These Vegan Spiced Orange Cookies get their flavour from fresh oranges and spices like cardamom and clove. Get the recipe below.
Orange and clove
These Vegan Spiced Orange Cookies are a celebration of two ingredients that go so well together - orange and clove. Although other spices are used in this recipe it's clove that comes through the most as it pairs so well with the sweet and tangy orange.
Some might say it's a festive pair of ingredients which would make these perfect for serving during advent or gifting at Christmas. But, I love these all year round.
Lets take a closer look at how to make them.
Vegan baking
This recipe is another delicious vegan cookie recipe. In regular cookie recipes you'll often see butter and egg listed as ingredients. But, in this recipe we replace them with vegan butter (like Flora or Naturli) and we melt our vegan butter, orange juice and sugar to form a syrup. This is what binds the dough together like egg would.
As the food industry develops more and more plant based alternatives to dairy products it makes vegan baking even easier. If you can't get hold of special vegan butter, margarine will do just fine!
For more information about plant based baking, check out my big vegan baking guide.
Baking with spices
I love adding spices to my cookies and biscuits and it seems people love them too. Just think about the universally popular ginger biscuit or gingerbread.
There are different ways you can incorporate spices into your bakes, the most common being through the use of whole spices or ground spices. (You can also use fresh spices like root ginger but that's not applicable here.)
This recipe for spiced orange cookies calls for a range of spices including:
- Cardamom,
- Cinnamon,
- Clove, and
- Ginger.
All of these spices have a lovely warming quality. Orange and clove in particular are a match made in heaven which is why I add a little more clove than I do the other ingredients.
Whole spices
The term whole spices refers to a spice that is used in its entirety - in other words it hasn't been ground or processed in any way before being added to a recipe. Some common spices you'll find as whole spices include cardamom, cumin and coriander seeds, cloves and cinnamon sticks. Though, you can often find these spices as ground spices as well.
Whole spices often stay fresher than ground spices but are less easy to incorporate into baked goods.
This recipe calls for cardamom pods. Although you could use ground cardamom I think you get a more subtle flavour by letting them infuse into the vegan butter and sugar mix. But more on the process in the recipe card below.
Ground spices
It is possible to buy some spices already ground up. They are more convenient than whole spices as you can simply add them to your recipe at the same time as the flour and any raising agent (like the bicarbonate of soda in this recipe).
They have no impact on the texture or structure of the cookie dough but impart a lot of flavour. Because of that we have to be quite conservative with how much we use.
If you want to grind your own spices you can do this with a specialist spice grinder or appliances like the Nutribullet which is what I do.
Baking with citrus fruits
This recipe isn't all about the spices. The fresh orange flavour is essential for balance.
When baking with citrus fruits I think it's important to use the whole fruit. That means the zest as well as the juice.
When buying citrus fruits that you intend to zest, it's important you buy unwaxed fruit. Citrus fruit is sometimes coated in wax to make them last longer. But don't worry, you can remove the wax by scrubbing under warm water.
To zest your orange, simply use a fine grated or zesting tool to remove just the zest (not the white, bitter pith). As you remove the zest you'll notice that it contains a lot of orange scented oil. We want to capture all of this in our recipe.
Juicing an orange is easy. You can either do it using a juicer or just squeezing it well. I'm not sure I'm quite strong enough to do the latter and remove all of the juice so I use a conventional juicer.
Don't worry if you get "bits" in your juice. All we want to remove are the seeds (big and small) as we don't want to bite in to one of these.
While the zest will get added to the flour and spices, the orange juice will melt with the sugar and butter to make the syrup.
The recipe
Vegan Spiced Orange Cookies
Ingredients
- 100 grams non-dairy butter
- 75 grams caster sugar
- 100 grams golden syrup
- 1 orange juice and zest
- 3 cardamom pods
- 0.25 teaspoon ground cloves
- 0.125 teaspoon ground ginger
- 0.125 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 350 grams self-raising flour
- 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
Instructions
- Pre-heat your oven to 190C / 375F / gas mark 5.
- Line two baking sheets with grease proof paper and place to one side.
- Add the non-dairy butter, sugar, golden syrup and cardamom pods into a sauce pan and place over a low-medium heat. Let the ingredients melt while stirring to ensure the sugar doesn't catch.
- In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, ground spices, orange zest and bicarbonate of soda.
- Remove the cardamom pods then leave the butter/sugar syrup to cool completely.
- Once cool, add to the flour and stir to bring the ingredients together until it forms a ball of dough. Use your hands to bring the dough together completely.
- Divide the dough into 20 equal portions and roll into balls.
- Evenly space the balls over your two baking trays and bake in the oven for 8-10 minutes or until the are golden brown.
- Let the biscuits cool slightly before transferring to a cooling rack and letting them cool completely.
Nutrition
Similar cookie recipes
If you looking for similar cookies and biscuits, why not try one of these recipes which also use spices or citrus fruits.
The cookie and biscuit archive
For the full range of cookie and biscuit recipes on the blog, check out the archives.
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