25 Sugar Cookies They Won’t Know Are Healthy
Sugar cookies can be an important part of holiday celebrations, birthday parties, school holiday parties, and everyday life with children. Even if you don’t do treats very often, it’s useful to have some sugar cookie recipes up your sleeve, so you’ve got them at the ready when you need them. Or even when you don’t necessarily need them, but you just want a cookie. That happens.
These little Paleo cookies are made with just a few ingredients, and are sweetened with coconut sugar. Almond meal and coconut flour make up the base, and they have a pure vanilla flavor and a buttery, crumbly texture. Perfect for cutting out shapes!
Photo: Chocolate Covered Katie
2. Maple Sweetened Sugar Cookies
These cookies are made with almond meal and sweetened with maple syrup. Use coconut oil to keep them Paleo, and I recommend considering the optional almond extract ingredient. It makes these so decadent, like the best little bakery cookies!
3. Soft Egg Free Sugar Cookies
I’m willing to try cookies of all kinds, but it’s soft and chewy cookies that really have my heart. These cookies are nice and soft, and they’re made from a plantain with cashew flour, coconut butter, coconut flour, and arrowroot starch. Make sure you use coconut sugar to keep them Paleo.
4. Grain Free Sugar Cookie Cutouts
These perfect cookies are made with cashew flour, coconut flour, coconut oil, raw honey, and almond extract for a lovely, festive flavor. I’m a fan of the pistachio butter sandwich idea this recipe suggests, as it’s a beautiful color and flavor for these cookies.
The only “flour” used in this recipe is cashew flour from ground cashews. They’re sweetened with coconut sugar and a bit of coconut nectar and have a nice vanilla flavor. They’re also a bit puffier than other roll-and-cut-out sugar cookie recipes.
Photo: Meaningful Eats
6. Best Almond Flour Sugar Cookies
This blogger recommends using coconut sugar (the same amount) if you need this recipe to be Paleo—everything else is already Paleo-approved. You just note that if you use coconut sugar, the dough will be softer, so take care and make sure to chill it before baking.
These cookies are made with cashews, coconut flour, and tapioca flour. What makes them so easy, you ask? You can mix the dough up in your food processor! So quick and less messy, in my opinion. Remember not to preheat your oven with this recipe. Its timing is based on a cold oven.
8. Ugly and Delicious Hazelnut Cookies
Those are the blogger’s words—not mine! I think all cookies are beautiful, including these hazelnut sugar cookies, which have only five ingredients and are sweetened with coconut sugar. They have a lovely hazelnut flavor and buttery texture from the grass-fed butter.
9. Lemon Curd Sandwich Cookies
These cookies are grain- and egg-free, and are sweetened with a modest quarter cup of maple syrup. They’re sweet and lemony, and delicious with some lemon curd sandwiched in between. There’s a recipe included for vegan lemon curd, but you could also try jam!
Photo: Beyond The Bite
Have you ever baked with water chestnut flour before? Neither have I! But I’m excited to try it. These cookies have a smooth dough and are sweetened with maple sugar and maple syrup. There’s a recipe included for a beautiful pomegranate Paleo frosting!
11. Cookie Cutter Sugar Cookies With Dairy Free Vanilla Buttercream
Let’s be honest with ourselves here. Sugar cookies are amazing on their own, but they’re infinitely better when they’re frosted, right? This recipe is for both the sugar cookies and a dairy-free vanilla buttercream frosting made with palm shortening.
12. Orange Maple Holiday Cookies
These awesome cookies have such a rustic look to them when cut into stars, and they’re like a cross between a sugar cookie and a gingerbread cookie! They also have a sweet orange flavor to them, and an optional frosting recipe that takes things up a notch.
13. 3 Ingredient Sugar Cookies
It doesn’t get any simpler than that, does it? Better yet, these three ingredients are easy to find: unsweetened coconut flakes, coconut sugar, and an egg! Optionally, you can include vanilla, cinnamon, chocolate chips, or goji berries. You could make them superfood cookies!
