These no-chill and no-roll Gluten Free Sugar Cookies are super easy to make and can be eaten as-is or dressed up for any holiday or occasion! Our sugar cookies are not only gluten free, but they’re also vegan, allergy friendly, and nut free.
Hey friends, I’m back with another allergy friendly recipe for you, and this one is top 8 free! If you’ve been looking for an easy gluten free and dairy free sugar cookie recipe, we’ve got you covered.
Our Gluten Free Sugar Cookies are based off of our popular No Chill Vegan Sugar Cookies. I love these sugar cookies (and our chocolate sugar cookies) because they are so easy to make: no chilling the dough or rolling required.
You mix them up the cookie dough and can bake them right away!
Our sugar cookies are also extremely versatile, so you can make them for any holiday or occasion. Read on for tips on making these and how to dress them up for special occasions.
We have 2 recipe cards in this post: one for the sugar cookies and one for the buttercream frosting that you can make to add to the cookies if you like. Don’t miss the second recipe card for the frosting, it’s at the bottom of the post!
How to make gluten free and vegan sugar cookies
Our allergy friendly sugar cookies are so easy to make, and they are top 8 allergen free! There are a few simple steps to make these, and it’s simple:
- Preheat your oven
- Whisk the dry ingredients together
- Cream together the palm shortening, sugar, vanilla, and rice milk
- Add the dry ingredients to the shortening mixture
- Roll the dough into balls
- Roll the balls in sugar and flatten slightly before baking
When baked for the recommended 11 minutes, these end up nice and crispy around the edges and chewy in the middle. You can bake these just a minute or 2 longer if you want to have a crispier sugar cookie.
These will be quite soft immediately out of the oven, so you’ll need to leave these on the pan for 5+ minutes to cool a bit to firm up before removing to a wire rack to cool more. You’ll crumple these cookies if you try to move them off the cookie sheet too soon!
Fun variations for our sugar cookies
Since our gluten free sugar cookies are simple and easy to adapt with different flavors, you can make just about any variation you can think of to dress these up.
Here are a few ideas for fun variations of these cookies:
- Add mini chocolate chips
- Mix in sprinkles for “birthday cake” sugar cookies
- Add orange zest and a little orange juice instead of rice milk for orange cookies
- Add cinnamon to the dough and to the rolling sugar for a snickerdoodle cookie
- Lemon zest and a little lemon juice for lemon cookies (or make our recipe for soft lemon cookies)
Holiday and seasonal variations
These dairy free sugar cookies are great left plain or dressed up for various holidays with some of our buttercream frosting and fun sprinkles.
We love using the McCormick natural food color powders to add some natural color to the frosting. This is a fun way to decorate for every season!
Here are a few ideas for holiday variations for these cookies:
- Add some natural pink food color powder to make pink frosting for Valentine’s Day.
- Add cinnamon to the dough and top with purple, yellow, and green sugar to make king cake cookies for Mardi Gras
- Use yellow and blue food color powder to make a green frosting for Saint Patrick’s Day and top with shamrock sprinkles
- Make a pastel blue or purple frosting and add some pastel colored sprinkles for Easter.
- Top with white frosting and red and blue sprinkles for the 4th of July.
- Add cinnamon and apple pie spice to the dough and the rolling sugar for a fall spiced sugar cookie.
- Spread the cookies with purple frosting and monster sprinkle mix for Halloween
- Use white frosting with snowflake sprinkles, red and green sprinkles, or crushed peppermint sticks for Christmas.
Check out all of our sugar cookie recipes:
- No Chill Vegan Sugar Cookies
- Chocolate Vegan Sugar Cookies
- Apple Butter Brown Sugar Cookies
- Frosted Lemon Cookies (soft sugar cookie base)
Gluten Free Sugar Cookies (Top 8 Free and Vegan)
Ingredients
- 1 cup all-purpose gluten free flour blend (I used King Arthur Flour gluten free flour)
- ½ teaspoon baking powder
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- ⅓ cup sustainably sourced palm oil (I use Spectrum or Nutiva)
- ½ cup unbleached cane sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 3 Tablespoons rice milk (or other dairy free milk)
- 2 Tablespoons sugar for rolling, optional
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 350° F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the gluten free flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside
- In another medium sized bowl, using a hand mixer cream together the palm oil and sugar using, then add in the vanilla and rice milk and beat together again until creamy and a little fluffy.
