Gluten and Dairy Free Holiday Cut-out Ginger Cookies

These make a lot of cookies, so you may want to cut it in thirds.

Ingredients:

2 cups melted coconut oil (You can use regular butter, vegan butter, or a heart healthy oil if you prefer)

2 cups date molasses (You can use regular molasses if you prefer)

1 cup coconut sugar (You can use regular white or brown sugar or Stevia or Agave instead)

2 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp ground cloves

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground black pepper

1 tsp baking soda

4 tsp vanilla soy milk (You can use another type of milk like rice or coconut or use sweetened condensed milk instead)

6 to 8 cups Gluten Free Flour Blend or sorghum flour (You can use any gluten free blend you prefer, or the straight sorghum, or 100% whole wheat flour — you’ll need just enough flour to make a soft dough)

Baking Instructions:  (The dough needs to chill overnight so make the dough up  the night before you want to bake the cookies.)

1.  Mix the coconut oil with the date molasses, coconut sugar, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, black pepper, baking soda, and milk.

2.  Add in the gluten free flour, a cup at a time, only as much as you need to make a soft dough.  Blend well.

3.  Cover the dough tightly with plastic wrap and chill overnight, or at least for several hours.

4.  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.

5.  Line a board with wax paper.  Sprinkle the board and a rolling pin with flour of your choice, and roll out small amounts of dough to a very thin thickness – thin enough to make a crispy cookie but not so thin that you can’t actually move the cut out dough to the cookie sheet.

6.  Cut out shapes with cookie cutters and place on the prepared cookie sheets.  The cookies will not spread a lot so you can put them fairly close together.

7.  Decorate the cookies with colored sugar and/or currants. (You can also just bake the cookies and then decorate them with icing when they’re cooled.)

8.  Bake in the preheated oven for 8 to 10 minutes.  Start with 8 minutes and then go up by 1 minute increments.  The cookies should be browned but not burnt and slightly puffed.

9.  Move the cookies to a wire cooling rack and cool them completely. Once cooled, they’ll be nice and crispy ginger cookies.  If you eat them while they’re warm, they’ll be chewier.

10.  When the cookie are completely cooled, store them in a tightly covered container.  They’ll last for a few weeks, though after a couple of weeks, they’ll get a bit softer.