Oh Baby! A Vegan Cookie Worth Celebrating
Hi guys! It’s Christine here for Sweet-Tooth Friday! This week I have a crowd-pleasing recipe for Vegan Cut-Out cookies that are perfect for personalizing and decorating for any occasion. These are yummy enough to pass off as regular cookies to friends and family, and at Matt and Erin’s baby shower I did just that!
Surprise…you don’t need eggs and butter!
If you haven’t figured it out by now, there’s a whole world of baking outside of the standard butter and egg set. But even if you’re in the healthy-baking know, chances are your aunts, cousins, and friends of friends are still unenlightened about the joys of animal-free baking.
That’s where this recipe comes in—it’s the perfect introduction for a non-vegan crowd! So while the raw chia carrot cake may seem a little too foreign for your grandma to enjoy, these pretty cookies are plenty sweet, “buttery,” and dare I say, decadent. It’s really fun to watch people’s astonishment when you tell them these cookies are vegan.
Instead of egg-white based royal icing to decorate, I made an icing with a super-fine sugar called dry or candy fondant. I actually like it better than royal icing because it doesn’t dry as teeth-breakingly rock hard. You could also use a variation of the icing I used on my vegan gingerbread cookies. The shortbread-style dough here is less sweet than a normal cookie, which is a must for frosted cookies.
Cookie cutters: not just for Christmas anymore!
If you only enter the cookie-zone around the holidays, you’re missing out on a whole year’s worth of cookie-worthy celebrations. I like to call these “party cookies” because they are always such a hit!
Unlike many of my recipes, these cookie aren’t seasonally flavored, which lets the fun shapes and decorating be totally adaptable, and inevitably the real focus!
Maybe you remember my eclectic collection of cookie cutters…with most designs being under $2, it really is easy to impulse-buy whenever the mood strikes. For the baby shower I decided on a baby onesie cutter like this one, which was inspired by the No Meat Athlete onesie Matt and Erin got for the baby.
Let’s break out the cookie cutters and rolling pins and get ready to celebrate with these Vegan Cut-Out Cookies!
Vegan Cut-Out Party Cookies
- 1 1/2 cups palm oil shortening, or 3 sticks palm oil based vegan shortening
- 2/3 cup sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1-2 tbsp lemon juice
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 2 1/2 cups dry fondant sugar
- 1/4 cup water
- 1/2 tsp almond extract (or any flavor you like!)
- Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
- For the cookies, mix together the flour, salt, and baking powder. With a mixer, beat the palm oil with the sugar until fluffy. Add vanilla and 1 tablespoon of the lemon juice. Stir in the dry ingredients until a cohesive dough starts to form. If it is too crumbly, add another tablespoon of lemon juice.
- At this point you can chill the dough for an hour to make it easier to work with, but you don’t have to. Line a insulated cookie sheet with parchment paper and spray lightly with baking spray. Dust with confectioners sugar. Take a small amount of dough, about the size of a tennis ball and flatten it with your palm right on the baking sheet. Dust your rolling pin with confectioners sugar, and roll the dough out to 1/4 inch thick. Cut out shapes with the cookie cutter, and remove excess dough, leaving cut-outs on pan. Place the baking sheet in the freezer for 10 minutes- this ensures the cookies will keep their shape and not spread. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until just barely starting to brown. While different trays of cookies are baking or chilling, you can keep working on pieces of parchment paper and then just transfer to pans when ready. It’s ok to re-roll the same dough twice, but try not to do it more than that so the flour doesn’t get tough. Allow baked cookies to chill thoroughly on wire racks. Makes about 3 dozen large cookies.
- For the icing, stir together the dry fondant, water, and extract. Check the consistency and add more dry fondant or water as needed; you want it pretty thick at first for outlining cookies, and then you can thin it out later for filling in color. Using a pastry bag or a baggie with a small hole clipped from the corner, outline the borders of your cooled cookies. Once the icing is sturdy, fill in the background of the cookie with a thinner icing, letting it “flood” into the borders. Once the background is dry, add colored icing to make carrots or any design, or sprinkle with colored sugars. Allow to dry uncovered overnight.
Whether you serve these cookies for a baby shower, birthday, or just keep them frozen for midnight snacking, they really are a great way to indulge with animal-free style. Plus, they are a lot of fun to make and decorate!
I absolutely can’t wait to meet the reason for these celebration cookies…the long anticipated Baby Fraz!
See you next Sweet-Tooth Friday, possibly with a brand spankin’ new NMA baby niece or nephew in tow!
xoxo Christine
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oh my goodness- these are SO SO adorable and PERFECT for baby NMA! I rarely eat cookies, but when I do…sugar are my favorite! Great job.
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Those cookies are so adorable!! I just copied down the recipe – can’t wait to try them out. My vegan tummy thanks you in advance though 🙂
.-= Catherine´s last blog ..Good ol’ Italian! =-.
Christine, those are the most ridiculously cute things I’ve ever seen! That baby is going to be so lucky to have you for an aunt:)
Wow those are probably the cutest cookies I have ever seen in my life. Just…wow! I love the short and simply ingredient list, but i have 1 question! Can coconut oil or butter be substituted for the shortening? Thank you for a fabulous recipe!!
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Hey Michelle,
I think coconut oil would work since it is a thick consistency like the palm oil. However since coconut oil melts very easily, I’m not sure if that would make the cookies spread out in the oven too much. I bet it would be fine, especially if you freeze the cookies into shape before baking. Thanks for commenting!
-Christine
Those cookies are sooo cute! They must have been so much fun to make for the baby shower! Thanks for the recipe! 🙂
.-= Aimee (I Tri To Be Me)´s last blog ..Humpastry Day – Whole Wheat Pizza Dough =-.
I had these cookies!!! They were soooooo good! And very cute!
cutest babyshower cookies ever! love love love them!
These are probably the cutest cookies on eart. How adorable!!
those cookies are ABSOLUTELY ADORABLE! i love them. and i am also hoping there is a new niece or nephew to present soon 🙂
.-= Holly (The Healthy Everythingtarian)´s last blog ..I Like to Think =-.
you did such a great job on these – they are adorable!!
How flippen cute these are!
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These look delicious, but my daughter, who is a vegan , says she can’t have them. She says that the fondant sugar contains egg whites. Vegans do not eat eggs.
However, I am not familiar with fondant sugar, so I couldn’t say she’s right or wrong about that.
These are completely adorable! My only concern would be the use of Palm Oil. Palm Oil is one of the main contributors to the decline in Orangutan numbers as their habitat is destroyed for plantations and they’re often killed in the process – also, once an area has been planted with Oil Palms it’s incredibly difficult to restore the forest as the trees change the nature of the soil etc. Chances are if you’re a vegan it’s at least in part to prevent animal cruelty so it’s really important to check where your palm oil is coming from. I know a lot of vegans have eliminated palm oil from their diet even though it’s technically not an animal product because of the harm that it does to this species. So if you can substitute for coconut oil that you know is sustainable or perhaps use a different variety of vegan shortening so you can still enjoy these awesome cookies then that would be great! 🙂
Those are the cutest cookies EVER!