These pretty (and delicious!) shortbread style Cherry Pie cookies are perfect for holiday cookie exchanges or special occasions! Your guests will never guess how easy they are to make!

With the holidays right around the corner, it’s nice to have a few easy recipes tucked away for when you’re short on time. This Cherry Pie cookies recipe that I am sharing with you today is about as easy a recipe as you will find. I love how festive looking they are!

The recipe itself comes from my friends Lori and Heather over at Who Needs a Cape. Lori and Heather are proof that online friendships can turn into real ones. They met online during their pregnancies and became good friends, started a blog and they’ve been working together for years, in spite of living in different states! We all participate in a Freaky Friday recipe swap where each blogger participating makes a recipe from the blog assigned to us, and we keep it a secret until our posts go live. Usually we can choose any recipe from the blog assigned to us, but at the holidays we do a virtual holiday cookie exchange. When I was checking out Who Needs a Cape’s cookie recipes, I kept coming back to their Cherry Pie Thumbprint Cookies.

I’m one of those people who tends to stick to the tried and true cookie recipes around the holidays. Basically, that means I make kiss cookies every year. It’s nice to change it up once in a while though. The key here for me is easy recipes that are hard to mess up. Baking has always been more of a challenge for me, because measurements have to be precise, and there’s not as much room for error. I still chuckle thinking back to my cookie exchange disaster years ago. I forgot the eggs in one batch of cookies, the sugar in another. By the time I realized my mistake, the cookies were in the oven and I had to start all over. I tend to be going a million miles a minute around the holidays, so I’m going to blame it on distraction. It’s funny thinking about it now, but at the time, I was at wit’s end, ready to call the hostess of the cookie exchange to tell her I wasn’t coming. My husband took pity on me and made my cookies for me so I could still go.

Ever since then, I have tried to stick to easy cookie recipes around the holidays, and if you read my blog, you’ll know that I prefer to keep my recipes as simple as possible in general. Lori and Heather are like-minded in that as well, so if you’re looking for meals you can get on the table fast, you should definitely check out Who Needs a Cape!

But today is all about cookies, so if you’re looking for easy cookie recipes for the holidays, I have a few suggestions for you from Who Needs a Cape’s cookie collection:

And here’s a couple from my collection as well:

Lemon Blueberry Bars (one of my all time favorites!)
Macadamia Nut Butter Cookies (from last year’s Freaky Friday cookie exchange!)

Ready to start baking?

CHERRY PIE COOKIES

I picked this Cherry Pie Cookies recipe because it looked so festive, but they’re quite delicious as well. Cherry Pie Cookies are a shortbread style cookie with a little bit of cherry pie filling tucked into a thumbprint and drizzled with white chocolate. They’re sure to be a hit for Christmas, Valentine’s Day or any special occasion!

And you are going to LOVE how easy they are to make!

Start by preheating the oven to 325 degrees.

Then, with a stand mixer, beat together margarine and butter until fluffy…about 2 minutes or so. Add the vanilla and beat for another half a minute. Add in the flour and confectioners sugar, and beat on medium until you start to see a dough begin to form. Stop your mixer, and finish creating a ball of dough using your hands.

Roll dough into 1.5 – 2 inch balls and place them on baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Make a thumbprint in the middle of each ball and spoon cherries from the cherry pie filling into each thumbprint.

Bake 12-15 minutes. Cool for a few minutes on the baking sheet, then transfer the cookies to a wire rack to cool completely.

Once cookies have cooled, melt white chocolate chips in microwave. Start with 30 – 45 seconds, stir, then continue melting the chocolate with 15 second increments in the microwave, stirring in between, until chocolate is fully melted. You can make an easy pastry bag for drizzling the chocolate. Spoon the melted chocolate into a xiploc plastic bag, seal it, and then cut a small hole in the corner to drizzle the white chocolate over the cookies. It works like a charm!

Allow chocolate to set before serving. Don’t they look delicious?!

Cherry Pie Cookies

Ingredients

1/2 cup margarine, softened
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups flour
3/4 cup confectioners sugar
1 21 oz can cherry pie filling
1/2 cup white chocolate chips

Instructions

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

With stand mixer, beat together margarine and butter until fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add vanilla and beat for another half a minute.

Add in flour and confectioners sugar and beat on medium speed until a dough begins to form. Finish creating a ball of dough using your hands.

Roll dough into 1.5 - 2 inch balls and place on baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Make a thumbprint in the middle of each ball.

Place cherries into each thumbprint.

Bake 12-15 minutes. Cool for a few minutes on the baking sheet, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

Once cookies have cooled, melt white chocolate chips in microwave. Start with 30 seconds, stir, then continue with 15 second increments in the microwave until chocolate is fully melted. Spoon chocolate into a plastic bag, seal, then cut a small hole in the corner. Drizzle white chocolate over the cookies. Allow chocolate to set before serving.