Who doesn’t love making Christmas cookies? It’s such a fun tradition for me and my girls that usually ends with lots of messes and huge icing covered smiles.
But one issue we usually run into is the fact that we’re a gluten and dairy-free home.
That can usually be fixed with a little gluten-free flour and some coconut oil (if you follow along with my recipes, you know I have my go-tos).
But sugar cookies heavily rely on butter to give them that golden, buttery taste. And if you look for sugar cookies recipes, oftentimes you’ll see people say that you really can’t substitute anything else for the butter.
Challenge accepted.
For a few years now, I’ve been trying out different gluten and dairy-free sugar cookie recipes. Usually they either taste bland or the shapes spread into blobs in the oven, and our beautiful Christmas tree and gingerbread man cookies become unrecognizable.
And nobody wants that.
So this year, I was determined to play around with a recipe that not only tasted great, but that actually held its shape too.
And guess what — we did it!
These sugar cookies tasted great without being too sweet (to accommodate for all the icing decorations), and they kept their shape SO well!
So let’s jump on into the recipe now so you can start baking a batch of your own!
GLUTEN-FREE, DAIRY-FREE CHRISTMAS SUGAR COOKIE RECIPE
INGREDIENTS
- 1 cup coconut oil, melted
- 3/4 cup sugar
- 1 egg
- 2-4 tsp vanilla
- 3 cups gluten-free 1:1 baking flour
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt
DIRECTIONS
- Combine flour, baking powder, and salt and set aside.
- Melt coconut oil, then beat in sugar, egg, and vanilla.
- Add in flour mixture and blend until combined.
- Cover and refrigerate for approximately 1 hour.
- Remove from fridge and preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Remove cookie dough from bowl, and begin rolling it out on a nonstick surface. Note: You might want to wet your fingers to help the dough combine. Mine came out of the fridge crumbly but became moldable with a little added water.
- Roll until dough is thin, but not too thin (about 1/4 in thick), then use cookie cutters to cut your dough into shapes!
- Place on a cookie sheet covered in parchment paper, and place in the oven for about 10-12 minutes or until the edges start to turn a light golden brown.
- Allow to cool completely, then begin decorating!
DECORATING
I’m going to tell you a big secret — I buy storebought icing. Sometimes I make my own dairy-free icing, but half the time, it breaks on me and I’m back to square one.
When there’s no time for redos, I just buy a few cans of storebought icing to have on hand. No shame in taking the easy way out sometimes!
I divided my icing into 3 containers — one small bowl of white, one pastry bag/ziplock bag of green, and one pastry bag/ziplock bag of red.
To create my colors, I used plant-based food coloring! You can find it all over, including at Whole Foods and on Amazon.
I cut small holes in my ziplock bags so we could use them to add detail to the cookies!
With the bowl of white icing, I placed it in the microwave for about 20 seconds until it thinned out.
Then, I dipped the face of each cookie in the white icing and allow that to try! That was the base of our cookies. I did this mainly to add a little more sweetness to the cookie!
Plus, that way, only small red and green details were needed, so this neutral loving mama got to keep lots of cookies simple and white!
THAT’S IT!
And really, that’s it! This recipe ended up being very simple and very fun! The hardest part was waiting 1 whole hour for the dough to harden!
Do you think you’ll give this recipe a try? Have another go-to recipe you love? Share it with me in the comments!