One of the most magical cookies are these green Sunbutter Cookies for St. Patrick’s Day. They naturally turn green in the center, so they’re fun and dye free.
For more ideas, check out all of our dessert recipes.
If you’ve been around here a while, you know I’m extra. I don’t even hide that fact. If there’s a holiday, I’m making cute treats for it. That’s just expected.
We go to a potluck at our clubhouse twice a month and every time I walk in, one of my friends comes up to me and says, “What did you make?” because she knows whatever I’m walking in with is going to be adorable.
For the first one this month, I made these fun green SunButter Cookies because St. Patrick’s Day is right around the corner.
They’re very similar to peanut butter cookies except they’re made with sunflower seed butter. Why? Because the baking soda reacts with the sunflower seeds and makes naturally green cookies. From the outside they look like regular cookies. When you bite into them, you see the green inside.
It’s magic. Okay, fine, it’s science. But let’s go with magic because that sounds good for St. Patrick’s Day.
We decorate the tops of these with vanilla almond bark and green sprinkles to make them look like a very festive cookie. We use the Great Value almond bark and that’s dye free. The sprinkles we used aren’t dye free (because we’re not a dye free house), but you can purchase dye free sprinkles if your house is. If you swap the sprinkles, these are completely dye free, which is great because a lot of people are looking for dye free options right now.
These aren’t the only festive treat we have for St. Patrick’s Day. For more, check out our full list of Fun St. Patrick’s Day Dessert Recipes. There are ideas for cookies, shamrock pretzels, and more.
Green SunButter Cookies for St. Patrick’s Day Recipe
Affiliate links are included in this post and Drugstore Divas may make a small commission if you use them.
Green SunButter Cookies Ingredients:
You can get the full list of ingredients with measurements in the recipe card below.
- SunButter sunflower butter – This is the most popular brand of sunflower seed butter You can use any brand.
- Maple syrup – This adds a sweetness without using traditional sugar.
- Egg – This acts as a binder to hold the cookies together.
- All purpose flour – Sunflower seed butter is really soft and needs flour to actually form a cookie.
- Baking soda – This chemical reaction between baking soda and the sunflower seeds in the SunButter is what naturally creates the green color. It also helps the cookies to rise and spread out while baking.
- Salt – This brings out the flavors of the cookies.
- Vanilla almond bark – Almond bark is a lot easier to work with than melted white chocolate chips.
- Green sprinkles – These give a hint to the green color inside.
How To Make Green SunButter Cookies:
Add the SunButter, maple syrup, and the egg into a large mixing bowl.
Stir until the wet ingredients are combined.
Quick note: Because this dough is really sticky, you want to mix it by hand with a spoon. Don’t use a hand mixer or a stand mixer for this dough. Those will really just make a huge mess.
Now it’s time for the dry ingredients.
Add the flour, baking soda, and salt to the bowl.
Stir until everything is combined.
The dough is really wet and sticky, even after the flour is combined. That’s okay. Please don’t think it’s too wet and add more flour to make it more like a traditional cookie dough.
Chill the dough in the refrigerator for an hour.
After an hour, take the dough out of the fridge.
Pre-heat the oven to 365 F.
Line a baking sheet with a silicone baking mat.
If you don’t have a silicone baking mat, you can use parchment paper. However, I prefer the baking mat because it’s reusable, so it’s more frugal and more sustainable than the parchment paper.
Use a #50 cookie scoop to scoop the cookie dough balls onto the baking mat.
Continue until you’re done with all the dough.
You should be able to get 25 cookies out of it.
Quick note: If you don’t have this exact sized cookie scoop, any scoop will work. I highly recommend using a scoop and not a spoon for two reasons. First, this mixture is really sticky. So the dough won’t easily slide off the spoon, so you’ll end up needing a second spoon and then your cookies will be an oblong shape rather than a circle. And second, using a cookie scoop means all the cookies are a uniformed size and will bake evenly.
Use the prongs of a fork to gently push down on the cookies to create a crisscross pattern on the top.
Just like with peanut butter cookies, the hashtag pattern helps flatten the cookies and assures they bake evenly.
Quick note: As I’ve said a couple times, this dough is really sticky. So sticking a fork into the top isn’t as easy as it sounds. So, you’ll want to actually add a little bit of flour to a small, flat dish. Dip the prongs of the fork into the flour, then make the marks.
The flour will absorb into the cookies and won’t change the flavor or texture at all.
Bake the cookies for 12 minutes until they’re a light golden brown.
Remove the cookies from the oven and let them cool on the sheet pan for at least 10 minutes.
The cookies will be really soft when you take them out of the oven and will continue to bake while they’re on the baking sheet. Trying to move them too soon will cause them to completely fall apart.
