So, I got through my week (ahem, 4 days) of cleansing and then capped it off with two Christmas Cookies. I had to. I mean, it’s all about balance, right?!
So now I can button my jeans and I am back in the Christmas Season Saddle! Which means that is it is obviously time for Sugar Cookies.
I have a life long love affair with sugar cookies. My Grandma Grace had a wonderful recipe that we baked and loved for my childhood. It was our one and only staple recipe until I went away to Culinary School. When I worked as a pastry chef in San Francisco I learned about Sable, the sugar cookies, tender, more delicate sister and I was hooked. So then that recipe had a 15 year place of honor right up until the Holiday season that we found out about our allergies. That was three years ago.
We have not had a sugar cookie in all of that time, and I thought that they were probably never to return to our Christmas traditions. But this year, I took extra time and after about 6 recipes, found the most perfect sugar cookie recipe ever. Complete with really easy rolling out and it’s cookie cutter friendly! I honest to God was about to ditch my huge box of cookie cutters before Christmas, and I am so grateful that I decided not to. The girls and I had so much fun cutting out the cookies and did multiple batches- some with icing, some with colored sugars and sprinkles. They all are adorable and it was so much fun!
In the recipe, you will see that you could use either vanilla or almond extract. We did batches of each and they were both wonderful, although my kids like the almond extract better. * if it is almond flavored or imitation almond extract than there is NO nuts in it. PURE almond extract would.
Also I have to make a note about all-purpose gluten free flours. I use Bobs Red Mill AP GF flour in all of my recipe development. I encourage you to experiment with other brands if they are more readily available to you- BUT please make sure that the flour doesn’t have xanthum gum in it. Or if it does, please do not add more per the recipe instructions. You will wind up with WEIRD and or GROSS results! I do not want that for you!
Ok. Also! I am excited for you to try the Vegan Royal Icing which worked just as well as the original version! So cool.
This weekend you can look for the Gingerbread Cookie Recipe on Sunday morning along with a 10am PT Cookie Baking Class on Facebook Live! I hope you will join me and the little girls for the tutorial. Have a great weekend!
- 2½ cups All Purpose Gluten-Free Baking Flour (I use Bobs Red Mill in the dark red bag)
- 1 ½ cups powdered Sugar
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- ½ cup Vegan Butter at room temperature
- 2 teaspoons vanilla or almond extract
- ¼ cup unsweetened non-dairy milk (I prefer oat milk)
- * FOR BEST RESULTS PLEASE DON"T SUBSTITUTE INGREDIENTS OR OVERBAKE!!!
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Prepare two sheetpans with parchment or silpats.
- In the bowl of a standing mixer combine all of the dry ingredients. Add the room temperature vegan butter in chunks and mix until you have a dry crumbly dough. Add the non-dairy milk and vanilla and beat until the dough comes together. It will be uniform but sticky.
- Transfer all of the dough to a sheet of wax paper and use the paper to form the dough into a disc. Refrigerate the dough in the wax paper for 30 minutes.
- Dust a work surface with powdered sugar and then roll out the dough with a little more and a rolling pin. You want the dough to be about ⅛ inch thick. Use cookie cutters to cut the shapes and transfer them to the prepared sheet pans. The dough will spread slightly so leave the cookies a little room on the pans. If you want to add sprinkles to the cookies, do this now- otherwise you can ice them when they are baked and cooled.
- Bake the cookies 8-10 minutes, they will still be pale but they will firm up while they cool. Let the cookies cool for at least 10-15 minutes before transferring them with a spatula to a cooling rack.
- When they are completely cool, ice them with Vegan Royal Icing. Store the cookies in an airtight container at room temperature or in the freezer.
Print Recipe
OOOoooh! These cookies look so cute and yummy! AND they’re vegan too???? Count me in!
Thank you Tori! They are yummy!
What fun holiday cookies!
Wow this has simple ingredients and looks soo easy! Making these soon
Hey Heather- I was planning to make these with regular butter as my sister-in-law is gluten free but not vegan. Would that be ok? Any adjustments?
