The Vegan Shortbread Sessions

#NYTCookieWeekButVegan2023

Dec 20, 2023

ICYMI, this post is part of a series wherein I veganize all the cookies from the New York Times Cooking Cookie Week, arguably my favourite part of the holiday season. The challenge kicked off with an emotional introduction and some easy vegan butter and egg recipes right here. Links to the previous three cookies are linked at the top of that post if you’d like to catch up. Onward!

Okay, this is my longest one yet, you may have to click “open in app or online” to see the whole thing, but we’re doing three cookies here, folks! You can read one at a time, just take her slow. Or drink it in a gulp because you’re dying to make all the vegan shortbreads right now? Either way!

Allow me to take you back in time: it’s Friday December 1st, the day the 2023 Cookie Week recipes dropped. If you’ll recall from my intro, our beloved cat Jeph had died just over a week before; the weeks previous to that had been a blur of caretaking and grief. The imminence of Cookie Week, already teased on Insta, had been for days a little lifeline on the horizon. I was surely among the first who smashed the link that Friday. I bade my ailing novel farewell and treated myself to a nice little morning of binge-watching while cleaning the kitchen. I felt, for the first time in a while, alive. Yes, the cookies looked beautiful, fun, delicious. But also: maybe if I truly committed to making them all, I wouldn’t have to think about anything else for days on end! At that moment, nothing had ever appealed to me more. Yet three recipes gave me pause.

I immediately started obsessing over how best to replace the three separate types of animal fat in the Lemon Butter Curls; sourcing the freeze-dried strawberries for the Neapolitan Checkerboard Cookie; testing vegan royal icing for the Technicolour Cookie. Because I keenly felt that if I couldn’t veganize these three, the whole project wasn’t worth it. These were The Shortbreads. The indisputable glamour girls of Cookie Week.

In addition to the more intricate decoration techniques these three recipes employ, the cookies themselves felt daunting, too. Matcha, Mexican hot chocolate, and bourbon are such big flavours, there’s plenty for a vegan to hide behind. Shortbread is little more than flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. Whatever I used for the latter two had better actually taste good and make the texture right.

The whole time I was writing my treatises on drop cookies and squares, I was also trying to get a handle on What We Talk About When We Talk About Shortbread — what the different fats do to texture, how egg yolks function, how sandiness or melt-in-your-mouthness or snap and crunch were typically achieved. I ended up making this batshit chart, thinking I would wow you all with my chemistry chops — none of this sentimental self-reflection or NYT hagiography. Just cold! Hard! Baking!

By last week I had two types of egg substitute in play — psyllium husk and fava bean flour. I’d planned to do a few mini-batches of each type of shortbread, using different egg replacements each time. I aimed to test store-bought vegan butter to see how it stacked up to my own. But look: I was doing most of my baking between eight-thirty PM and midnight; washing my bowls and writing in the mornings; then putting on my business top and facilitating meetings at work as if I wasn’t a woman possessed, lightly coated in flour at all times. There simply wasn’t time to develop the Unified Theory of Vegan Shortbread of which I’d dreamed. I’ve included the chart above in case it does anything for you, but though I was initially proud to have made it, trying to analyze it frankly kills my buzz.

In the end, I used my good ol’ homemade butter for all three cookies. My scale was back in business, so I weighed my dry ingredients for these. For eggs, I decided to try just fava bean flour for one cookie, a mix for another, and pure psyllium for the last. I’ll get a bit into why I made each choice, but I have to admit it was mostly just vibes. I’ve said it before, I’m saying it again: if fear of science holds you back from baking, trust me: it’s fine! Or I got lucky! Either way, even if you fuck up a cookie, it probably won’t taste that bad! Sure, let’s quote Vaughn Vreeland again — “It’s a cookie! It’s the holidays, honey.” Truly. Allowing myself to simply riff my way through these buttery glamour girls last week was in fact just the kind of holiday my weird old brain desired.

