Sugar Cookies
This recipe is the foundation of a lifetime’s worth of holiday merriment, a blank but delicious canvas for you and your kids to customize until your hearts explode with happiness. By way of texture, I aimed for something traditionally crisp, playing up the flakiness and butter-tinged richness. Just roll out the dough; they’re a cinch. In general, just about any flourish you can imagine to add to the top—sprinkles? Gummi bears? frosting?!—will complement this cookie with a little density. There’s a photograph on page 46, so you know what you’re working with.
Recipe information
Yield
makes 24
Ingredients
Preparation
Step 1
Preheat the oven to 325°F. Line 2 rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.
Step 2
In a medium bowl, whisk together the 2 1/4 cups rice flour, the sugar, arrowroot, baking soda, xanthan gum, and salt. Add the coconut oil, applesauce, and vanilla and lemon extracts and stir with a rubber spatula until a very thick dough is formed. Gradually add the cold water and stir until the dough is slightly tacky. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Step 3
Dust a clean work surface with some rice flour. Remove half of the dough from the refrigerator, place it in the center, and roll the dough around until the surface is entirely coated in flour. Dust a rolling pin with rice flour. Roll out the dough to 1/4-inch thickness.
Step 4
Cut out the cookies with your desired cutters and transfer from the work surface to one of the prepared baking sheets with a spatula, placing them about 1 inch apart. Repeat with the remaining dough. Bake for 7 minutes, rotate the baking sheets, and bake for 5 minutes more, or until slightly golden. Let stand on the baking sheets for 10 minutes.
Step 5
Fill a pastry bag fitted with your desired tip with the sugar glaze and decorate as desired.
Tall and Cakey
Step 6
Add 1/2 cup of flour to your batter and reduce the vegan sugar by 1/4 cup. The flour will add height and the result will veer cake-ward, obviously, but it’s the reduced sugar that protects against chewiness. As it cooks, sugar melts, spreads, and caramelizes, creating a compressed and tightly wound cookie.
Soft-Baked, for That Slightly Undercooked Vibe
Step 7
Add an extra 1/4 teaspoon xanthan gum and remove the cookies from the oven 4 minutes before the specified cooking time. You should allow the cookies to become somewhat cool before eating or they may break. You’re left just this side of straight- from-the-fridge cookie dough!
Mega Chewy
Step 8
Add 1/4 cup vegan sugar plus 2 tablespoons melted coconut oil, and prepare for extreme decadence. This is not for the faint of heart, people. Adding these ingredients will leave you with a candy-like cookie the likes of which your oven has never seen.
Credit-Card Thin
Step 9
Reduce the flour by 1/4 cup. Make sure to bake until cooked through in the center—in general just a tad more than you would with your other batches. The really thin variety tends to get too delicate and tender if under-baked. You’ll know they’re done when you tap your finger in the center and it doesn’t leave a dent.
