Easy Vegan Sugar Cookie Stars

December 12, 2016 · Natalie 84 Comments

Five healthy ingredients is all it takes to make these delicious vegan oat flour sugar cookies–ready to be cut-out & frosted into any festive holiday form! Gluten-free, oil-free, refined sugar-free.

Almost known as Easy Vegan CUT-OAT Sugar Cookies. Because they are cut-out cookies…but made with oat flour…see what I did there? Yeah, I think the backspace button was the right decision on that idea. It always sounds more clever in my head then it does out loud. Anyways, moving on…

After rambling on about my childhood gingerbread cookie house tradition, I’m not even going to start telling you about our sugar cookie decorating tradition.

I’m not going to mention how we would make them by the double double batch. Or the part where I would purposely put too much glaze on the cookies just so it would run off the sides and I could go through and “clean-up” the drips later like it was my job. I won’t say how many December dinners were eaten in the living room because the entire dining table was taken over by a red and green blanket of glaze-shiny drying cookies.

I won’t tell you about all the cookie snowflakes, ornaments, trees, and snowmen. Or about the lazy later years where we simply stuck with circles and left the festive vibes to the frosting. About the cracked or headless or hit-the-floor cookies that were instantly snagged and snacked, still warm, which was almost as precious a prize as the stolen floury bits of dough.

I won’t tell you about my favorite part: the unspoken, graceful cooking-creating rhythm. Roll, cookie-cutter cut, on the pan, into the oven, wait for the timer, check for golden brown edges, off the pan, stacked, sorted, ready for frosting. After dozens and dozens of cookies it became like a harmonious dance. No one needed to say which pan went in first or came out next, these things were just known between my mom, my sister (when she would take part), and I. Still to this day that is the most vivid memory the word “baking” evokes for me.

But I’m not going to ramble on for 3 paragraphs about that or you are going to start to think I was born in a crazy cookie cottage and raised by Keebler Elves or something.

Times change and tastebuds change and honestly those cookies are so sugary-sweet and buttery-rich to me now I don’t know how I used to eat 3 or 4 in a day and make it out stomachache-free?? Or perhaps all the frosting-eating, cookie-fun memories have just crowded the stomachache memories right out of my head.

So this year I wanted to make a vegan, gluten-free, oil-free, refined sugar-free, and stomachache-free sugar cookie, and that’s exactly what these sparkly sweet stars are! They use completely different ingredients–oat flour instead of wheat, maple syrup instead of sugar, coconut butter instead of butter butter–but are still sweet and holiday-perfect and ready to be rolled, cut, and decorated into any festive form.

The thing that surprised me most with this cookie makeover mission was that even with all those ingredient swaps, the aroma was still SO reminiscent of my moms original recipe. I don’t know why or how, most likely it’s the Christmas cookie magic!