Our soft apple butter brown sugar cookies are great for the early fall apple harvest. These cookies are great made with homemade apple butter, and they are nut free, vegan, and can easily be made gluten free as well!
What’s better than fresh homemade apple butter in the fall? Cookies made with apple butter!
If you’re enjoying apple season (we are!), then these cookies are a must-make. Our soft brown sugar cookies with a hint of apple butter are perfect for early fall, and they’re nut free, dairy free, egg free, and can be made gluten free.
I made these cookies with regular wheat flour since my kids can have wheat, but you can easily make these gluten free. I was tinkering around with my no-chill sugar cookie recipe and added some apple butter and they turned out delicious!
These delicious apple butter cookies are a type of brown sugar cookie made with brown sugar instead of white sugar. It adds a great flavor that pairs well with the sweet and tangy apple butter.
How to make apple butter cookies
Our apple butter brown sugar cookies are soft cookies. If you like crunchy cookies like my husband does, you just need to make a few simple changes to get crispy cookies.
For crispy cookies, all you’ll need to do is replace the brown sugar with white granulated sugar, use only 1 cup + 1 Tablespoon flour, and bake for 17 minutes. These will turn out nice and crispy!
We used wheat flour from Wheat Montana since it’s farmed and processed in Montana (our home state), but you can make these cookies gluten free easily by swapping out the all purpose wheat flour in this recipe with an all-purpose gluten free baking flour.
I’ve been working on a pumpkin cookie recipe with both white wheat flour and the King Arthur gluten free flour and they are both nearly identical and both turned out perfectly, so this is a good blend that works great for replacing wheat flour in my cookie recipe.
You can use just about any kind of apple butter in this recipe as long as it’s thick and not runny. We used our homemade Instant Pot apple butter in this recipe, but store bought should work fine, too.
Variations for apple butter brown sugar cookies
You can add some fun mix-ins to these brown sugar cookies to make them even more delicious! We made a batch of the crispy apple butter cookies with the Nestle Simply Delicious dairy free white chocolate chips in them that tasted alright.
We have mixed feelings about the Nestle Simply Delicious white chocolate chips. I LOVE their semi-sweet chocolate chips (the best!), but the white chocolate chips don’t taste as good to me when they are baked (they are not too bad when just eaten out of the bag).
Another way to change up this recipe is to roll the cookie dough in white or brown sugar before setting on the pan and flattening them a little, or simply dip the top of the rolled cookie in sugar before flattening slightly on the pan. We do this with our regular sugar cookies, but didn’t do them with the ones we took photos of.
Adding chopped or minced apples would be another fun way to add variations to these brown sugar cookies! You’ll want to add about 1/3 cup diced firm apples to the cookie dough.
Check out our other apple recipes!
- Instant Pot Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal
- Easy Instant Pot Apple Butter
- Dairy Free Caramel Apple Nachos
- Apple Butter Brown Sugar Cookies
- Gluten Free and Dairy Free Apple Recipes for Fall
- Gluten Free Apple Oatmeal Cookies
- Dairy Free Apple Pie Smoothie
- Ginger Apple Sparkling Cider
- Apple Cider Pancakes
- Apple Cinnamon Granola
Apple Butter Brown Sugar Cookies (Dairy Free)
Ingredients
- 1 ¼ cup + 2 Tablespoons all-purpose wheat flour (or all-purpose gluten free flour blend for gluten free)
- ½ teaspoon cinnamon
- ½ teaspoon baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- ½ cup brown sugar
- ⅓ cup sustainable palm oil shortening (I use Spectrum or Nutiva)
- ⅓ cup apple butter
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside, or set out a baking stone.
- In a small bowl, whisk together the flour or (gluten free flour blend), baking powder, salt, and cinnamon. Set aside.
- In another bowl, beat together the palm oil shortening, brown sugar, apple butter, and vanilla with a hand mixer until mixed well.
- Add the flour mixture to the shortening sugar mixture and blend together with a hand mixer until smooth and a dough forms.
- Roll Tablespoon fulls of cookie dough into balls and place them on the prepared cookie sheet and flatten slightly.
- Bake for 13-15 minutes. Allow to cool in the pan 5 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool more.
Video
Notes
Nutrition
Sarah Jane Parker is the founder, recipe creator, and photographer behind The Fit Cookie. She’s a food allergy mom and healthy living blogger based in Wyoming. Sarah is also an ACSM Certified Personal Trainer, ACE Certified Health Coach, Revolution Running certified running coach, and an ACE Certified Fitness Nutrition Specialist
Hi Sarah,
Please note how many cookies constitute 1 serving.
Thank you very much
Hi Kandy, a serving is 1 cookie. The recipe card lists 15 cookies at the top, and this is how the nutrition information is calculated, so this recipe makes 15 cookies and 1 serving is 1 cookie.