—> The Actual Recipe (gift link!)

—> TL;DR:

I replaced the egg yolks with two tablespoons of fava flour mixed with two tablespoons of water that I let sit thirty minutes.
I replaced the cream with coconut milk.

I can’t lie, this recipe scared me the most. It’s so simple and elegant, relies on the highest variety of animal products, and employs not one, but two egg yolks to hit a texture akin to those incredible Swedish butter cookies in the blue tin. Could I do it?

Because my experience showed that fava flour made things “custardy,” I decided to use that alone to replace the yolks in the Lemon Butter Curls. I mixed up two tablespoons of fava flour with two tablespoons of water — approximating the weight of the yolks — and let it sit and hydrate while I creamed my butter and sugar and zested my grapefruit (Komolafe suggests grapefruit as a variation on lemon, and that sounded yummy to me!)

As is my Cookie Week tradition, I re-watched Komolafe’s video as I worked. Near the beginning she says, “I was going for a really melty texture. And how I got that was adding a lot of fat into the dough.” The camera then alights upon a block of butter, the two yolks, and the heavy cream. And I was about to add beans?? I glanced at my still-lumpy bean gloop and felt a wave of panic. I tried to get science-y again. Should I add more oil to get the same fat/protein ratio? What kind of oil? Would it just grease things up? But I gave my bean gloop a stir, she started smoothing out, I took a deep breath, and reminded myself to vibe.

The dough came together nicely, and tasted nothing like hummus as I’d feared. I used a simple sub of coconut milk for the heavy cream — the thick, fattier part at the top of the can — and that worked fine as well. Things were looking up!

When it came time to pipe my pretty curls, though, let’s just say Komolafe elegance was not quite on the table. She makes squeezing out her sea-horsey shapes look so effortless! But I was vindicated by the many commenters who said that even with the full complement of animal products, the dough was a bitch to pipe. Furthermore, I do not own a piping bag, but was somehow expecting the most from my ziploc with the corner cut off?

My first batch looked a little bloated, and I was worried they were too soft. I thought they tasted great, but I wanted to know if I’d achieved what Komolafe had intended. I reached out to fellow Cookie Week Completist and omnivore, Josephine D’Ippolito, to ask if hers were tender inside or crisp throughout. She kindly confirmed the latter, so I baked off another batch at a lower temp (300 degrees) for longer (30 minutes), to try to get it right. Indeed they were crunchy all the way through, and while David preferred it, I ended up liking the slightly softer ones better myself. I brought the latter style to a party at the end of the week, and if I do say so myself, they got raves — there was talk of “melt-in-your-mouth.” So whether or not I perfectly nailed the brief, it was a very nice shortbread! Fava beans!

The glaze for these is simple: just icing sugar and citrus juice. I found it a bit cloying at first, so I used a trick I learned from Mr. Fancy Desserts himself, Brooks Headley, who advises in his Superiority Burger cookbook to season fruit sorbet with powdered acids till they taste more like themselves. Because I’m a weird cooking nerd, of course I have powdered citric acid in the pantry — easily found at a health food store due to its use in skincare. I pass along this hot cheffy tip for when you want to crank the pucker up a notch without adding liquid. I also rubbed some leftover grapefruit zest with sugar and let it dry overnight, then sprinkled that on for my sparkly topping. Fun!

Cookie 5: Neapolitan Checkerboard Cookies by Sue Li

—> The Actual Recipe (gift link!)

—> TL;DR:

I replaced each egg yolk with a 1/2 teaspoon of psyllium husk, a 1/2 tablespoon of fava flour, and one tablespoon of water.
I replaced the egg whites with a one-to-one slurry of potato starch and water.

