These home-made vegan jammy dodgers consist of a light, crisp shortbread biscuit sandwiched together with a spoonful of jam. I’ve used the traditional raspberry jam in the pictured biscuits. A simple alternative, which also tastes lovely, is to sandwich the cookies with melted, cooled chocolate.
There is definitely a place for shop-bought Jammie Dodgers (now that they’ve had a vegan relaunch after a few years of being banished from biscuit tins), but with a few ingredients and less than an hour to spare you can have the home-made version, which are much more delicious.
The generic name for this kind of thing in a linzer biscuit or cookie, after the traditional Austrian Linzertorte.
You need to work with the shortbread dough while it is still a little warm, so it’s important to have everything you will need – including cutters and lined trays – ready at the start (ie, what chefs call mise en place). Don’t leave the dough to chill. It will be too crumbly to roll once the coconut oil has set firm.
vegan jammy dodgers…
ingredients
- 60 g coconut oil
- 50 g vegan margarine
- 70 g icing (confectioner’s) sugar
- 140 g plain white flour
- 20 g cornflour (cornstarch)
- 30 g ground almonds
- raspberry or other jam (one small teaspoon per biscuit)
- a little caster sugar for sprinkling
method
- Set the oven to 180°C/360°F. Line the base of enough baking trays for 24 x 6 to 7 cm biscuits. Have a board and rolling pin ready, along with a suitable cookie cutter (I used one about 5.5 cm across) and something small enough to use as a cutter for the centre (unless you happen to have the precise tool – I used the wide end of an icing nozzle!).
- Warm the coconut oil in the microwave in a medium/large bowl until it is liquid but not hot.
- Add the vegan margarine and the icing sugar and beat with an electric whisk to form a smooth, runny buttercream.
- Sift the flour and cornflour into this mixture and add the ground almonds. Then fold and stir until everything is combined and you have a soft dough. Only use your hands at the last minute to bring the dough together into a ball.
- Transfer the dough to a lightly floured board, sprinkle some more flour on top, and roll to a thickness of 2-3mm. It can be quite crumbly depending on the temperature of the oil. Simply press it together and carry on if it’s splitting a bit as you roll it.
- Cut as many biscuits as you can on the first roll – it will be trickier the more you re-roll because the dough will have absorbed flour from the board and the coconut oil will gradually solidify.
- Cut out the centre of half of the biscuits before baking for 8 to 10 minutes (the centres can also be baked as mini shortbread cookies, of course, but bake them separately – they will bake faster than the full-size biscuits). Remove the biscuits from the oven as soon as the first signs appear that they are turning golden at the edges.
- Allow to cool, then sandwich the biscuits together with a small spoonful of jam and finishing with a sprinkle of caster sugar.
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For another classic biscuit made vegan, try these abernethy biscuits.
