Wine Cookies

Made with white wine and a few other simple ingredients these lightly sweetened and crunchy wine cookies are what your glass of afternoon wine has been missing. 

Wine Cookies

As if there weren’t enough reasons to love the Italian way of life, now I’ve been introduced (via my friend, Rosemary’s, new cookbook) to wine cookies and my appreciation for all things Italian has gone up yet another notch. Made with white wine and a few other simple ingredients these lightly sweetened and crunchy cookies are what your glass of afternoon wine has been missing.

If you’ve been following along the last several years you might have seen some mentions about Rosemary pop up on this here blog. Her blog, An Italian in My Kitchen, never ceases to be a source of inspiration for me. My favorites include her lemon bread, pizza dough, and chocolate pudding cake but mostly it’s our friendship – one that spans across the internet – that I value the most. We’ve never met in person (she lives just outside Rome, Italy and I’m all the way in the US), but for the last four-ish years our friendship has grown through a modern-day penpal arrangement – through emails, direct messages, and the occasional coffee chat over Skype.

And so, just over a year ago, I was thrilled when Rosemary signed with the same publisher I did and got to work on her own book. We had the unique opportunity to work on our books at the same time and she was such a source of support for me through the process. Writing – book writing, especially – is often a lonely endeavor so to have a friend to lean on through the process was priceless.

Her book, Authentic Italian Desserts – 75 Traditional Favorites Made Easy – is filled with all of her favorite Italian desserts, many of which were handed down to her from her Italian mother-in-law. Her photos are gorgeous and the recipes are equally as beautiful, but easy to execute, which I appreciate. Baking does not come easy for me mostly because I have little patience for things like waiting for bread to rise, or butter to soften, or dough to be kneaded to just the right texture, but Rosemary’s recipes always seem to come together effortlessly. She does a great job making sure we all feel successful in the kitchen.

My copy is already smudged with flour and when I tried the wine cookies I knew this was the recipe to share with all of you. It’s a cookie for grown-ups, a lightly sweet treat to serve alongside the other snacky-treats at happy hour and they couldn’t be easier to make.

Some Ingredients You’ll Need

• The cookies’ star ingredient is white wine. Rosemary doesn’t specify, so choose one that you like to drink. I used some Moscato, an Italian sweet wine, that was leftover from Thanksgiving. The wine flavors the cookies and gives them a little bit of an acidic punch.
• You only need one bowl to make the dough which is just a combo of the wine, flour, sugar, vegetable oil, and baking powder. Mix it all together with a fork until the dough comes together.
• The dough is quite sticky so you may need extra flour when you turn it out onto the board. Knead it a few times until the dough is soft and no longer sticky.
• I divided the dough into twenty parts and rolled each into, as Rosemary describes, chubby ropes before bringing the ends together to create a circle. Each cookie gets a coating of sugar before they go into the oven.
• I started checking on my wine cookies around the 20-minute mark and pulled them out once they were lightly golden.

Be sure to check out Rosemary’s book (available wherever books are sold) and happy cooking-making!

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More Cookie Recipes

• Snickerdoodles
• Molasses Cookies
• Gingersnaps
• Cantucci (Italian Almond Cookies)

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The nutrition information in this recipe is an estimate only and was calculated using Nutrifox, an online nutrition calculator.