How to Make Rainbow Lollipop Cookies

Wacky Wednesday at school is wackily harder than you might think to come up with for treats for the kids.

I mean, really. Wacky food? I’m all tapped out.

So when I saw these Rainbow lollipop cookies, I knew they were perfect. All the fun of a lollipop with none of the sticky mess!

And I wrongly assumed perfectly difficult as well. Thankfully, rainbow lollipop cookies are easy (admittedly more time-consuming than regular cookies) and a huge hit with the preschool set.

And adults.

Who wouldn’t love a giant “lollipop” sugar cookie in vibrant colors like this?

Here’s what you need to make rainbow lollipop cookies:

• ¾ cup butter, softened
• 8 ounces cream cheese
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 4 colors of paste or gel food coloring
• lollipop sticks

Here’s what we did to make rainbow lollipop cookies:

1. In your mixing bowl, cream the cream cheese and sugar until fluffy.
2. Add egg and vanilla and beat until smooth
3. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt. I stir with a whisk.
4. Add dry ingredients to the sugar/cream cheese goodness. Combine until a soft dough forms.
5. Divide the dough into fourths and tint each with a different color. The Princess Cupcake chose orange, pink, purple and green for ours. We used both the Wilton gel colors and Duff’s gel colors.
6. Wrap your colored dough in plastic wrap and chill for 2 hours. We let ours chill overnight.
7. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
8. Take ½ of each color and put it on a plate. Pinch off enough of each color to make a ¾ inch ball. Ours made 11 clumps. I divided it out before rolling because I wanted to make sure I had the same number of clumps of colored dough for each separate color.

1. After you have approximately a dozen clumps of each color on the plate, roll each clump into a ball.

1. For each lollipop cookie, take one clump of each of your 4 colors and smush them together gently into a ball. Do not do a lot of squishing here or you will not get good stripes.

 

1. Now roll the ball out like a snake to about 12 inches long.
2. Starting at one end, coil the snake around like a lollipop. Start with the middle of the lollipop cookie and wrap the dough snake around and around. Your cookies will be about 2 ¾ to 3 inches wide.
3. Place the cookies on a lightly greased cookie sheet with a few inches in between each cookie. I used parchment paper and non-stick aluminum foil (because I ran out of parchment).
4. Gently push the lollipop stick into the bottom of the dough.

1. Bake for 8 – 12 minutes. Check them after 8. If they are lightly browned, take them out. Our baked for the full 12 minutes.
2. Allow to cool before removing them from the cookie sheet. This recipe made 22 for us.

 

1. I gave them about 10 minutes and then moved them to a cooling rack. When they were completely cool, I put treat bags over them.

They’d be even cuter if you put some ribbon and a cute tag on them.

I’d be even cuter if I got more sleep. And that’s what I did instead of making a cute tag that preschoolers can’t read.

This is a great kitchen project for little ones. They love mixing, coloring, rolling… oh yeah, and licking the beaters.