Vegan Maple Shortbread Cookies

I started making short bread cookies in health food cooking while I was in high school. This is a simple treat, most shortbread cookies are just flower, fat, and sugar. However vegan shortbread cookies are made with no animal byproducts, so this is a treat for everyone to enjoy, meat eaters and vegetarians alike. For those of you that are unsure of what a Vegan or Veganism is, you can sum it up to a belief in not using animal products of any kind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veganism

Spring is here and the maple syrup producers are producing maple syrup and other products made from the sap of the maple tree. Here is a Youtube video from the program How It’s Made on how maple syrup is made.

This recipe takes about one hour and makes 24 cookies depending on how you cut the dough.

Ingredients

2 cups of flour (500 mL)

1 cup vegan butter or margarine (250 mL)

¼ cup maple sugar (63 mL)

If you cannot get maple sugar you will need ¼ cup white granulated sugar and 2 tsp maple syrup to make your own maple sugar.

Equipment

Bowl

Pastry Cutter or Food Processor

Rolling Board

Sharp Knife

Cookie Sheet

These instructions are only if you cannot get maple sugar. Stir 2 tsp of maple syrup and 1/4 cup of white sugar together in a bowl so that the sugar absorbs the maple flavor. Let it stand for about 10 minutes then stir again before mixing in the other ingredients.

Combine flour, vegan butter or margarine, and maple sugar, using a food processor or with a pastry cutter in a bowl until a dough forms, it should be a little crumbly.

If it is too crumbly and wont hold together when you try to form a log, add a little maple syrup so that the dough sticks together a bit better.

Form into a rough square or rectangular log, I find picking up the square log and taping it on the board gives you nice flat sides.

Cover in plastic wrap and refrigerate for about thirty minutes to let the dough rest.

Dust a cookie sheet with flour.

Remove the dough from fridge, make sure the log is square or rectangular by tapping it on the baking board.

With a sharp knife cut cookies out to ¼ inch thickness (a little less than 1 cm).

Place the cookie dough on the flowered cookie sheet and refrigerate for another 10-15 minutes so that they keep their shape in the oven.

Preheat your oven to 350⁰F or 180⁰C.

Remove the cookie sheet from the fridge and bake for 10-12 minutes until you start to see the bottom edges brown.

Remove from the oven and let cool on a wire rack.

I would suggest you store them in an airtight container, but my boys eat the cookies as fast as I can make them.