Also, if they spread into each other and got misshaped, that’s okay. Just do the glass hack. Put a glass on top of the cookie and gently swirl the glass. The cookie will bump around the edges and when you remove the glass, you have a perfectly round cookie.
The hack works perfectly with these cookies.
When the cookies are cool enough, move them to a wire rack to finish cooling to room temperature, about an hour.
Melt the vanilla almond bark in a microwave-safe bowl according to the package.
The easiest way to do this is to chop the almond bark into smaller pieces, then microwave on high for a minute. Stir, then microwave and stir at 30-second intervals until the almond bark is completely melted. It usually takes me 90 seconds total to melt the almond bark this way.
Put the almond bark in a piping bag with a circle tip attached.
If you don’t have a piping bag and tips, you can actually add the melted almond bark to a ziptop plastic bag, cut off the corner, and use that as a piping bag. I’ve done that so many times. But Pete got me a piping tips kit a few Christmases ago and I love any excuse to bring it out.
Pipe a diagonal design onto the cookies.
Don’t worry if the vanilla almond bark gets on the baking mat. When the cookies are completely cooled, you can easily break that off.
Pipe a few, then add the green sprinkles. I only add sprinkles to one half of the cookies, just because I feel like that makes them more interesting to look at, but you could add sprinkles to the entire cookie if you want.
You want to make sure you’re adding the green sprinkles before the almond bark hardens so that the sprinkles can stick. So pipe a couple, sprinkle a couple, then go back to piping.
Quick note: We mentioned it above, but everything in the cookies is dye free, although we do use traditional sprinkles. If you wanted to keep these dye free, you could use Watkins green decorating sugar to top your vanilla almond bark.
SunButter Cookies: Frequently Asked Questions
Store any leftover cookies in an airtight container. They can be kept at room temperature.
We definitely suggest making these cookies at least a few hours ahead of time. When they come out of the oven originally, there’s not much of a green color. After about four hours, you’ll see a deep green color in the center of the cookie when you cut into them. That color deepens overnight while the outside of the cookie stays brown.
The cookies take on more of the green color the longer they sit, and by the third day, the green starts to overcome the brown outside of the cookie. So, you can make these ahead of time, but you’ll get the best wow factor from your taste testers if you make them just one day ahead of time.
It won’t. The chemical reaction is between sunflower seeds and baking soda; peanuts don’t react in the same way.
You’ll get this reaction from certain breads and SunButter, though. Irish Soda Bread used baking soda, so if you add the SunButter to Irish Soda Bread, you’ll get a green reaction, which is also perfect for St. Patrick’s Day.
Green SunButter Cookies
One of the most magical cookies are these green Sunbutter Cookies for St. Patrick’s Day. They naturally turn green in the center, so they’re fun and dye free.
Ingredients
- 1 cup SunButter (sunflower seed butter)
- 1/2 cup maple syrup
- 1 egg
- 1/2 cup all purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 2 squares vanilla almond bark
- Green sprinkles
Instructions
- Add the SunButter, maple syrup, and the egg into a large mixing bowl.
- Stir until the wet ingredients are combined.
- Add the flour, baking soda, and salt to the bowl.
- Stir until everything is combined.
- Chill the dough in the refrigerator for an hour.
- Pre-heat the oven to 365 F.
- Line a baking sheet with a silicone baking mat.
- Use a #50 cookie scoop to scoop the cookie dough balls onto the baking mat.
- Use the prongs of a fork to gently push down on the cookies to create a crisscross pattern on the top.
- Bake the cookies for 12 minutes until they’re a light golden brown.
- Remove the cookies from the oven and let them cool on the sheet pan for at least 10 minutes.
- When the cookies are cool enough, move them to a wire rack to finish cooling to room temperature, about an hour.
- Melt the vanilla almond bark in a microwave-safe bowl according to the package.
- Put the almond bark in a piping bag with a circle tip attached.
- Pipe a diagonal design onto the cookies.
- Pipe a few, then add the green sprinkles.
Notes
To make the hashtag mark, add a little bit of flour to a small, flat dish. Dip the prongs of the fork into the flour, then make the marks.
The green color is most pronounced the next day.
Nutrition Information
Yield
25Serving Size
1Amount Per Serving Calories 31Total Fat 0gSaturated Fat 0gTrans Fat 0gUnsaturated Fat 0gCholesterol 7mgSodium 71mgCarbohydrates 6gFiber 0gSugar 4gProtein 1g
Have you made these green SunButter cookies for St. Patrick’s Day? Let us know how it went in the comments.
Steph@CrazyLittleLovebirds
Friday 13th of March 2026
These sound so good!
Jennifer Wise
Monday 9th of March 2026
This is SO cool! I did not know that about baking powder and sunflower seeds. Such a festive and fun idea, too. Sounds delicious.