Champagne Stars

Champagne Cookies

Popping in really quickly with a fun New Year’s Eve recipe for you (and my last new recipe of 2020): Champagne Star Cookies! While you won’t catch a buzz off of these sweet treats, they’re a lot of fun to make and taste distinctly of your favorite champagne. These would also be great as a bridal shower dessert, wedding party treat, or really any cause for celebration. They have sturdy, buttery, cookie bases that are slightly crisp on the outside but softer in the center. The top is iced with a sweet, champagne-flavored icing that dries hard and looks gorgeous adorned with sprinkles.

What You Need to Make Champagne Star Cookies

Let’s talk about just a few of the ingredients above before we get started…

Champagne. This goes in the icing only. We reduce this for a strong, distinct flavor (more on this below). Choose a champagne that you enjoy drinking, sparkling wine would also work!Butter. Use unsalted butter and then we’ll add a bit of salt. This should be softened, but not so soft that the exterior is greasy or oily. We’re also melting an additional two tablespoons of butter and mixing that into the icing, which adds another subtle dimension to the frosting (similar to my petit four icing, only it dries harder and more shiny!).Egg yolk. We are using the yolk only, (save the white to go towards meringues!). This enriches the dough and helps to make for a tender cookie, whereas the white would actually make the final cookie a bit more crumbly and dry and would make the cookies more prone to spreading in the oven.Flour. Use all-purpose flour.

This is just an overview of the ingredients I used and why. For the full recipe please scroll down to the bottom of the post!

Champagne Icing

What makes these cookies “Champagne cookies” is their distinctly champagne-flavored icing. In order to achieve this taste, we must start by reducing our champagne (which simply means we’re cooking out most of the water). I always start by preparing this first, even though we won’t actually need it until the cookies are baked and it’s time to make our icing. You want to give this plenty of time to completely cool, so best to do it right away! Reducing the champagne is a simple step, but it’s critical for an obvious champagne flavor. Start with 1 ½ cups of champagne or sparkling wine and cook it on the stovetop until you’re left with less than just ⅓ cup. Champagne contains a lot of water, so when we heat it on the stovetop, much of that water cooks out (as does the alcohol!), leaving behind a potent reduction with a powerful champagne flavor. This packs a much more flavorful punch than if we were to use straight champagne. In fact, if we didn’t reduce it, the flavor would be quite watered down and you might not even be able to even identify the flavor when you tasted the cookies.

The cookie dough base is a basic one (I’ve used it for my heart cookies and it’s similar to my popular butter cookies). I don’t actually use any champagne in the dough, instead it’s vanilla flavored, which complements the champagne surprisingly well. After a lot of testing, I wasn’t impressed with the minimal flavor imparted by actually including champagne in the dough. It was difficult to pick up the flavor without compromising the texture of the final cookie (even a small amount made the cookies dry and they lost their shape in their oven). Ultimately I found it was best to use a standard, buttery sugar-cookie-esque dough and limit the champagne flavor to the icing. Thanks to our icing, you won’t miss the flavor in the dough and instead the cookie and icing complement each other nicely instead of yielding an overbearing, one-dimensional flavor. Tip: If your dough seems a bit too sticky, just dust your counter and the surface of the dough generously with flour as needed until it’s easy to manage. Lift the dough several times with a spatula as you’re rolling it out and dust beneath it as needed to keep the dough from sticking.