bit of very non-Clean icing sugar for these cookies. I use some baking parchment to make a piping bag and used that to get a very thin line. As you can probably see, piping icing is not my forte!

More Clean Eating Cookies

• Old fashioned Date cookies
• Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies
• Homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies
• Coconut oat cookies
• Healthy biscuits for kids
• Ginger Ninja biscuits

Cinnamon Christmas Cookies Recipe