Okay, I said no hagiography, and I love all the Shortbread Girlies so much, but I simply must say: Sue Li is fully the secret stand-up comic of the Cookie Week crew; when she says her cookie looks like a little sweater, I live; and when she explains that it’s inspired by a checkerboard cake she used to eat as a kid in Taiwan, I’m shuttled back to this iconic pandemic moment during her Taiwanese Popcorn Chicken video that shows us Li can also be a vulnerable queen. 🙌

Of course she’s also got the baking chops, and this cookie looked so cute and tasty that I was actually excited to pull out my ruler (??) and make it. To replace the egg yolks, I went with a half-teaspoon of psyllium husk, a half-tablespoon of fava flour, and one tablespoon of water per yolk, just because I wanted to try a mix of the two. I let that mixture stand around about 15 minutes before use. The dough turned out crumbly as hell, but workable, which seemed to be many commenters’ experience, too. Thank god Li makes it clear in her video that it’s fine if your strips of dough break as you assemble your checkerboard logs. Because let me tell you, they broke a lot! But I forged ahead with some sort of altered-state confidence, because she’d told me it was going to be okay.

The other big thing to veganize for this recipe is the eggwhite Li uses to bind the different coloured doughs together into their cute-as-hell grid. Again, I wish I could tell you that I knew exactly what to do because of my encyclopedic grasp of Things That Gelatinize, but no. I just had a feeling that a potato starch slurry would work. I mixed the starch one-to-one with water, tested it on some scraps of Lemon Curl dough, felt satisfied with the result, and pressed on. I would guess that tapioca or cornstarch would work, too, but alas the experiment has yet to be done.

Listen. When I sliced off my own little sweaters and they didn’t fall apart? I have to say I’d impressed myself. When I baked them and they still didn’t fall apart? I could’ve cried! When they tasted great to boot? My heart sang!

Two more tips:

If you’re searching for freeze-dried fruit, the dubiously named Rotten Fruit Box has a real smorgasbord available and ships all over the world. They offer bags of “bits and powder” for cheaper, so if you’re blitzing them anyway, that’s the move.
I really don’t like to use plastic wrap and don’t keep it in the house. I mostly rely on washable ziplock bags, and was excited to share with you this great “no plastic wrap hack.” Hubris! I did roll my doughs into shape in ziplocks, then had to cut the bags open to get the dough out, lol. Then to roll my logs tightly enough to chill into shape in the fridge, I had to use aluminum foil — possibly even worse for the earth, definitely no better. If I make these again, I will buy a little roll of Saran; sometimes it’s okay to use the right tools for the job.

Cookie 6: Technicolor Cookies by Samantha Seneviratne

—> The Actual Recipe (gift link!)

—> TL;DR:

I replaced the egg with a psyllium egg.
I did a totally different icing recipe, coloured and flavoured with freeze-dried fruit.

For the cookie: I used a straight-up psyllium egg, busted out my ruler again, and cut out all the spices except the vanilla. Seneviratne’s recipe is for a robustly flavoured cookie that stands up to the royal icing onslaught, but I made mine plain, partly in deference to my spice-averse love, David, but for another reason as well. I had an idea.

Clearly the thick swirls of brightly coloured icing for which this cookie is named is the main attraction here. But I don’t like plain icing very much. Plus, as much as this Cookie Week project was mostly intended to function as the opposite of a “dopamine fast,” I also wanted to end up with cookies I could bring to our families’ Christmas celebrations. My parents like icing even less than me.

I mentioned above that I ran some icing tests way back on December second, so let’s briefly hurtle back there once more. That morning I’d gone to the health food store to look for matcha and freeze-dried strawberries. I found both, but the latter only in pathetically small baggies. I bought a couple in case I could find nothing else. As I walked home, caffeinated and pumped, I started thinking “What if I coloured and flavoured my Technicolour icing with powdered freeze-dried fruit? Wouldn’t that be fucking rad?” For full minutes I thought myself a genius, the true queen of Cookie Week. Then I remembered I was stealing straight-up from Eric Kim’s 2020 Frosted Sugar Cookie — an idea I’d filed into a small cave in my brain that had now staggered awake. When I realized my plan was pilfered from someone who knew what he was doing, though, I actually felt better about it! This meant it might actually work!

