Dairy Free Sugar Cookies

I had a day to myself yesterday while Andy took Adam and Jack to a children's orchestral production of Peter And The Wolf that his mum and sister were playing in, so I decided to make some sugar cookies (or biscuits as we call them in the UK).

My piping skills need some work

The recipe I used was this one by Alton Brown, but with a few tweaks; I replaced the unsalted butter with a dairy free margarine and the milk with rice milk. Before I could do anything though I had to convert the measurements from cups into metric because I cannot work with measuring cups. I'm really picky about making sure I weigh ingredients down to the gram, so I hate how imprecise they are. The measurements I used were:

330 grams plain flour
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
225 grams dairy free margarine (I used Vitalite)
225 grams caster sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 tablespoon rice milk
Icing sugar for rolling out the dough.

I will say that I had some problems with this recipe, but I suspect that it has to do with the adaptations I made than the original recipe. The dough needed a lot more flour than I initially used, probably because margarine has a higher water content than butter so if you make any kind of dough with it it tends to need more flour to get to the right consistency. I think I also made a mistake with converting the cups to grams. One site I checked said that 1 cup of flour is 110 grams and another said that it's 142 grams, and I went with the lower of the two. I don't know exactly how much more I added, I just sifted in more flour until it looked like the right consistency. As it turned out, I didn't add quite enough but I was worried that too much more would make them bland and tasteless. The dough for the first lot of biscuits in each batch was a bit soft, but as the icing sugar was incorporated it stiffened up perfectly.

To ice them I just used a fairly thick glace icing (water and icing sugar) with some food colouring. It doesn't harden like royal icing, but Jack is allergic to raw egg so royal icing is a banned substance round here! I have found some vegan royal icing recipes though, so maybe I'll have a go at making a gingerbread house before Christmas.

From the rate the biscuits are disappearing I'd say that this recipe is worth keeping.