overhead photo of plate with homemade chocolate sugar cookies made to look like pinecones using slivered almonds on a plate and served with coffee and on a table decorated with real pinecones and evergreen branches

Family Fun

Pinecone Sugar Cookie Recipe

Pinecone season runs from September through December, or mainly in the autumn. That’s pinecones start falling to the ground from trees. It’s also baking season for us. As such, that’s how the Pinecone Cookie was born!

Baking supplies you’ll need to make Pinecone Cookies:

sugar cookie dough (recipe below)
2-3 tbs unsweetened cocoa powder
cookie cutters in oval shapes
almond slivers

It turns out it’s pretty easy to make a chocolate-flavored “pinecone cookie.” All you need to do is add cocoa powder to your usual sugar cookie recipe. We used this sugar cookie recipe at All Recipes because we know it’s easy to roll out and cut into shapes but probably any sugar cookie dough (even store-bought) would work. How much unsweetened cocoa was the next step. We eye-balled it and lopped in THREE big and healthy scoops. It wasn’t bad.

Once the dough was thoroughly mixed we plopped it onto a sheet of parchment paper and rolled it to ¼ inches thick. Then we covered it with another piece of parchment paper and popped it into the refrigerator to chill for a few minutes. It’s always better to work with sugar cookie dough when it’s cold.

Once it was chilled we took off the top layer of parchment paper and cut cookie shapes. We used an easter-egg, a maple leaf, and a holly leaf shape and they all worked equally well.

It turns out the shape of a pinecone can be pretty much anything! It’s the almond slivers you add to them that really make them look like pinecones.

Once all the shapes were cut out, we started the laborious process of sticking the slivered almonds one by one into the chocolate cookies. Of course, you could just mound the almonds on top and tell everyone they are pinecone cookies. That works just as well but if you want them to really *look* like pinecones it’s best to start at the top and stick the slivered almonds into the cookie so that the almonds are all pointing the same direction, working your way down to the bottom with some slivers slightly hanging off the edges for an authentic pinecone look.

I mean, come on. It’s worth it, right? Don’t they look cute? I was worried that the thin slivers of almonds might burn or toast but they don’t. They hold up to the oven heat just fine and are nice and crispy when the cookie bakes. After nine or so minutes in the oven (following the sugar cookie recipe above) at 375 degrees F, we took them out and they looked perfect!