Back home, I pulverized strawberries in my Vitamix, mixed up a batch of aquafaba-based royal icing (I used this recipe, worked great!), and added some strawberries to half whereupon it became delightfully pink. Inspired, I threw some of my recently procured matcha into the other half. I happened to have some non-Cookie-Week shortbreads in the freezer already, so I went for it and drowned a few in icing. By this point it was almost midnight, the endorphins were flowing fiercely, so I was truly under the impression that the below result looked AMAZING:

The next morning they’d faded some, but I still proudly showed David who declared them “Maybe a little muted?” Very kind. Nevertheless, I was convinced my fruit plan would fly. By that point I’d found the aforementioned Rotten Fruit Box, promptly ordered sixty-five bucks worth of freeze-dried fruit, and dove headfirst into Matcha Latte Land.

All this to say…what? I guess I wanted to tell you that I’d tested this before, it kind of worked, so when I set about doing it again, it wasn’t totally out of nowhere; I could vibe with confidence. And vibe I did! In addition to the strawberries I needed for my Checkerboards, I’d ordered freeze-dried blackberries, mandarin oranges, and red grapes. I had this mulled wine situation in mind, so I eyeballed a fifty-fifty mix of grapes and blackberries, blitzed to powder, sifted out the seeds (copious!), and added some cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom. For the orange swirl, I blitzed my mandarin sections, sifted out the pith, measured out two tablespoons of that, and added half a teaspoon of turmeric to bump the colour up (plus turmeric tastes good!).

As for the icing base, pedantic as they can be, thank god once again for the NYT Cooking Comment Brigade. I’ll just copy the comment from the wonderful and generous Gayle verbatim:

As a cake decorator, I would use this icing instead: 2 cups sifted (yes, you need to do this) powdered sugar, 2 tablespoons light corn syrup, 1- 2 tablespoons milk or water, 1/2 teaspoon clear vanilla or almond extract. Mix til smooth using a spatula or portable mixer. Adjust to pourable thickness with addtl water or sifted sugar. Color and apply as directed in NYT recipe. This icing tastes good, dries hard, but isn't brittle like royal icing. Let the cookies dry overnight before packaging.

I had noticed that my royal icing had indeed dried up brittle, and dulled pretty fast. Gayle’s comment already had hundreds of up-votes so I decided to give it a whirl. You guys, this icing turned out SO good! I thinned it with two tablespoons water, one tablespoon lemon juice to start, because I like a little tang. I ended up with 200 ml of pretty thick icing which was enough to ice 18 of my cookies, as an FYI. I divided the icing into two bowls and to the first added 1.5 tablespoons of my berry powder, plus a drizzle more water to get it all smooth and nice. To the other, I added a full 2 tbsp orange/turmeric powder to get it as bright as I wanted, and thinned with a bit of water again. I let those sit, covered, while I readied my pouring station. The icings had thickened after sitting, so I added a bit more water and lemon juice to each, just stirring till things seemed right. I’m sorry I didn’t measure, but I was really vibing now! Just getting so excited to do! The! Thing!

It was really so fun! David was casually making coffee in the background of my video, not even realizing that I was reaching nirvana over here. Maybe due to my fruity riff, I think I’m the most proud of these cookies of all. They looked so beautiful to me I had to keep running to the kitchen to look at them as if they were my sleeping cats.

I was worried they’d get dull when they dried, but in the morning they looked shiny and glorious, and I was proud to pack them up for my party that night. The shine did dull over the next couple of days as the icing hardened more, but I just ate one now after five days in a tupperware, and they still look cool and taste great. I just can’t say for sure if the fruit-based glaze allows them to sit around for quite as long as Seneviratne advises. I’ll also say that the berries were so flavourful you could barely taste the spices in the final product, so the mulled wine thing wasn’t really there. I have some ideas about that for my next round of icing dumping, and to be honest I can hardly wait!

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