Sugar Cookie Recipe (Gluten-Free, Paleo) (2024)

Do you remember what you got for Christmas when you were sixteen? Neither do I,but I can tell you that was the year my momended a huge argument between us by shoving her fist into a raw chicken, treating it like a puppet, and refusing to answer questions unless I directed them TO THE CHICKEN.

And she can’t tell you what she got for Christmas when she was seven, but she’s never forgotten the time her mom brought a horse in the house to cheer her up during a long recovery from pneumonia. (The horse never forgot, either. It started breaking in and making itself sandwiches in the kitchen.)

It’s so easy to get preoccupied with wrappingpresents (which I love giving) and checking off lists this time of year. So easy, in fact, that we can forget to give our kids the one thing that will last a lifetime: MEMORIES.

Some of my favorite childhood memories happenedin the kitchen: baking, throwing pasta against the wall, and even once turning our tile floorinto a slip n’ slide. Unfortunately, those memories were alsofilled with neon cereal and fake cheese, whichcontributed to the health struggles I faced later on.

With my kids, I want to bring all the magic and none of the junk, which is why we spent one of our mornings this week baking up sugar cookies. Since it’s pretty much the best time of year to bake, I thought I would share the recipe with you.

It’s adapted from this paleo chocolate chip cookie recipe, but I’ve dialed up the vanilla and made the dough a bit more firm so that it’s easier to roll. The dough and frosting are not super sweet, because I wanted my littles to be able to use sugar sprinkles liberally without the cookie becoming too sweet, so you’ll want to adjust the sweetness using sprinkles or even just plain rapadura, maple or coconut sugar over the top.

Now, I’m not saying it’s going to be perfect

Making memories is messy. You might end up mixing the frosting with a lopsided hand mixer and splatteritall over the wall.

You might carefully bob and weave to prevent countless kid spills, then dump saltall over the kitchen table. You might even drop your phone in a bowl of frosting.

Butyour kids won’t remember that. They’ll remember sprinkles, and icing, and laughter, and the way the preschoolershouted, “Yay, we’re going to eat humans!” when you suggest gingerbread men.

They’ll remember YOU, guiding the way they roll out the dough and talking with them about what’s on their mind. Andthat’s exactly as it should be.

A note on decorating

Regular food dye posesa “rainbow of risks” – cancer, hyperactivity, and more. I’d much prefer to create beautiful colors with naturally derived plant, fruit, and veggie extracts,thankyouverymuch. To decorate, we used:

• This natural food dye to color our frosting. For yellow we used a little of the yellow dye, and for orange we used double the amount. For green, we mixed yellow and blue.
• These naturally colored sprinkles

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