It’s challenging converting a tasty recipe to vegan as the flavours and textures can be very different from the original recipes. I always think vegan recipes need to be more fun, so I am trying to come up with fun recipes on this blog that are not only vegan but look and taste as good if not better than the original. I’m trying these cookies out on three foodie friends in a minute who love dairy, and they don’t hold back in telling me what they think about my new recipes.
Ok, I’m back…they loved them and they thought they were very pretty and tasted delicious and wanted the recipe before I publish it. We all decided they would be very nice with vegan vanilla ice cream, I love Swedish Glace and fresh strawberries or they would be perfect for making an ice cream sandwich with…or simply with just a slice of strawberry on top.

Recipe

Makes  20 cookies.

Ingredients:
1 cup of warmed mild coconut oil, you can use ordinary coconut oil too
2 teaspoons of vanilla extract
1/2 cup golden caster sugar
2 and a half cups of plain flour (I use white organic spelt flour)
1 cup of freeze dried strawberries Sainsbury’s baking section
1/4 teaspoon of salt
1/2 teaspoon of lemon juice
4 tablespoons of icing sugar

How:
Firstly, line a biggish baking tray with parchment paper or a silicon sheet. Set aside.
Mix the coconut oil, vanilla extract and the sugar together in a mixing bowl. Stir in the flour, salt and 3/4 of the freeze dried strawberries. Mix together to form a dough. It might be a bit grainy but it’s fine once it’s baked.
Wrap in cling film and place in the fridge for half an hour to firm the dough up.
Preheat the oven to 170°C.
Roll the dough out to a thickness of roughly 1/2 cm. I use a sheet of cling film on top of the dough when rolling it out so it doesn’t stick to the rolling pin.
Choosing your favourite cookie cutter, stamp out 20 cookies and place them on the prepared baking sheet.
Bake for about 10-12 min and then leave them on the baking tray to cool.
Mix the icing sugar with the lemon juice and a little water till you get a double cream consistency.
Drizzle this over the cooled cookies and then sprinkle them with the remaining freeze dried strawberries which you can sprinkle or smash up with a rolling pin and get even more creative with your sprinkling.
I found freeze dried strawberry slices at my local health store, Whole Foods Market, and added them too. You can get them online if you can’t get them locally.

I shop at:
Waitrose
Sainsbury’s
Tesco
Lidl