Gluten Free Cream Cheese Cookies with Coconut Flour

These easy cream cheese cookies are gluten free, grain free, and refined sugar free. You can even make egg free cream cheese cookies! Keep them plain and simple, or dress them up with additional flavors. You may want to make a double batch!

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Gluten free cream cheese cookies are so simple and quick to make, yet so delicious! With only a few simple ingredients, and equally simple instructions, this is a great recipe to let the kids make.

If a special diet is making your holiday baking look daunting, give this recipe a try! If you can have dairy and coconut, you can make this recipe. I will include some ways to tweak the recipe below, as well as some flavors you might like to add in for different variations. These are wonderful just plain and simple, though!

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How to Make Gluten Free Cream Cheese Cookies

This is a wonderfully simple recipe! Kids can do it. In fact, it is my daughter’s favorite. She Who Loves Vanilla finds the flavor just right as-is. I like to add other goodies, too; it works well to make half the original way and then stir whatever you choose into the other half so you get two versions in one batch.

First, soften the butter and cream cheese. I just put them together in the mixing bowl, unwrapped, for an hour or two on the counter.

This is one recipe where I find it helpful to break out the hand mixer. If you have a stand mixer, use that. Beating the butter and cream cheese gives them a little extra fluffiness. Since we aren’t using sugar, there isn’t any of that to cream in. (Unless you do use sugar, in which case you want to beat that in before adding the other ingredients.)

It is nice to beat the butter and cram cheese together first, but it works fine to just dump everything in together. Are you in a hurry, or are you going tor the best possible results?

If you are familiar with coconut flour, you will know that the dough will thicken a bit as it absorbs moisture. Let it rest for a few minutes so this can take place.

If coconut flour is new to you, it will help you to know that coconut flour just works differently from all other flours. You need much less (about 1/4) than other flours. This is because it absorbs a lot of moisture. Allowing the dough to rest for a few minutes will help the consistency.

I like to bake one cookie first, as a test. If it turns out well, then bake the others. If not, I make a change and bake another test cookie. It is a little bit of a pain, but I like to avoid having a whole batch come out strangely. Coconut flour can be a little tricky, so the extra few minutes pay off.

If you make the recipe exactly as written, you might skip the test cookie. If you make any changes, you will find it worthwhile to make sure! See below for how to fix it if the consistency is off.

After the cookies come out of the oven, they will be quite fragile! If you remove them right away, they may fall apart. The more they cool, the sturdier they will become. This is all the more true if you added nuts or other chunky bits.

Special Diet Tweaks to Gluten Free Cream Cheese Cookies

There are various things you can do to make gluten free cream cheese cookies work for you! Here are some examples:

• GAPS diet– use GAPS cream cheese (long fermented with no gums or stabilizers), freshly ground coconut flour, and GAPS compliant vanilla extract or powder. Be vigilant about what you add in.
• egg free- leave the egg out! It works fine.
• no honey– if you aren’t a fan of honey in baking, you can use sugar instead. Anywhere from 1/2 to 1 cup, and cream it into the butter/cream cheese mixture for extra good texture. Honey makes cookies pretty soft, and sugar will give a better texture if you are fine with using it.
• no sugar– the original recipe for these gluten free cream cheese cookies was for the keto diet and used a sugar substitute. It works very well, so if you prefer, make the original keto cream cheese cookies instead.

Help! My cookie dough isn’t working right!

Baking with alternative flours can be tricky! I recommend baking one test cookie before sticking the whole batch into the oven so you can adjust the dough if the cookies flop. It doesn’t take that long, and you don’t want to lose a whole batch!

So what can you do if that first cookie doesn’t turn out right?

• if the test cookie is much too soft (spreads out too much), add a tablespoon of coconut flour and do another test cookie. Remember, a little coconut flour goes a very long way!
• if the cookie is too dry (eat it to check– you have permission!), try adding more butter or another egg. You will want to do another test cookie to check.
• if the cookie was close to right, but didn’t spread out at all (and you want it to), you could add more butter or other wet ingredient. If you basically like it, and it doesn’t have a dry feel in your mouth, you could just flatten it a little with your hand or with a drinking glass.

Optional add-ins

While these are delicious cookies as they are, you can add extra special items, such as

• sprinkles on top– before baking, dip the tops of the cookie balls in whatever sprinkles you want. So festive! I like these dye-free ones for a splurge. Pricey, but I bought them years ago and we do a couple batches per year, so they last awhile. Amazon doesn’t seem to carry a red-and-green version. I bought them from Sprouts; check there or your local health food store.
• chocolate! Mini chocolate chips would work, but I often grate a small amount of low sugar chocolate.
• nuts– pecans and walnuts, chopped up, are good.
• citrus peel– this is the next thing I want to try– orange zest is the plan, though you could also finely chop candied orange or other peel.

There you go! As easy and delicious a Christmas cookie as you will find, minus the gluten, grain, egg, and refined sugar!

Want another cookie recipe? Try my gingerbread drop cookies!