Name: Little Tart Matcha Pinwheels
Yield: 30 cookies
Ingredients: 720 grams (5¾ cups) all-purpose flour; 10 grams (2½ tsp.) baking powder; 6 grams (1¼ tsp.) kosher salt; 452 grams (4 sticks) unsalted butter at room temperature; 500 grams (2½ cups) granulated white sugar; 220 grams (4 large) eggs; 10 grams (2 tsp.) vanilla extract; 9 grams (4.5 tsp.) matcha powder

When Sarah O’Brien thinks of holiday cookies, she pictures the butter-stained cover of her mom’s Betty Crocker Cooky Book. “The book’s brightly colored and variously shaped cookies stood out against bright red binding,” recalls O’Brien, founder and baker at Little Tart Bakeshop in Atlanta.

“On that iconic cover there are thumbprint cookies, crackle cookies, sugar cookies, piped cookies, and pinwheel cookies.” She wanted the shop’s holiday cookie selection to have that same visual interest while staying true to what their customers love. “Our baking ethos at Little Tart: to offer our customers simple, timeless treats made with care and delicious ingredients,” she says.”We use a ton of matcha at the bakery in our drinks, so why not flavor a cookie with it?”

Here, the grassy matcha is balanced by the sweet and buttery vanilla dough, and the resulting festive, green cookie is certainly cover-model-worthy. We’ve included conversions, though O’Brien suggests using a scale if you have one. Her recipe makes a batch of thirty, so you can deliver a dozen to a couple of lucky neighbors and still have some swirly goodness leftover for yourself.

Preparation

Add flour, baking powder, and salt to a bowl and whisk to combine. Set aside. Add butter and sugar to the (separate) bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Mix well on medium speed until light and smooth, about 4–6 minutes. (It doesn’t need to be fluffy, just well mixed and a little lighter in color.) With the mixer running, add eggs one at a time. Stop and scrape down the bowl after the second egg, then continue adding remaining eggs. Scrape down again, then mix in vanilla. With the mixer on low, add the reserved dry ingredients, ⅓ at a time, and combine until just incorporated.

Remove half of the dough from the mixer. Add matcha to the dough in the mixer and stir to combine, scraping down the sides if necessary. You should now have two blocks of dough: one vanilla and one matcha. Form each block of dough into an 8-by-8-inch square and wrap in plastic. Place in the fridge overnight. Pull dough blocks from the fridge and dust each side generously with flour.

On a floured countertop or between two pieces of parchment, roll each piece of dough to ¼-inch thickness while keeping it rectangular with a height of about 10 inches. Each piece of dough should be around the same dimensions. Place the matcha dough on top of the vanilla dough ¼ inch from the bottom edge. Starting with the 10-inch side, roll the vanilla dough tightly over the beginning of the matcha dough. This will prevent holes at the center of your cookie. Continue to roll up to make a log. Wrap in plastic and place in the freezer for 2–3 hours to chill. (Optional: You can jazz up this cookie by rolling the whole log in sprinkles before chilling.)

Remove log from freezer and use a sharp knife to cut into ¼-inch slices. Place slices on a parchment-lined sheet tray about an inch apart. Bake at 325°F for 6 minutes, rotate the tray, then cook for 6 more minutes, until slightly golden around the edges.