I am a sucker for cookies and “cookie cakes” are one of my favorite desserts ever!! I LOVE frosting on cookies!! Something magical happens when you add the creamy frosting with the crunchy cookie!

The “letter cake” trend has been popular for a couple of years. I made one on Hallmark Channel’s Home and Family. It was an actual cake recipe for the base though. For this Memorial Day, I thought that it would be fun to make a giant cookie cake made from homemade sugar cookies and decorate it with my trusty vanilla buttercream recipe. I really wanted to make this without food coloring, so I decided to add the red and blue with fruit. I thought frosting and cookies was my favorite combination until I had it with fruit on top. The fruit adds a nice acidic balance to the sweetness and makes this dessert really fancy and beautiful.

You could use the same idea on a much smaller scale and make mini flags or even turn these into little layered tarts! Use this flavor/recipe combination any way you like to add a sweet and patriotic touch to your holiday.

Ingredients for the sugar cookie layers

5 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cups sugar
1 cup unsalted butter room temperature
1 cup coconut oil; measure at room temperature and then melt and allow it to cool
2 eggs, room temp
1 teaspoon vanilla

Directions

In a bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.
In a stand mixer cream together the butter and sugar until light, fluffy and pale in color.
Slowly add in the cooled coconut oil and mix well.
Stir in the eggs one at a time and mix until combined.
Mix in the vanilla.
Slowly add in the flour mixture and stir until completely mixed in. Be careful not to over mix.
Divide dough in half and wrap it in plastic wrap or in a plastic bag.

Place wrapped dough in the refrigerator for about one hour.

For this recipe, in particular, I recommend rolling it out to the “flag shape” when it is still soft because you are rolling it out into a big rectangle. So, don’t let it set up in the fridge for too long. About a half-hour is a good amount of time.

Roll out 1/2 of the dough onto a floured sheet of parchment paper

Roll it out to about 1/4 of an inch thick, or slightly thicker; you don’t want it to be too thin for this!

It helps to use a piece of wax paper on the top of the dough to roll it out (sprinkle some flour on the top of the dough as well)

Use a ruler and a knife to measure out a rectangle based on the size you want; I customized mine to the size of the platter I wanted to put it on, it was roughly 8 1/2 by 13 1/2 inches

Cut the shape with a knife

Since the dough is already on parchment paper, carefully slide the parchment paper onto a baking sheet

Place the cookies in the fridge for about 10 minutes while you heat your oven to 350 degrees

*Note: make sure to change the baking sheet to a room temperature baking sheet and not the one the cookies were on in the fridge. If you put a cold baking sheet into a hot oven it will lower the oven temperature and could throw off your baking process.

Place the cookie in the oven and bake.

Repeat with the second half of the dough so that you have two large rectangles

The baking time will vary depending on how cold the dough is, but it’s roughly 15 minutes or until the outsides start to get slightly golden

Allow the cookies to cool completely

Time to decorate!!

This took me two batches of my vanilla buttercream frosting!! It’s a pretty big cake so it’s totally worth it.

Slide the first cookie layer, carefully, from the bakiing sheet into the desired serving try.

Add lots of little dollops of frosting in rows onto the first cookie layer

For the second layer, before adding it onto the the bottom layer, spread a layer of frosting with a off-set spatula to the top of the cookie, this is for the fruit to stick on! The reson you want to do it before you put it onto the first cookie layer is so that you don’t smash the little frosting dollops when you are speading.

Very carefully slide the second cookie off of the cookie sheet into the bottom cookie. If it breaks, it’s ok! You can cover it with frosting!

Decorate the top as desired! I did it first by adding in the blueberries first and then spacing out the raspberries and the frosting to make the stripes.

I simply used a serrated knife to cut the pieces when serving.