Vegan Blood Orange and Pistachio Cookies

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Vegan Blood Orange and Pistachio Cookies

These delicate Vegan Blood Orange and Pistachio Cookies are full of the sweet fragrance of blood oranges with some added crunch and nuttiness from the pistachios.

Prep Time30

Cook Time15

Chilling time1

Total Time1 45

Course: Snack

Cuisine: British

Diet: Vegan, Vegetarian

Keyword: blood orange, pistachio

Servings: cookies

Calories: 147.73kcal

Equipment

Rolling Pin
Cookies cutters
Baking trays
Cooling rack
Icing bags

Ingredients

For the cookie dough

150 g vegan block butter or margarine
100 g caster sugar
1 blood orange zest only
275 g plain flour
2 tbsp pistachios finely chopped
0.5 blood orange juice only

For the decoration

250 g icing sugar
0.5 blood orange juice only
2 tbsp pistachios finely chopped

Metric - US Customary

Instructions

To make the cookies

In a large bowl, cream together the butter, sugar and zest of the blood orange until light and fluffy (I use an electric mixer but this can be done by hand).
Add in the flour and pistachios and stir until combined; to bring it together into a ball of dough, add the juice of the blood orange and stir.
Lightly dust your work surface with flour and tip the dough out (don’t worry if its still crumbly at this stage, there’s no need to add extra juice).
Knead the dough to bring it together until its one smooth ball of dough. Avoid overworking it.
Wrap the dough in cling film or place it into a Ziploc bag and place into the fridge to chill for at least 30 minutes. While the dough is cooling, line a couple of baking sheets with baking paper and place to one side.
Once the dough is chilled, roll it out on to a floured surface. Be sure to move / pick up the dough and rotate in between rolling it out to stop it sticking to your work surface. Stop once the dough is roughly 5mm / ¼ inch thick.
Cut out as many cookies as you can and place them straight on to the lined baking trays. Place these trays into the fridge for 30 minutes.
Bring together all of the trimmings into a ball, re-roll and cut out more cookies. Keep repeating this until you have use up all of the dough and don’t forget to chill them before baking.
While the cookies are chilling, preheat the oven to 180 C / 350 F / gas mark 4.
Bake the cookies for 12-15 minutes until they are just golden brown.
Once baked, transfer the cookies to a cooling rack and leave to cool completely before decorating

To decorate

Sift the icing sugar into a large bowl and slowly add just 1 tbsp of blood orange juice at a time until the icing is smooth and thick. It should be thick enough to hold it's shape when piped. Be very cautious as it's much easy to add more juice to make it thinner than it is to add more icing sugar to make it thicker.
Pipe a border of icing round the edge of the cookie in any shape you wish.
Add a tsp more juice and then carefully spoon or pipe the thinner icing into the centre of the cookies, the outlines you have already created will act as a dam to stop it flowing over the edges of your cookies.
Add the finely chopped pistachios to the top.
Leave the icing to dry for an hour or two before eating.

Nutrition