These vegan Christmas tree sugar cookies make an amazing addition to a festive cookie box along with other classic cookies like vanillekipferl, gingerbread, molasses cookies, and Linzer cookies.
Decorate them with naturally colored eggless royal icing with lots of different shades of green, or add a pop of color with sprinkles, and gold leaf to resemble baubles and tinsel!
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📖 Recipe Overview
- Taste - Sweet and buttery with a slightly tangy flavor.
- Texture - Soft and light inside with a slightly crisp outside.
- Level of Ease - Super easy to make, the dough is blast chilled in the freezer or can be refrigerated overnight.
- Best Served - Coming up to and during Christmas, they make the perfect festive snack or gifts for family and guests.
- Free-From - Eggless, dairy-free, and nut-free.
🧾 Ingredients Needed
Here's everything you need to make this easy vegan Christmas cookie recipe from scratch:
Use these cookies to create a forest scene alongside my vegan gingerbread house for a beautiful festive edible display!
Ingredient Notes
- Greek-style vegan yogurt. Made using vegan yogurt as an egg replacer which gives them a beautifully soft consistency and slightly tangy flavor.
- Vegan butter. Make sure you use vegan block butter (stick butter) and not margarine from a tub. These products have completely different levels of water content and cannot be used interchangeably.
- Cornstarch. This helps keep the cookies tender and binds together the dry and wet ingredients. This is often used as an egg substitute in vegan cookie recipes.
- Vanilla bean paste and almond extract add wonderful flavor to these vegan sugar cookies. You can opt to leave out the almond extract to make them nut-free, but I wouldn't skip the vanilla!
🥣 How To Make Vegan Christmas Cookies
Find the complete list of ingredients, quantities, and instructions in the recipe card at the end of this post.
These Christmas cookies come together in just a few easy steps. The dough is chilled in the freezer for a couple of hours, the key to getting that incredible fluffy texture!
- Cream together the butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl with an electric whisk or in a stand mixer until light and airy.
- Whisk in the vegan yogurt, followed by the vanilla and almond extract.
- Mix in the dry ingredients (flour, cornstarch, baking soda, and salt)
- Wrap the dough in plastic wrap, flatten it into a disc and refrigerate for a minimum of 2 hours (overnight works great).
- Roll out the dough to approximately ½ cm in height on a floured surface.
- Cut out the cookies using Christmas tree cookie cutters.
- Arrange the sugar cookies on lined baking sheets and bake in a preheated oven until lightly golden on the edges.
- Cool the cookies completely before decorating.
How to Ice Christmas Cookies
First, draw an outline of royal icing on the cookie, this icing should be thick enough so that it doesn't run down the sides of the cookie.
You can then "flood" the cookie using a more thinned-out icing, just add a little more aquafaba to the icing to make it a nice consistency that flows well without being translucent.
Wait a couple of hours until the icing is dry to the touch before serving!
📝 Recipe Tips
Dust your cookie cutters in flour. Keep a bowl with some flour on the side to coat the cutters before you use them. This will help prevent the dough from sticking!
Instead of Christmas tree cookie cutters, you can use festive cutters such as snowflakes, snowmen, Santas, or stars.
When using multiple colors of icing for your cookies, allow each color to dry to the touch before adding the next. This will prevent the colors from leaking into one another.
These vegan sugar cookies are perfect served with a cold glass of dairy-free eggnog!
💬 FAQs
Store them at room temperature in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks.
Freezing sugar cookies before baking helps to solidify the butter and creates incredibly fluffy baked cookies.
Freezing or chilling the cookie dough thoroughly will also help prevent them from spreading too much whilst baking, which is key for beautiful cut-out cookies!
No, these cannot be used interchangeably. As shown in the image above, baking soda helped create neater cookies with sharper lines, whilst baking powder caused them to spread more and have cracks on the surface.
The baking soda also reacts with the acid in the yogurt to give you a delicious tangy flavor!
🎄 More Christmas Cookie Recipes
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📖 Recipe
Description
Equipment
Ingredients
- 150 g (⅔ cups) vegan block butter, room temperature, *see notes
- 150 g (¾ cups) granulated sugar
- 30 g (1.5 tbsp) Greek-style vegan yogurt, or thick coconut yogurt, I use Alpro Greek-style
- 1 teaspoon vanilla bean paste, or vanilla extract
- 1 teaspoon almond extract, optional
- 250 g (2 cups) plain flour
- 1 tablespoon cornstarch, (cornflour)
- ¾ teaspoon baking soda
- ¼ teaspoon sea salt
- 1 batch vegan royal icing
- vegan dark chocolate, optional, for garnish
- gold leaf sheets, optional, for garnish
Instructions
- Make the cookie dough: Add the butter and sugar to a large bowl and use an electric whisk or stand mixer to whisk for 2-3 minutes until light and airy. Add the vegan yogurt and whisk again to combine. Whisk in the vanilla and almond extract until combined.
- Sift the flour, cornstarch, baking soda, and salt into the bowl with the wet ingredients. Bring the mixture together with a rubber spatula to form a dough ball, wrap it in plastic wrap, flatten it into a disc, and place it in the freezer for 2 hours. Alternatively, you can refrigerate the dough overnight.
- Roll out the cookies: Preheat your oven to 175°C (350°F). Lightly flour your countertop and roll out the dough to approximately ½ cm in height. Keep a bowl with some flour on the side to coat the cookie cutters before cutting them out to help prevent the dough from sticking. Place the cookies on baking trays lined with parchment paper or a silicone mat.
- Bake: Bake for between 8-10 minutes until the cookies are very slightly browned at the edges, they will look underbaked and that's what you want. Allow the cookies to sit on the baking tray to cool for about 5 minutes. Next, carefully slide the sheet of parchment paper with the cookies off of the tray and onto a cooling rack. Cool for another 15-20 minutes until they reach room temperature.
- Ice the cookies: Make a batch of vegan royal icing and color to your taste as shown in the post. You can also melt a little dark chocolate to create a bark effect on your Christmas tree cookies.
- Transfer the icing to a piping bag. Snip the very tip of the bag with scissors and start by piping an outline on your cookies. If you wish to coat the cookies completely in royal icing you can flood the cookies by continuing to pipe inside the outlines with icing that is a little thinner consistency.Decorate with some gold leaf sheets (if using) to create a tinsel effect!
- Storage: Place the iced cookies back on a cooling rack to allow the icing to dry completely for a minimum of 1-2 hours before storing them in an airtight container at room temperature.They will last in a sealed container for around 2 weeks.
Notes
- Vegan butter: Take this out of the fridge to sit at room temperature for 30 mins to 1 hour. Use vegan block butter NOT spreadable butter from a tub. I use flora plant butter or Violife Block.
Nutrition
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