Four Leaf Clover Sugar Cookies

These four leaf clover sugar cookies start with a high altitude tested, no spread recipe for soft vanilla cutout cookies, frosted with fluffy green and white vanilla buttercream for St. Patrick’s Day. Today’s post includes a video tutorial for decorating these Irish holiday cookies!

You might also love these recipes for shamrock shake cupcakes, chocolate guinness cake, and Irish soda bread.

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Why You’ll Love This Recipe

No Spread Recipe. The vanilla sugar cookies hold their shape perfectly when they bake, with no spreading.

Easy to Decorate. With just a few piping tips and easy techniques, you’ll have so much fun decorating these sugar cookies for St. Patrick’s Day.

High Altitude Tested. I develop all the recipes on my site for Denver’s altitude of 5,280 feet. If you’re at a lower or higher elevation, please see my FAQs for guidance on adjusting recipes for your altitude.

See the recipe card at the end of the post for the full ingredients list and instructions.

Ingredients and Equipment

• Vanilla Cutout Cookies. This is the perfect base cutout cookie recipe for decorating with royal icing or buttercream. The cookies hold their shape beautifully, and they’re also not too sweet on their own, so the sweetness of the frosted cookies isn’t overwhelming. You can also flavor the cookies with citrus zest or any flavor of extract you like. See this post for my video on making and rolling out the cookie dough.
• Vanilla American Buttercream. When decorating sugar cookies with buttercream, you need a frosting that holds its shape when piped. See this post for all my tips on perfect buttercream.
• Gel Food Coloring. I used forest green, leaf green, turquoise, and warm brown.
• Electric Green Sparkling Sugar and Gold Sugar Pearls.
• Cookie Cutters. I used this set of four leaf clover cookie cutters, which I bought just a couple months ago, but which no longer seem to be available. A more common shape, though, which is widely available, is the shamrock, which is a three-leaf clover shape that’s symbolic in Ireland.
• 12-Inch Disposable Piping Bags + Couplers.
• Piping Tips. 1M, 18, 32, 68

Be sure to read all of my BAKING FAQs where I discuss ingredients, substitutions and common baking questions, so that you can be successful in your own baking!

Instructions

Cookies

• Make the vanilla cookie dough and bake the cookies as instructed, using any size/shape of four leaf clover cookie cutters or shamrock (three leaf clover) cookie cutters you like.
• Handle the baked cookies gently; let cool completely before decorating.

Buttercream

• Make 3x the recipe for Vanilla American Buttercream.
• Remove 1/4 of the buttercream to keep it white.
• Use gel food coloring to color the remaining buttercream green. I used 10 drops of “forest green”, 20 drops of “turquoise”, 2 drops of “leaf green”, and 4 drops of “warm brown”.

Decorating

• To decorate my cookies, I used piping tips 1M, 18, 32, and 68. When filling the piping bag, I alternated the green buttercream with smaller amounts of white buttercream, to add more variegation in color. See the video in the recipe card for a decorating tutorial!
• After piping on the buttercream, I finished decorating the cookies with a little electric green sparkling sugar and a few gold sugar pearls.

Be sure to read all of my BAKING FAQs where I discuss ingredients, substitutions and common baking questions, so that you can be successful in your own baking!

Frequently Asked Questions

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