BellyHealthy

Hooray!!! After only a couple dozen dairy free cookies coming out of the oven and sliding directly into the rubbish, I’m getting the hang of baking, and these turned out much easier than the last big batch (which is why they weren’t included in the Dairy Free Thanksgiving Cookies post). I guess the trick was really to watch them brown and take them out immediately to finish ‘cooking’ on the racks. You’re going to need a cookie gun to make them look like this, and given the negative reviews on most cookie guns online, I’m going to vouch for a cheapo Wilton one, so if it breaks you won’t cry or feel like you wasted too much money. I think mine was $5 on sale after the holiday season last year.

To make your own lavender sugar, you’ll either need some culinary lavender and a couple of weeks, or a month and infinite amounts of patience. I happened across a lavender farm a few months ago where the work of sifting the lavender from impurities was already done for me, so all I had to do was put the buds in some cheesecloth and let it sit in an airtight container of sugar for a month. To find out more about culinary lavender, read this article I wrote on my personal blog.

The tin in the photo is because I made these as a birthday gift, and the juice was my breakfast, carrot and celery. Come on, with all these cookies, I’ve got to pull back somewhere.

Lemon Lavender Spritz Cookies

Ingredients:
1 cup Nucoa
6 heaping tablespoons of Tofutti Plain Better Than Cream Cheese
1 cup lavender sugar
1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp grated lemon peel
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt

Directions:
1) Preheat the oven to 350 and cream the butter and ‘cream cheese’.
2) Add sugar and keep mixing until it’s all blended in and looks light and fluffy.
3) Toss in the lemon peel, vanilla and egg yolk and mix.
4) Gradually, add the salt and flour.
5) Press the cookies onto ungreased cookie sheets and bake for 12-15 minutes.

To get the yummy looking glaze on these, I mixed powdered sugar with a few drops of water and red and blue food colouring. I measured this out by eye: you’ll want to make sure the mixture isn’t too watery, or they won’t harden and dry on the cookies enough to be stacked in a cookie tin.