Schackrutor (Swedish Checkerboard Christmas Cookies)

Some of the cutest Swedish Christmas cookies are schackrutor, or chessboard cookies. These are simple but tasty little cookies made with chocolate and vanilla flavored dough, layered to look like a chess or checkerboard. But more recently I’ve been seeing Swedes add two half circles to their checkerboard cookies to make heart shapes! They’re so sweet and look like the classic Swedish paper heart Christmas ornaments.

I used this Swedish recipe to make the cookies.

Tips

You can make the dough in an electric mixer or by hand. When making it by hand I start mixing all the ingredients with a fork, and then I use my hands to knead the dough until it comes together in a ball.

The vanilla and chocolate dough recipes are the same, except that the chocolate one also has cocoa powder added.

Don’t over work the dough – knead only until it comes together in a nice ball. Then let the dough rest for about 15-30 minutes in the fridge.

While I tend to be quite free with my cookie recipes, this is one recipe where it’s easiest to be very exact.

I roll out a little over half of the chocolate and vanilla cookie dough, using a ruler (or the measurements on my baking mat) to measure out the exact size of the dough I need – 4×6 in (10×15 cm) and 1/2 in (1 cm) thick. Then slice eight 1/2 inch slices of each vanilla and chocolate dough.

For best results put the sticks of dough in the fridge again for 10 minutes to chill. I didn’t have time to do that here because I had to check out of my Airbnb soon, and the chocolate dough did start to melt a bit as I was building my checkerboard.

Then build the checkerboard by placing every other vanilla and chocolate in 4 rows wide and 4 rows high. Make sure they are completely pressed together. You do this by pressing gently with your hands and/or a knife and constantly shaping the block into a square.

Roll the rest of the light and dark dough into thick sausages and divide them in half lengthwise. The sausage needs to be the same thickness as the square checkerboard log you built. Place the vanilla on one side of the checkerboard log and the chocolate on the other. Press and shape it so that it has the shape of a heart – it might look odd at first, but as you shape the dough you can get a nice heart form.

Then slice the block of dough into cookies, about 1/4 in (7 mm) thick and place on your baking sheet.

You can use the remaining vanilla and chocolate dough to make another checkerboard (without the heart addition) or simply roll the dough into logs and slice plain chocolate and vanilla cookies from them. I was running out of time so I sliced plain cookies and they still turned out great, if a little less exciting than the hearts.

Bake the cookies for about 12 minutes, until the vanilla dough just starts to turn golden.

You can switch the recipe from US measurements to metric by clicking from “US Customary” to “Metric” under Ingredients.