Yes Amanda- totally!
Bob’s Red Mill flours are cross contaminated with nuts and we aren’t able to use it – I know you said experiment, but is there a second best you’d recommend? Super excited to try these! Thank you!
Hi Sharon! WOW- I did not realize that they are. Thank you so much for that information! I would try the Namaste brand, just leave out the anthem gum from all of my recipes!
Is there any way you could create these great vegan recipes without the use of so much sugar? Is there any way to substitute honey instead?
Honey isn’t vegan, so that substitution wouldn’t work. You could probably use agave or maple syrup to sweeten though!
So glad you found the perfect holiday cookie & that your didn’t toss the cutters!
These are so gorgeous and I’m so glad that you and your girls were able to get back into your Christmas traditions this year with this recipe!
thank you Laura!!
Love this dairy free and egg free version!
Is one of the ingredients off in this recipe? I’m in the process of making these cooking, and after following the directions, I’m left with a crumbly mixture that could not be considered dough at all. It is completely dry, and can’t even be squeezed into dough balls. It seems like there was way too much sugar or flour. I’m not sure how to fix it, and I’m very disappointed because I feel like I’ve wasted ingredients and time.
Okay, after spending my day making these cookies, here is what I have to say.
1. This recipe is lacking in wet ingredients. If you follow the recipe, all you will have is a bowl full of a crumbly mixture. I added extra milk and butter to at least make it form a dough ball.
2. After about an hour in the fridge, I went to roll the cookies. I had to spritz the dough with water several times to keep it from cracking. The dough was difficult to roll thin, so my cookies were a little thicker than desired.
3. The cookies need to be baked at a higher temp. They were not browning at all after 11-12 min, so I just took them out.
4. These cookies look like dry dog biscuits when you take them out.
5. These cookies taste like dry dog biscuits. They are not very sweet, are lacking in flavor, and they are very dry.
I’m throwing them all out and trying a new recipe. This is the third vegan sugar cookie recipe I’ve tried, and it was definitely the worst. Would not recommend these cookies at all.
WOW JACKIE.
1. and 2. It may have been the flour that you used. No one else has had this experience.
3. They are not meant to brown. Ultimatley you probably just over baked them too.
4. and 5. Good Lord- I am all for feedback, but mostly you are just rude.
Im so glad you took so much time and energy to post such nasty feedback on Christmas. Have a great Holidays.
I don’t think you mixed them long enough. I am making now. The recipe says to beat until a dough forms. Yes at first it is crumbly but after a few minutes a dough forms.
Thank you Shelley for your input!
I am amazed at how great these turned out. Thank you for a great and easy recipe. Also the frosting!!! Amazing the best easiest frosting I have ever tried to make.
Thank you so much Clover, I am really happy that you like the recipe- Have a Merry Christmas!
Do you add xanthum gum to this recipe? I know Bob’s doesn’t have it but has a chart of how much to add. Just want to make sure!
Hi Avivah, I did not add it to this recipe- without it it kept the cookies nice and tender and kind of crumbly which I like in a sugar cookie!
I was so very excited to try these cookies and after hours and money wasted i honestly want to cry! I have made so many vegan/gluten free recipes and (i don’t meant to be rude, this was only my personal experience) but this is one of the worst for me.
I used bobs red mill gf 1-1 and earth balance butter. I followed the instructions to a T, except for the fact that the cookies were unmoldable as some of the other comments agree and i added a teaspoon more of milk. They were moldable after about 40 or so minutes of working with the dough to get it to that point.
I refrigerated for exactly ten minutes as specified and baked. The cookies took about 12 minutes on 350, and they didn’t look much like the cookies pictured in the recipe. They looked undercooked and moist but we’re hard-is the best way to describe them.
I cooled for ten minutes but… the worst part of these was put of all three of my batches no matter how much pam/olive oil was lathered on they BREAK so easily! So out of the 20 or so i made only 5 survived, only 2 are uncracked though.
