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Vegan Sugar Cookies


Vegan Sugar Cookies

This is a recipe from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar with my own method of making and handling the dough.


Ingredients

  • 2 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 T cornstarch
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1/4 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 cup vegetable shortening, room temperature
  • 1/2 cup butter, softened (we like Earth Balance buttery sticks)
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1/4 cup non-dairy milk
  • 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
  • Yield: 2-3 dozen, depending on the size of your cookie cutter(s)

Sift the flour, cornstarch, salt, and baking powder in a medium-sized bowl. Set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, beat the shortening until smooth. Add the butter and beat until both are well combined. Add the sugar and cream until fluffy. Don't shortchange this step. Creaming your butter and sugar properly can take 5 minutes even with a stand mixer.

Mix in half of the dry ingredients and all of the milk and vanilla extract until just combined. Add the remaining dry ingredients and mix until it forms into a nice soft dough.

Split the dough into thirds (or if you have really large cutters, you might want to only split the dough in half), flattening each into a disk, wrapping them separately in plastic wrap, and sticking them in the fridge for at least 3 hours so that they're thoroughly chilled. Line 2 (or 3 or 4 if you have room in your fridge for them) baking sheets with parchment paper.

Why did you need to split the dough? The thing with sugar cookie dough is you want to minimize the number of times you re-roll it. You also want it to stay chilled. So, working with a piece of dough that's fairly large means you're going to end up re-rolling the scraps several times. Your dough's going to keep getting warmer and softer, and you're going to have to keep using more and more flour to prevent sticking, which means more flour kneaded into your cookie dough.

By dividing the dough into thirds, you can keep 2 disks chilling in the fridge while you work the 1. Using equal portions of flour and powdered sugar, dust your pastry board. Gently roll the dough out until it's 1/4" thick. Try to only roll the pin forward, away from you. Avoid rolling it back and forth. Rotate the dough frequently to prevent/check for sticking and to ensure your dough will have a uniform thickness.

If you're using several cookie cutters, try to lay them out strategically before you make the cuts in order to minimize the amount of scrap dough left. If you're only using one or two cutters, just have at it and hope for the best.

Using a spatula, unless you like thumbprints in your sugar cookies, transfer the dough onto your prepared cookie sheets leaving 2 inches between cookies. Overcrowding your cookie tray results in one super cookie instead of several individual cookies. Which is what you might be going for. I'm not judging. Once your tray is full, stick it in the fridge.

Hopefully, you've done a fantastic job and only have a small amount of scrap dough left. Take out your second disk of dough and stick your scrap dough onto it. Now you've got a new piece of chilled dough to work with and your leftover dough will be incorporated into it.

If you ended up with quite a bit of scrap dough, you have 2 options.


1) If the dough is still chilled and seems stiff enough to work with, you can smoosh it into a ball and re-roll it to cut out more cookies.


2) If not, form it into a mini disk, wrap it up, and stick it back into the fridge until it's chilled enough to work with.

Keep rolling and cutting until you either run out of dough or run out of baking sheets. Now leave them sitting in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. This will help ensure the cookies maintain their shape while baking. If you pop them in the oven without chilling them first, they'll taste just as good but your mittens will have swollen wrists and your stars and snowflakes will look even wonkier than they already do (no judging!). It's a risk some are willing to take to get to the eating portion of this exercise a little sooner.

Preheat the oven to 350degF. Bake the cookies for 8-10 minutes. You want to take them out before the edges start to brown. Leave them on the tray for a few minutes to firm up before transferring to a wire rack to cool.



After the cookies are cooled, make the icing.


Vegan Royal Icing


Ingredients

  • 3/4 cups powdered sugar
  • 3 tsp water
  • 3/4 tsp light corn syrup
  • liquid food coloring, optional

Make sure your cookies are completely cooled before you make this icing because it starts to get stiff after a few minutes and that makes it difficult to work with.

Whisk the sugar, water, and corn syrup together until it's smooth. Add the food coloring. Pour it into a plastic squeeze bottle like they use at sub shops for the vinegar. Outline your borders first. Fill in the middle a little at a time, using a pastry brush to spread the icing around and smooth it out. If you want to do multiple colors, you'll need more squeeze bottles and pastry brushes. Make sure to do the color boundaries first to prevent any bleeding.

By min | December 16, 2014, 11:35 AM | Vegan Vittles