Baking cookies is fun, but did you know that it also uses math? The mathematics involved in baking often goes unnoticed, but it’s a great way to practice basic skills like ratios, fractions, measuring, and more! Our favorite rainbow striped cookies also give you a chance to use color mixing and art in your culinary creations. Use your math and art skills to make beautiful and delicious cookies! 🌈

Supplies

  • Ingredients for cookies (see recipe below)
  • A large cookie cutter
  • Gel food coloring
  • Parchment paper
  • Ruler

Sugar Cookie Recipe

This sugar cookie recipe makes fantastic cut cookies that keep their shape while baking. This recipe makes roughly 8 dozen 3″ cookies, but also works great as a half batch.

  • 6 cups flour
  • 3 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 2 cups butter (4 sticks)
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 tsp vanilla
  1. Cream together butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla.
  2. In a separate bowl, mix flour, baking powder, and salt.
  3. Add dry ingredients to butter mixture and mix well.

Cookie dough in rainbow colors

🌈 Rainbow Cookie Instructions

Let’s make some rainbows!

  • Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
  • After you make your dough, separate it into 6 evenly sized balls.
  • Knead a small amount of gel food coloring into each ball to get six colors of dough. (Rainbows have seven colors (ROYGBIV), but we left out indigo to make mixing and cutting easier!) Most food coloring sets only come with a few basic colors. Mix the colors as needed to get all six colors for your stripes.
    • Red
    • Orange = Red + Yellow
    • Yellow
    • Green = Blue + Yellow
    • Blue
    • Purple = Red + Blue
  • For horizontal stripes, take your cookie cutter and measure from the top to the bottom of the cutter.  Divide that number by six. This tells you how big each stripe of color dough should be to fit all six stripes into one cookie.
  • Roll each color of dough into long thin snakes and place them next to each other on parchment paper. The snakes should be about half as wide as your desired stripes. Keep in mind that you will be rolling the dough to flatten it and they will become wider.
  • Cover the dough with another sheet of parchment and gently roll across them with a rolling pin in order to flatten the dough to your desired thickness and connect the ropes into one uniform sheet of dough.
  • Place the rolled dough still on the parchment sheet in the refrigerator to chill for 10 mins.
  • Take the chilled dough out of the refrigerator and cut out as many cookies as you can from the rainbow striped sheet. You will not need additional flour.
  • Remove the scraps and leave the cut cookies on the parchment paper. (The remaining dough scraps can be gently rolled together to make rainbow tie-dye effect cookies.)
  • Place the parchment paper on a cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees for 8 to 10 minutes.

Learn About Rainbows and Unicorns

Enjoy your new rainbow cookies while learning more about rainbows and unicorns!

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