I feel horrible adding this- i don’t want to offend like i said- but in all honestly these didn’t taste very well to say the least. But i suppose with all the other problems with my batches that is expected.
I am a very experienced baker and cook in general when it comes to gluten free/vegan recipes. I don’t see how adding a tablespoon of milk made THAT much of a difference in the delicacy and taste of the cookie. And as far as i’m concerned prior to the tablespoon of milk the cookies were unmoldable. My options were:
trash it
or add milk
I hope this wasn’t too harsh, it’s just honesty really, but I saw Heathers reply to one of the other negative comments and I want to make it clear this is not meant to offend her. i don’t typically leave comments or reviews but i just spent so many hours on these along with making icing so i am very exhausted and am in a way “warning” others with my comment and the few below mine about the crumbliness, dryness, and “dog food taste”, i personally advice not to waste your time and money on this recipe unless you have a lot of time on your hands/are looking for something to do and not eat. I’m basically just saying i don’t reccomend this recipe at all from my personal experience with it. I wish i would’ve just stuck to my usual or used another one.
But best of luck to anyone who tries it! And thank you Heather for the recipe as i’m sure it may work for someone else who used slightly different ingredients/method. 🙂
Gabby- I just saw this when I woke up this morning and truly feel terrible about your experience. I have to start with telling you that you used flour with xanthum gum in it- not the regular GF all-purpose flour. Having said this- it is such an extreme review that I will go back and make these cookies today and see if I have the same experience as you or if I can see where maybe people are having trouble. I will circle back later today.
Gabby, So after feeling so upset about this that I spent my Sunday making two batches of these back to back to make sure it was not a messed up recipe, I just feel like something else was off with what happened for you? I even had my kids make one of the batches and it was so easy that I am not sure what went wrong for you in that the dough “wouldn’t come together”? Did you use a standing mixer? (I notice that you used Cup for Cup which has anthem gum in it and is a completely different blend than the one that I use for these cookies.) It took about 5 minutes to make the dough (with measuring time) and then I immediately just scooped it out onto the counter and into a ball. I refrigerated the dough for 30 minutes because I got busy and then rolled out using some powdered sugar to keep them from sticking to the counter top. I baked them on silpat sheets- NOT a sprayed baking pan which I think is what you are talking about above with the “PAM and Olive Oil” (which would only soak into the cookies and make them greasy and taste like the oil? and then I see that you baked them for 12 minutes not 8-10 like in the recipe- so I would definitely assume that they would be too hard. The cookies are pale, even when finished, but they are not hard, they are tender and flakey. And as for tasting like dog food- I don’t know what to say about that. My kids really enjoy them, I really enjoy them, and people who had them this last holiday season were delighted. I really am sorry that you had such a bad experience, but I do see a few areas where things seems to have gone awry from the original recipe, and that may be the difference.
Wow, I never checked back on this page as I assumed my comment would be ignored but you are truly such a caring person! Such great lengths to attempt to fix my experience, that’s so kind of you and I very much appreciate that. I highly doubt the average blogger would go to those lengths. My comment was after a long day of frustration and confusion, and frankly I have come to the conclusion that it may have been many small things combined. From the flour, to the baking time, to the pam. I did use a standing mixer and I followed the ingredients and directions precisely (besides the baking time because they simply were not done.). But your experience was interesting because my batches were in fact very pale, but mine actually crumbled so badly that i could not get any of them fully intact off the pan. Like I said before I am very experienced in GF/vegan cooking and actually run a blog of my own. I typically would never leave a “reveiw” of any kind but I spent so much time and money on these and my boyfriend and we were just so disappointed, we even did the icing prior to the cookies as we were making halloween/autumn cookies! Looking back i suppose it was a lot of small errors that may have caused my cookie disaster. Can’t say I will give them another try but I will absolutely check out some of the other stuff on your blog!:) Thank you for being so attentive and caring in my experience.