- Add the flour mixture to the palm oil mixture and blend together using a hand mixer until a thick dough forms. The dough should be thick and not too sticky
- Roll the dough into 1-inch balls and roll the cookie dough balls in sugar if you like
- Place the cookies on the prepared baking sheet at least 1-inch apart and slightly flatten the cookie balls
- Bake for about 10-12 minutes in the preheated oven.
- Allow to cool on the cookie sheet for about 5 minutes before moving to a cooling rack
- Store in an airtight container for up to 4 days. Leave these on a wire rack for a couple of hours before storing if you want them crispier.
- Enjoy!
Notes
Nutrition
Here’s the recipe for our favorite buttercream frosting. It’s so good!! It’s great for both cakes and cookies and is gluten free, dairy free, vegan, and peanut free.
Best Dairy Free Buttercream Frosting
Ingredients
- ½ cup dairy free soy free butter, completely softened (Country Crock Plant Butter or Earth Balance Soy Free work great)
- 3 cups powdered sugar
- 2 Tablespoons rice milk (or other dairy free milk)
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- Dash salt
Instructions
- In a large bowl, beat the dairy free butter with a hand mixer or stand mixer until creamy, then add half the powdered sugar and blend.
- Add the other half of the powdered sugar, along with the rice milk, vanilla, and dash of salt and beat until creamy. You can use 1 Tablespoon of rice milk to make this thicker, but we found this is silkier and smoother with 2 Tablespoons of rice milk.
- Beat the frosting until it is silky, smoothe, and creamy, and a good consistency for piping if you are decorating with a piping bag and frosting tips.
- Use the frosting to top cakes or cookies. Store at room temperature in an airtight container for up to 3-4 days.
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
The best allergy friendly sugar cookie I have ever made. I rolled them in cinnamon and sugar. I followed the recipe exact except I added 1/4 cup of melted butter instead of 1/3cup of oil. They were amazing and tasted like they had all the allergies!! Thank you so much for sharing your recipe!
Thank you so much Emily, glad you loved these!
Hi, I am looking forward to making these but wondered can I use the country crock plant based butter avocado oil sticks instead in this recipe?
Hi Rachel! I think you can, I’d just maybe use a bit less butter (maybe 1/4 cup instead of 1/3 cup) since the butter melts easier than the pal oil does. Or when you make your cookies, bake just a couple of test cookies at first to see how they bake up, if they spread out too much, add a bit more flour to your batch.
Could you use this recipe with cookie cutters to get different shapes? Not sure if rolling out the dough to cut out the shapes would change cooking time possibly since they are possibly going to be thinner?
Hi Desi, I’m not sure if these will work for rolling out and cutting with cookie cutters. But we have a roll out sugar cookie recipe that’s gluten free and dairy free if you want to try that one instead! https://thefitcookie.com/no-chill-gluten-free-cut-out-sugar-cookies-dairy-free/
Thank you Sarah Jane! Like you literally saved my Christmas with this sugar cookie. My little loves them and so does my husband. So I did replace the rice milk with coconut milk and I replaced the cane sugar with Lakantos golden sugar, I also used Bobs red mill GF flour. Everything else was the same! They came out so soft. I learned after the first batch not to cook them for too long. My second batch came out way better.
Thank you so much Valerie! I’m so glad you loved these 🙂
Do you have to use the unbleached sugar or can you use regular?
Hi Pam! You can use regular bleached sugar if you like, I usually use unbleached since it’s more natural, but they are interchangeable in recipes 🙂
Another awesome recipe! I used canola oil instead of palm oil as it was all I had available. My non-allergic husband enjoyed these cookies as well. Definitely a recipe to make again.
Thank you, Hope! So glad these turned out so well with canola oil, I’ll definitely try that next time I make these 🙂