Flaxseed Sugar Cookie Conversation Hearts

     Flaxseed sugar cookies?!?! Yes, flaxseed sugar cookies. One day when I ran out of eggs and needed to make a sweet treat for a Galentine's Day party, I tried using flaxseed in my dough instead of eggs and it turned out AMAZING. Plus, how cool is it that now you can reap all of the amazing benefits of flax seeds while eating a cookie! Flax seeds can boost digestion, decrease inflammation, they contain omega-3 and vitamin B so they can help your hair, skin, and nails be shiny, strong, and smooth, and they can even reduce cholesterol! Now, obviously, at the tiny bit of flaxseed that you will eat in each cookie is pretty minuscule. Not to mention, the sugar, butter, and flour that are also in the cookie definitely do not help with things like inflammation and cholesterol. But still! It's linden fun to know that this awesome superfood is in the cookies you are eating! 

    Another main worry you may have with substituting egg with flax seeds is that it may affect the texture. That is where you may have to be a little careful. In order to keep my sugar cookies smooth, I used a coffee grinder to turn my flax seeds into a powder. You could also buy your flax seeds already ground into a powder, just make sure they're not super grainy. When you get your flax seeds into a powder, you can mix one tablespoon of the ground flax seed with one tablespoon of warm water, and that will equal one egg in any sugar cookie recipe you want to use!

    My favorite sugar cookie starts by beating together softened butter and sugar. While I am waiting for that to fully incorporate and get fluffy, I mix my ground flax seed and water, and I let it sit for about five minutes. By the end of five minutes or whenever my butter and sugar are creamed together, my flax seed is super gelled up and thick. I added it to my butter and sugar mixture along with my vanilla and I beat everything together until not was very well combined. 

    From there I made my cookies like any other sugar cookie. I mixed in my salt and flour until barely combined and was very careful to not over mix. Once I was satisfied with the texture I dumped it out onto my work surface and rolled it out until it was about 1/4 inch thick. If your dough is sticking to everything a little too much I suggest sticking it in the fridge for a few hours to allow the butter in the dough to harden up a tish. Do not use flour on your work surfaces/hands because if you add too much or are not careful, you could cause the dough to become too dry, overworked, or you could end top with dry flour streaks on your finished cookies. Now is when my cookies first started looking like conversation hearts! I used my smallest cookie cutter to cut out a TON of little heart shapes and I baked them for a little less time than was on my base recipe because they were a little smaller than my standard sugar cookie. 

     After my cookies were done baking, I set them out to cool and I made my royal icing. I like to make mine with flavor by substituting some of the water with vanilla, lemon juice, or some other kind of liquid flavoring. My base royal icing recipe is just two tablespoons of water, one tbsp merengue powder, and a cup of powdered sugar. You can add a tish of vanilla or other flavor extract on top of that, just be careful to monitor the thickness of your icing before you do. For letters and borders or finer details I keep my icing a little thicker and stick pretty close to this recipe but if I "flooding" a cookie or covering a lit of space I will add a little bit more water.  The key to a good royal icing though is making sure you have the texture you want more than making sure you are following the recipe exactly. The more you use it and the more practice you get, the more you will get the feel for it! And don't worry if you don't get it right away, I'm still learning too!

    I split my icing in a few different bowls and quickly got to work coloring them. Royal icing starts to set pretty quick so you do have to make sure to cover it or mix it periodically if you don't plan on using it right away. Usually you would then put each color into a separate piping bag, but I don't have a ton of bags and I didn't want to use so many on such a small batch of cookies so I opted for a messier method. I decided to carefully dip each cookie in the color I desired. Conversation hearts traditionally come in pink, yellow, orange, blue, purple, green, and white. All of these are super pretty pastel shades of their respective colors and are written on in red lettering. When you are coloring your royal icing, start with just a little bit of food color to avoid saturating your frosting in order to keep your colors pastel. You can always add color but you can not take it away. 

    I let the flooded cookies rest for a little bit so that my letters would rest on top rather than sinking into my base color. If you don't wait for the base color to harden, the letters will sink into it and have the potential to bleed. The way you know your base frosting is ready is by tapping it lightly with a finger. If the frosting sticks or moves, it is still too soft. If the frosting cracks you probably pressed too hard but you could probably let it dry a little longer. Sadly, the only advice I can give you for writing the letters is to do it slowly and carefully. Take your time and practice and you will slowly get better! I believe in you!

    My sweet little conversation hearts turned out super amazing and super tasty! This was the first time I really did super detailed icing but I think they turned out super cute! let me know if you try this! Leave me a comment!