A dash of this, a pinch of that…it’s how many of the best recipes got made. The trick is to write it down after you make it! These washboard cookies have a coconut base, but have a few “dashes” of other flavors to enhance the coconut taste.

To me these old fashioned treats actually taste a lot like the lightly coconut cookies that always came in the blue tins of Danish butter cookies at Christmas. Of course you can make these delectable cookies any time of year. But, I love that they particularly remind me of December and all those holiday parties I went to growing up where coconut cookies were always on the table of goodies.

The dough for these cookies will be stiff when you first mix it up and it will get even stiffer after refrigerating it for an hour. But, this is exactly how you want it to be.

First you roll the dough into balls, then you flatten them out with the back of a fork dipped in sugar. Unlike peanut butter cookies you don’t make a cross hatch with the fork. The end result is that many of your cookies will be oval instead of round and that’s perfectly fine.

You can alternately choose to flatten the dough balls and then make your fork marks going the other direction. I’ve seen these made all different kinds of ways! More oblong cookies will look more like a laundry washboard, which they are named for.

They will spread in the oven so keep that in mind when shaping them.

The ingredients that support the dried coconut in these cookies are vanilla and almond extracts. They give these treats a more complex flavor. Even so these aren’t extremely coconutty, just coconutty enough! To make these nut-free use imitation almond extract.

For a simple cookie that’s easy to make but hard to resist these are the ones to bake. And, the process of making the design on top is a fun activity to do with kids, too.