Venice High School Cherry Butter Cookies

I've made these cookies 4 or 5 times now and they always turn out great, full of cherry buttery goodness! The first couple times I followed the recipe exactly and took them to a couple Christmas parties. Everybody loved them. I like to experiment so the next time I tried adding 2t of the juice from the cherries to the dough. I substituted almond extract for the vanilla and used almonds instead of walnuts. I liked them even better that way! For my most recent batch, I added red food coloring and rolled the balls in sugar before flattening. The pink color looks so pretty on the cookie tray. Watch carefully during baking. My first batch got way too brown. They only needed 11 minutes in my oven.

These are delicious! I made them smaller than ping pong ball size and left out the Walnuts on half the dough. The other half, I put walnuts on top.

This dough is nice to work with. I needed to leave out nuts because of allergy reasons. The kids liked them and I’ll be using them for a Christmas bake sale.

I added food colouring and white chocolate chips like a couple of the reviewers did, like the visual effect of that. I used half a cup of milk to knead the dough, which increased the cooking time a bit but made them very soft and chewy.

Great cookies! tasty and light. I made these for a friend who is lactose intolerant. He loved it.