Photo: Mangia
14. Frosted Valentine’s Day Sugar Cookies
This might be my favorite recipe, because it uses cashew butter! You could also use almond, or for a nut-free version, slightly melted coconut butter. All would be delicious, especially with the coconut butter and honey sweetened frosting spread across the top. Yum!
Remember these guys? Snickerdoodles are just a sugar cookie that’s rolled in cinnamon sugar before baking. This Paleo version is made with almond flour, honey or maple syrup, and vanilla. You can roll it in a coconut sugar and cinnamon finish, or just use plain cinnamon.
16. Perfect Paleo Snickerdoodles
Here’s another take on Paleo snickerdoodles. This one uses gelatin (Great Lakes green container) as a main component, which helps the cookies hold together, gives them a bit of a crisp, and happens to also work wonders for your hair, skin, nails, and joints.
These sugar cookies taste like a hot mug of chai on a chilly winter morning. Or on any day, really. They’re made with almond meal and tapioca starch and boast an assortment of spices, like ginger, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, and nutmeg, and they’re maple-sweetened.
Photo: Living Healthy With Chocolate
18. Vanilla Cookies With Creamy Chocolate Almond Filling
You could make these cookies with or without the chocolate almond filling, and they’d be delicious both ways (of course, you could also use a different filling of your choice). These are sturdy enough to take a filling, and have a honey-butter flavor to them.
19. Not-Sugar Nut Free Cookies
Of course, these are still sugar cookies in the taste sense of the word. But they’re sweetened with dates and made with a base of coconut flour, coconut oil, palm shortening or butter, eggs, and vanilla extract (plenty, for a strong vanilla flavor).
20. Sugar Cookies With Cacao Butter Frosting
This frosting idea is my absolute favorite. The cookies are made with almond flour and honey, and frosted with a frosting made from coconut butter, honey, coconut milk, and chopped raw cacao butter. The cacao butter gives the frosting a white chocolate flavor!
21. Chewy Paleo Cinnamon Sugar Cookies
These cookies have a soft and chewy texture from the green plantain and water chestnut flour that make up their base. They’re sweetened with maple sugar and baked with plenty of cinnamon for a sweet and spicy flavor that can even be sandwiched with frosting.
Photo: Full Up Eating
22. Fudgy Vanilla Almond Sugar Cookies
If you like your cookies soft and gooey, I have the treat for you. These cookies are made with almond meal and coconut sugar, and an egg white ensures they get a sticky, gooey, soft, and fudgy texture when you bake them up. These don’t need frosting at all!
These cookies may be sugar-free, but they’re plenty sweet, as they’re made with stevia and a little bit of raw honey (so it depends on what you consider “sugar”). A vanilla bean pod gives them an intense vanilla flavor, and ghee or butter gives them healthy fats and flavor.
24. Valentine’s Day Sugar Cookies
These cookies have a faint pink color from raspberry juice, but you could leave it out and they’d still be awesome. The base for these treats is almond and coconut flours, with a bit of arrowroot starch. You can use either honey or maple syrup to sweeten them.
25. Salted Chestnut Sugar Cookies
These easy and unique cookies have only four ingredients: chestnut flour, coconut oil, raw honey, and coarse sea salt, which gives these cookies their salted flavor. You could also add a bit of vanilla extract to give them a more complex flavor.
Thank you so much for including me!! 🙂
Hi, I am loving your recipes!!! I live Tasmania, Australia and it is impossible to buy Plantains here. I was just wanting to know can I substitute these for bananas? Or perhaps you may have another substitute to use? I am now needing to buy a printer lol so I can print out my favourite recipes. My family recently became Paleo eaters dew to my 14 year old daughters eating disorder. She has been battling this for more than 2 years. We were already eating gluten free and along the line of holistic foods.. if thats such a thing lol…. so really for us all we had to change was the no grain thing. I can not express how much this has changed our lives. I am so happy I brought your books, we use them every day, our favourite for breakfast is the banana nut muffins and the blue berry muffins, but I also like to use raspberry’s. I have even convinced my mother and father that Paleo food tastes good lol. I just wanted to share some love. Thankyou 🙂 Tammy