Recipe without butter, please?

GermanaGnosher

Hi everybody, I need to make cookies without milk and/or derivatives (therefore no butter) for a child in my daughter's class. I went ahead and tried to substitute butter with shortening in my trusted vanilla/lemon recipe, and it was a DISASTER!!! The dough came out unmanageable ever after chilling so I had to add more flour, and then the cookies spread like there was no tomorrow (They basically "relaxed" until they all joined together, and they were not close to start with!)

Next I'm going to try and substitute butter with margarine, but if someone out there already has a tested and tried recipe I'd be happy to see it. There's plenty of cookie recipes out there without butter, but we all know how different it is when what you need are soon-to-be-decorated cookies!

Thanks

4/11/143:00 PM

Original Post

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The Tailored Cookie CoSuper Gobbler

Maybe try doing 50% shortening and 50% margarine as a butter substitute (so if the recipe calls for 2 cups of butter do 1 cup shortening and 1 cup margarine)?

4/12/147:15 PM

GermanaGnosher

Originally Posted by TheTailoredCookie:

Maybe try doing 50% shortening and 50% margarine as a butter substitute (so if the recipe calls for 2 cups of butter do 1 cup shortening and 1 cup margarine)?

Thanks for your input! What advantages would that have as compared to only margarine? I know in the US you are used to shortening, here in Europe not so much and I'm not sure about it.
What I have noticed in the disaster cookies is that they were much "flakier" than when I use butter. The dough is still in the freezer... I guess it's going to become a pie

4/13/141:45 PM

Alejandra_Bake&FUNGobbler

Hello Germana, I have this (easy) recipe with no butter. Maybe you should try it ;-)

Here is in spanish (with pictures): http://bakeandfun.blogspot.com...as-para-decorar.html ..

Here I do my best translating:

"Mediterranean Cookies"

80 ml de olive oil (SOFT not virgin)* or corn oil

1 egg

150 g icing sugar (or 120g white sugar)

300 g flour

1 orange or lemon zest
How to

Mix sugar and oil with a wooden spoon

Add egg and beat until your mix changes its consistency

Add zest

Add the flour gradually and (because you won't be able to use the spoon anymore at this point), integrate by hand :-)

Then (inmediatly) you can roll out the dough and cut out your cookies.
This is a cookie dough "to make and use". Don't refrigerate it or effectively will be a disaster.

The cookies consistency is a bit different from those made with butter, but they taste really good and of course, you can decorate them! :-)

TIP: If you try using margarine instead of butter take out the white eggs from your recipe. Use only yolks since the margarine contains a lot of "water" and less fat and then you need to compensate your ingredients.

I hope you get great results! :-)

4/14/144:34 PM

GermanaGnosher

Originally Posted by Alejandra_Bake&FUN:

Hello Germana, I have this (easy) recipe with no butter. Maybe you should try it ;-)

Here is in spanish (with pictures): http://bakeandfun.blogspot.com...as-para-decorar.html ..

Here I do my best translating:

"Mediterranean Cookies"

80 ml de olive oil (SOFT not virgin)* or corn oil

1 egg

150 g icing sugar (or 120g white sugar)

300 g flour

1 orange or lemon zest
How to

Mix sugar and oil with a wooden spoon

Add egg and beat until your mix changes its consistency

Add zest

Add the flour gradually and (because you won't be able to use the spoon anymore at this point), integrate by hand :-)

Then (inmediatly) you can roll out the dough and cut out your cookies.
This is a cookie dough "to make and use". Don't refrigerate it or effectively will be a disaster.

The cookies consistency is a bit different from those made with butter, but they taste really good and of course, you can decorate them! :-)

I hope you get great results! :-)

Muchas gracias!
And thanks also for taking the trouble to translate, I know how hard it can be! Of course you didn't know I could also read Spanish

I have already baked the cookies for this time, but I will try your recipe for the next

Thanks especially for the tip about using margarine, it does make a lot of sense. I have found that when I leave the egg whites in, the cookies tend to spread a bit more. This time by adjusting the oven I managed to limit the spreading but I still had to re-shape the cookies as soon as they got out of the oven.

Lots and lots to learn!

4/15/141:50 AM