Powder-kissed and pretty, these Swedish Rye cookies are perfect for holiday cookie enthusiasts (or, anyone really!) after a not-too-sweet, shortbread-style butter cookie. I make them with a blend of rye and whole wheat pastry flours, and also break with tradition when it comes adding a secret ingredient. Because I love the taste of toasted rye bread slathered with cream cheese, I use a butter/cream cheese combination for the dough – instead of a butter-only dough.

These cookies can be baked into all sorts of shapes although I do like to roll & stamp them. The dough is generally easy to work with and I’ve found that cutters from super small up to medium-large in size work really well. 

Other Ideas

I suspect you could experiment with other flours in place of the rye and expect good results – barley or oat flours might work well. I was also thinking about doing a savory version of this cookie with herbs and grated cheese in place of most/all of the sugar – turning it into a buttery rye cream-cheese herb cracker…

Variations

A number of you have commented over the years with successful variations on this recipe. I wanted to highlight a couple here with the hope that it might be helpful!

• Can these be adapted to be vegan? Truman notes, “I replaced the butter and cream cheese with earth balance vegan buttery stick and tofutti better than cream cheese. This made it a bit more heart healthy, and vegan as well.” And along those lines, Keri adds, “I made the vegan version of these as well! They are delicious – I added some grated orange zest and ground anise seed, and they remind me of a less-crispy version of my grandma’s pepperkaker.”
• KanelBulle spiced things up, “I combined this with the gingerbread idea by adding spices – ginger, cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon – and using a dark sugar that is called “molasses sugar”. It came out brilliantly (even if I don’t have the cutters to make those rings).”

I like to make these cookies not just around the holidays, but throughout the rest of the year as well tbh. If you’re here and on the lookout for holiday/ Christmas cookie recipes, I’ve compiled a bunch of favorites from past holidays into one place. Or, here if you’re simply looking for more cookie recipe inspiration. I particularly love these chocolate puddle cookies, this shortbread, these special snickerdoodles, this millionaire’s shortbread, and these triple ginger cookies.