I just finished making a batch of these. I followed the recipe exactly, I only made mine plain and chocolate swirls. I made the chocolate by adding cocoa powder to the other half. It was a little difficult to roll out the dough, I would suggest chilling it for a while first. Otherwise they turned out great. I think they may taste a little better tomorrow, right now they are a little plain and bland tasting. A good cookie with coffee...!

Just made the chocolate version and it was wonderful! I laid off the brown sugar a bit though and rolled the log in red sugar (like Maurice Lenell's) which are my kids favorite! Dough was very soft and pliable to roll. Great recipe!

I had a lot of trouble with this dough as it kept cracking and crumbling when I went to roll it. Mine didn't turn out nearly as pretty as some of the pictures and they aren't really delicious cookies. Not bad, just not quite worth the struggle. I think the appeal is in how pretty they are supposed to be to look at but as I say, mine weren't.

Time consuming as others said, but didn't find it was worth it. Pretty plain and almost unflavored cookies (and I did follow the recipe exactly as written).

I needed a quick and easy recipe to make a LOT of cookies for an annual cookie exchange. These were perfect. Note, however, that you'll need much more food colouring than listed to get a vibrantly-coloured cookie like what's shown in the photo. Also, to keep my cookie-log from settling flat as it chilled, I slit an empty wrapping paper tube lengthwise, wrapped my dough in parchment, and slid it into the tube. Voila: nice round cookies!

the dough was sticky and didn't roll well and the cookies tasted horrible! I wont try this recipe again. I plan on putting frosting on them so the kids will eat them, but that sorta defeats the purpose of making a pinwheel cookie. The baking time was also off, I watched them and took them out as they got set, which was over 8 minutes. I will keep looking for a good pinwheel recipe

Thanks for all the great ideas. The cookies look like so much fun, but I'm a big procrastinator so I opened a box of sugar cookie mix and had them done in a few hours. Followed directions on box, split dough & added red/green food coloring. Chilled dough for 5 mins, layed out 20"+ wax paper and placed the red dough in center, another wax paper on top to roll it out. I rolled the dough out nice and thin(rectangular shape), lift wax paper+dough placed on large cutting board to chill until second layer was ready to work with. Roll out green dough same way. I liked the red layer on the outside so i put that layer on the bottom, peeled off top sheet of wax paper, then side by side pulled off top layer of green wax paper. Holding bottom wax paper quickly but gently flipped the green layer on top of the red layer(trim edges if necessary. Gently press the two doughs together. Remove the 2nd green wax paper, which is now on top from flipping. Roll the long side of the rectangle like a sushi roll. Start the roll by lifting up the long side to start the roll, The bottom wax paper should still be under both layers, holding both corners lift the wax paper to help roll the log. As you move down the wax paper the dough should fall off as you start rolling. Roll your log back onto the wax paper, and then wrap with a towel & freeze for an hour. When slicing, remove towel, wax & use are sharp knife and do it quick before the dough starts getting too soft. Reshape and bake 375 for 9 mins.

Yum! I have to say they surprised me a little. I figured they'd be pretty good; you know, average plain Christmas cookie. Well they were plain, but in a really good way. I'd tasted the unbaked dough and it was nothing special, so the delicious buttery taste of the baked cookies surprised me :) As for the method, it worked out well for me. The dough came together easily and it wasn't too sticky. It rolled out pretty nicely (and I'm kind of rolling challenged!). The only part where it worked out less than perfect for me was rolling it up in the log. The bottom layer cracked and started falling apart; I think maybe I rolled it too thin. It patched together well enough and the finished product looked ok, so no big deal. I made only half a recipe (and only got 20 cookies), I might have to make more! Thanks for the recipe :)

Yum they were good.

Everything about these were perfect! I made two batches and added some unsweetened cocoa powder (in lieu of flour) to the one batch I eventually colored red. It made everything come together! I made soooooooooo many cookies and these were my favorites!