Sweet Potato Rum Cookies Recipe on Food52 (2024)

It’s no secret: We’re huge fans of Chrissy Teigen. Her recipes regularly find themselves in our weekly rotation (even when we nearly set our kitchen on fire making them). We’re unabashedly obsessed with her first cookbook, and its super-delicious follow-up. We laugh out loud when we read her hilarious tweets, and audibly coo when we see Instagram photos of her impossibly cute kids, Luna and Miles, doing impossibly cute things.

So when Chrissy agreed to share her go-to holiday cookie recipe with us this season, we could hardly contain our excitement. It was sure to be packed with flavor, heavy on the nostalgia factor, and just plain craveable. (This was all, of course, confirmed when we got the recipe.) Now, we’re so thrilled to share it with you—plus, a story from Chrissy on why she loves these cookies so much around the holidays.

Now, don't get me wrong, traditional sugar cookies and chocolatey cookies are great, but I had to make a cookie that was a bit more fun for the adults, and these are to die for around the holidays: rich, tender sweet potato cookies with a boozy, rum-butter–flavored icing. The cookie dough is made from flour, sugar, and soft, canned sweet potato as well as its flavorful syrup, making for a pillowy texture and an earthy flavor. The icing, which is a simple glaze with powdered sugar, rum extract, and butter extract, could just as easily be made with rum and butter if you're not baking with little ones.

The cookies are wonderfully plush and thick, perfectly chewy, and unbelievably flavorful, thanks to a punch of allspice and bright orange zest. The buttery, rummy, just-sweet-enough icing provides the perfect balance. I like to make a little extra icing (warmed up, of course) to keep on hand to double dip the cookies into, and have a tiny pinch bowl of kosher salt to sprinkle a few grains onto each bite. —Chrissy Teigen

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375°F (190°C).
2. Using a food processor, cream softened butter and sweet potatoes until fully mixed.
3. Add orange zest, brown sugar, syrup and lemon juice, and vanilla and mix until combined. Lastly add salt, baking soda, all spice and flour, and pulse until fully combined.
4. Drop batter 1 heaping tablespoon at a time onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet and bake for 14 minutes, rotating halfway through, until they have set and the edges are slightly browned. Make sure to give them a little space in between each cookie, since they will expand during the cooking process.
5. Once baked, remove from oven and set on a rack to cool.
6. While cookies are cooling, add all glaze ingredients to a medium sized bowl and whisk together. After adding the extracts, you may have to add additional water or whole milk, one tablespoon at a time, to achieve a pourable but not too thin consistency. Cover bowl with plastic wrap or lid until cookies are cooled.
7. Pour glaze over cookies while still on the rack with a sheet pan or platter underneath to catch the drippings (and feel free to use the dripped icing for dipping the cookies into, as I do).