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Delicious easy to bake festive spiced cookies stuffed with a salted caramel, and dusted with icing sugar perfect for Christmas

Festive Biscuits

Baking biscuits during the Christmas season is a simple way to bring festive flavour into the kitchen. Classic gingerbread biscuits remain a favourite thanks to their warm spices and easy decorating options. Their crisp edges and soft centres make them a reliable Christmas biscuit for gifting, sharing, or filling up a festive biscuit tin

My gingerbread cheesecake cookies have also become a popular Christmas bake, combining traditional gingerbread spices with a creamy caramel cheesecake centre. These biscuits offer a richer, more indulgent option while still keeping those familiar festive flavours. They’re ideal for anyone looking to add a modern twist to their Christmas biscuit selection.

For something colourful and fun, my Christmas sprinkle cookies are a go-to. They’re quick to make, perfect for batch baking, and bring instant festive cheer to any biscuit plate. Whether you choose gingerbread biscuits, gingerbread cheesecake cookies, or bright sprinkle cookies, these bakes are some of the easiest ways to make Christmas biscuit traditions feel fresh and festive. However, there is always room for another festive biscuit in my books…

The biscuit dough

The biscuit dough for these cookies is quite simple, and basically my homemade jammie dodger recipe, with a Christmas twist. I love a basic cookie dough, and the Jammie dodger dough is a sweetened enriched dough, and extremely easy to make and bake with.

Butter – it’s important when baking a biscuit such as this, that you don’t want to spread or mis-shape, to use block unsalted butter and not a baking spread or margarine.
Sugar – you use icing sugar (or confectioners sugar as it’s also known) to add the sweetness to this dough
Vanilla – a splash of vanilla is always good in my books
Egg – you want this dough to be nice and rich, and to control the amount of liquid, two egg yolks is best.
Flour – plain flour is important as you do not want any added raising agent in the dough
Spices – I use a mix of ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg to create a slightly spiced dough. If you like things full of flavour, I would add more, or also add in 1-2tsp mixed spice.

Baking the biscuits

When it comes to making and baking these biscuits, you want to start by beating together the butter (which is best at room temperature at this point) and the icing sugar until combined fully. I then add in the flour, vanilla, spices and egg yolks and mix again until the dough is combined.

You don’t want to over-mix the dough, just beat it enough until it starts to come together, and then you want to knead it and bring it together with your hands either in the bowl, or on a work surface. Wrap the dough in clingfilm, and then chill for at least an hour to make sure the dough has chilled properly and won’t be too warm to shape.

Rolling the dough out on a floured surface to about 1/2cm thick, you can then cut out whatever shapes you want. I used an 8cm snowflake cutter for the main biscuit shape, and made sure to re-roll and shape all of the dough as I cut out the pieces to get as many biscuits out as possible. I used a smaller cutter to take out the middle of half of the biscuits.

Add the shaped biscuits to lined trays, and bake in batches in the preheated oven. If you only have a smaller oven, you may want to chill the other biscuits in the fridge, whilst you bake in batches, to prevent the other biscuits from becoming too warm in the kitchen whilst waiting.

Filling the biscuits

Once the biscuits have baked, I leave them to cool fully on the trays as they can be softer and more delicate when they are fresh out of the oven. This is normal, so nothing to worry about. If you need the trays you can chill them on a wire rack, you just need to carefully move them across.

I lay the biscuits without the holes on a tray, and then dollop a spoonful of my homemade caramel sauce on top and spread slightly to the edges of the biscuits. You can then add the biscuit with the centre cut out on top of this, and carefully sandwich the cookies together. I finish the cookies off with a dusting of icing sugar as I like the extra sweetness, and I think it makes them look a little snowy.

Flavour swaps

When it comes to anything that is ‘spiced’, things can vary. It can vary in the sense of what people might find too strong in flavour, where some people will think it’s flavourless. It’s always the same, and that is totally okay. I find, the quantities in this recipe are a pleasant level of spice that I enjoy, but you can 100% increase the levels if you like ‘spiced’ things to be super spicy. I would also recommend, if you like spicy flavours, is buying more authentic spices as I often find the little jars in the supermarket are more bland or are less intense in flavour.

You can also swap up the flavours of these festive sandwich cookies really easily, by using a different centre to your biscuits. I use my homemade caramel sauce like I have said, but you can swap this to a jam or a spread, such as a chocolate spread, or biscoff, or anything similar. As long as it’s not too runny, you can use it.

Tips & Tricks

I used an 8cm snowflake cookie cutter in this recipe, but you can use any shape you want
These will last 5-7+ days, once made
You can freeze these for 3+ months
You can swap the caramel for another centre such as a jam, Nutella or Biscoff
Feel free to increase or decrease the spices depending on what levels you normally like a sweet spiced bake