Autumn Swirl Cookies

Or as the author named them, "Party Cookies".

I renamed mine since I did them in fall colors.

The recipe is from the book, Carrot Cake Murder, by Joanne Fluke.





I am a big fan of the culinary mystery genre.





Since my job revolves around catering and I like to cook, I can relate to all the food/catering references. Most culinary mysteries also print the recipes they write about and I often make a recipe or two from the novels I read. I think it adds to my overall enjoyment of the book.

The first cookie I decided to bake is a very rich butter cookie.

You make the buttery dough and then divide it into 4 blobs. (I think "blobs" is more descriptive than the term "sections", so I shall continue to use "blobs" throughout my descriptions of these dough bundles.)


You toss one blob at a time back into the mixer to add the food color.

As it turned out, I could have only made two blobs because I decided to only use two colors--orange and brown.
I used these Wilton colors, which I was very happy with. The colors held up well in the baking process and produced nice vividly-hued cookies.
Each blob is divided into 8 smaller blobs.
Then rolled into long ropes.

The ropes are then stacked in fours, alternating colors. The end will look like this: You then roll it up in waxed paper, patting it a bit to even it out, so it's almost the same size all the way down. Then it needs to chill. I stuck mine in the freezer for about 30 minutes because I wanted to get them done last night. The last batches had been in the freezer for about an hour and, I think, those were the best.
When removed from the freezer, the log was nice and firm and I cut it into sections.
Each cookie was dipped into sugar on both sides. I sprayed the cookie sheet for the first batch only. On my next four trays I only put 12 cookies to a sheet. They really spread out!

Here they are all packed in a tin. I think the recipe made a little over 4 dozen.
I thought these cookies were very good. On my first batch I cooked them 11 minutes. It was not enough. I added minutes on each batch. I ended up cooking them about 15 minutes and I liked those best. The cookie was nice and crisp on the outside with a softer buttery interior.

If you click the recipe, it will get larger.


The heroine of this book runs a bakery. The book has a number of recipes that sound good. On her website, the author publishes recipes from her books that you can print out. The one she has now is for Red Velvet Cookies, which were also in this novel. I plan to try them next.