Also just to add to that, as far as the taste I know you say you loved yours and I am SURE that my cookies tasted nothing like yours! The consistency and texture sounds completely different so i’m sure your batches did in fact come out great tasting when mine…. not so much. Thank you again for the very kind response to my experience.
I have been looking for a great sugar cookie recipe. Yours looks awesome but i need a vegan gluten free nut free.and coconut free recipe. Do you have suggestions to substitute the coconut milk in the recipe?
Thanks
Of course Debby! Swap for any non-dairy milk (soy, rice, hemp, flax, etc)
Tried it with a little less than 1/4 cup pumpkin purée in place of the egg. The cookies came out nicely, they kept their shape and aren’t too sweet, also there is no pumpkin flavor with this substitution so no worries. There is a slight grittiness from the flour I used but this recipe is definitely not to blame. With icing on top these are great but can’t quite pass as the regular gluteny and butter filled version.
What “vegan butter” do u use?
I like Earth Balance!
I wanted to chime in to say that I made these cookies, substituting in regular butter, and they were awesome!! There were a couple of very negative reviews and I just want to encourage others to give these a try. I think the key is blending the butter with the dry ingredients for a good long time. Super easy to make, wonderful dough that was easy to handle, and best of all, yummy cookies!
Thank you so much Marisa!
My son has an egg allergy and some littles in his daycare class have gluten and dairy allergy… So this recipe looked perfect to accommodate everyone’s needs 🙂 .
I made this for daycare’s easter egg hunt party and everyone loved it.
Thank you so much!
Can I use almond unsweetened milk instead of coconut milk?
I would like to try these ASAP!
Susan I just made these and the only substitution I made was unsweetened vanilla almond milk for the coconut milk and they turned out ahhhmazing!! Actually my flour may have some xantham gum in it. I can’t remember what I refilled my canister with last time, but regardless this was the simplest and beat vegan cookie I’ve ever made! I don’t know why others have had some problems. Maybe they have used coconut milk from a can which I think would cause them to turn out quite differently. But either way thanks for a great recipe. It was just what a needed for a quick gf and egg free dessert to take to the kids school function.
Would Miyoko vegan butter work or coconut oil? I don’t really like the way earth balance tastes. Also, I don’t have a stand mixer- only an electric mixer .. would that work? Or should I cut in the butter with forks?thanks for your help! I really want to try this
Electric mixer would work, and so would coconut oil or another brand of vegan butter!
WOW! I usually don’t bake vegan and gluten-free, but I now work with someone who can only eat vegan gluten-free, so I decided to try! I was hesitant because of the “dog cookie” comments, but not at all! SO easy to make the dough, it was so easy to cut out, and the 10 min. bake time was perfect! I tried one this morning with my coffee and I cannot taste the difference between a “regular” sugar cookie to this one! Keeping this recipe! Thank you for my first adventure of vegan gluten-free… I think I will keep trying!
Thank you so much Courtney! I am really happy that these worked well for you and that you enjoyed them!
I tried making these with Trader Joe’s gluten free all purpose (brown rice flour, potato starch, white rice flour, tapioca starch)
Had a very difficult time getting the dough to form (very dry) so I added a tablespoon extra butter. That got the dough to form but when I baked them they ran into big blob shapes 🙁 is it from the extra tablespoon of butter? I don’t know if it would have ever formed a dough if not for some extra moisture. Maybe next time I can just try a tablespoon of milk?
Hi Nicole- When I make them I always use the flour blend I listed (Bob’s Red Mill GF Baking flour) Every blend is so incredibly different and absorbs moisture differently. If it is more absorbent than the flour that I use, it will be dry OR another possible problem is the dough simply was not mixed for long enough to bring the dough together into a dough? but yes, I would always add a little milk over extra fat, which would definitely make them spread. I’m sorry they did not turn out- I know how frustrating that is. If you use the ingredients listed there, they will turn out perfectly!
Just a friendly heads up that Bobs red mill products may contain traces of top 9 allergens. They do not use allergen control protocols.