Pinwheel Cookies-Celebrating Virginia

With the excitement of this year’s NCAA basketball tournament, I wanted to make a special cookie celebrating UVA’s advancement into the Final Four. Pinwheel cookies emerged as a fun way to share with my daughter and her classmates.

After the suffering defeat in last year’s tournament, it sure was exciting to see them prevail in each round of this years tourney. What a difference a year makes!

Why my excitement over college basketball…. I’m glad you asked, it just so happens, my sweet and beautiful daughter is current Wahoo. She is in her third year at UVA studying IT and Marketing. So telling you the electric excitement that ran through the campus and Charlottesville probably came as no surprise!

I decided to make a cookie to celebrate their road to the Final Four and their exciting journey to the championship game.

The Recipe

The recipe consist of my favorite sugar cookie recipe, it’s full proof and I love it so much. It has been used on many occasions. Super easy to work with too!

Its then rolled and sliced into the coolest pinwheels showcasing the school colors of orange and blue. These are your home made version of a slice and bake cookie. Just like the Pillsbury ones in the grocery stores.

Substitute any two of your favorite colors and watch how your friends and family will devour them!

Assembling Pinwheel Cookie Dough

After making the dough, l divide the dough in half and color each section into the classic Cavalier colors of orange and blue.

For each colored dough, I further divide that into two pieces. Now you have two pieces of dough that are blue and orange, for a total of four pieces. Also, one way to be super accurate is to weight each piece of dough on a kitchen scale.

On a piece of parchment paper, I place one of the blue pieces of dough on the paper and press or roll with a rolling pin into about a 6×2 rectangle. You can also use your hands to shape the dough into the rectangle.

I repeat this process next with the orange dough, placing it directly on top of the blue dough and press into the 6×2 rectangle. This step is repeated with the remaining blue and orange dough.

When complete, you will have four layers of cookie dough shaped into a rectangle.

Rolling the Dough

Next, starting from the longer horizontal end of the dough, I gently use the parchment paper as a friend to help release and roll the dough into a log. The parchment allows the dough not to stick and aides in helping roll the dough without tearing it. Try to keep the dough relatively tight so no holes develop when you slice it.

The dough is then wrapped and placed in the refrigerator an hour or two to firm up.

Once removed, I gently use some egg wash and brush the dough with this, then sprinkle with orange sanding sugar to cover all the dough. The more the merrier, literally!

On a cutting board, I slice the dough, just like cinnamon rolls to form cookies and these are placed on a parchment lined cookie sheet. They look so cool don’t they?

I bake these off and they are ready to celebrate with!

I sent these back with my daughter to eat while watching the big game. They were a huge hit with her friends! Yay!

I love the way the sanding sugar looks on the outside of these pinwheel cookies. It really gives it a classy look.

And…. just maybe they were the luck UVA needed to win that championship!!!! Go WAHOOS! Congratulations National Champions!

Try using this technique with two of your favorite team colors for your own version of pinwheel cookies!

You could also use colors of the holidays and seasons to make a great cookie too. Using different sanding sugars on the outside to make it really shine.

TIP

Regardless of the colors you pick, always start with the darkest color first when you are making your layers of cookie dough.

Other cookie ideas:

• Graduation Cookies
• Ice Cream Cone Cookies
• Autumn Leaves
• Valentines Hearts
• Cactus Cookies
• Baseballs
• Patriotic