Lavender Lemon Sugar Cookies Without Butter
Do you ever find a flavour combination that you just want to throw in everything? Lavender and lemon should become one. It’s floral without being cloying, spring-y without relying on a marshmallow gimmick, sweet but with baggage. To give you the undersell, it’s nice and I think you’ll like it.
I first started making a variation of these vegan coconut oil cookies a few years ago using vegan butter, basically following a traditional sugar cookie recipe while subbing in vegan ingredients and adding the flavours that I wanted. They were delicious, but I’m trying to use less vegan butter in my baking (so I can justify using a metric tonne of it in my buttercream experiments), so I wanted to create a version that used coconut oil in its place. I also wanted to add in some white rice flour for cookies that snap when you bite them, then perfectly melt in your mouth.
In the recipe below I call for ‘culinary lavender,’ but there’s no specific strain of lavender used just for cooking. What’s more important is that you’re using lavender that isn’t sprayed with pesticides. I bought my bag of lavender buds in the loose leaf tea section of a health food store, but it may also be kept with the spices, or you can find it online or often at farmer’s markets.
This recipe is a riff on Oh Lady Cakes’ amazing (seriously, so good) Coconut Oil Sugar Cookies, which you can find here. If you’re looking for basic yet amazing sugar cookies with coconut oil, that’s the recipe for you. While there are some unexpected steps (notably adding in the non-dairy milk a tablespoon at a time and really making sure it’s fully incorporated each time), I’ve made variations of this recipe a bunch of times and it’s never gone wrong, so have faith in the recipe and have faith in your cookie-baking self.
Lavender Lemon Vegan Coconut Oil Cookies Recipe
Lavender Lemon Coconut Oil Sugar Cookies
Ingredients
- 1 tbsp culinary lavender buds
- 6 tbsp melted coconut oil
- 3/4 cup organic powdered sugar
- 3 tbsp unsweetened non-dairy milk
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 1 cup all purpose flour
- 1/3 cup white rice flour
For the lemon glaze
- 1 cup organic powdered sugar
- 1 juice of small lemon
- lemon zest + extra lavender, for garnishing
Instructions
- Line a cookie sheet with parchment and preheat oven to 350F.
- Blitz the lavender in a coffee/spice grinder until the buds are broken down a little but not so much they're powdered.
- In the bowl of a stand mixer, mix melted coconut oil and powdered sugar until fully mixed. Add in non-dairy milk a tablespoon at a time, making sure to incorporate fully after each addition + remembering to scrape down sides. Then add extract and stir again to combine.
- Add in the all purpose flour, lavender, salt, and soda and stir to partially combine. Add in rice flour and stir just until there is no dry flour remaining and a soft dough forms.
- Dust your work surface and rolling pin with flour and roll out the dough immediately, to about 1/4" thickness. Cut into twelve cookies (or maybe more, my cookie cutter was a 3" circle).
- Bake for 9-11 minutes. These cookies shouldn't brown much. Let sit for a few minutes on the cookie sheet to firm up before transferring to a cooling rack.
- While they're cooling, prepare the glaze by adding lemon juice to sifted icing sugar and whisking until fully incorporated.
- Once the cookies are fully cooled, dip the top of a cookie into the glaze, and let the excess run off for a moment before setting down + sprinkling with lemon zest and a few lavender buds.
