Today we want to show you how to use butterfly pea powder to prepare these pretty blue cookies. They're crispy, colourful, and delicious — we're sure you'll love them so much you'll come back for more!
Butterfly pea powder is an all-natural blue powder made from pulverised dried butterfly pea flowers.
Also known as blue pea or Asian pigeonwings, butterfly pea is a vibrant blue flower native to South and Southeast Asia.
The flowers contain lots of blue pigments, called anthocyanins, which are also powerful antioxidants!
You can find culinary butterfly pea as dried flowers or a fine blue-violet powder. They should be available at your local Asian food store, or you can easily find them online.
Butterfly pea powder is the go-to choice for these blue cookies, as you can easily mix it with the other ingredients.
A teaspoon of the powder is enough to give the cookie dough a vibrant blue hue, but you can also increase or decrease the quantity to get a lighter or darker shade of blue. So, have fun with it!
As for the other ingredients, we used coconut oil and plant-based milk instead of the classic butter and cow milk.
This means these blue cookies are dairy-free, egg-free, and 100% vegan — perfect for everyone to enjoy!
We'll also give you the option to make the cookies sugar-free using zero-calorie erythritol, a safe and natural sweetener we use in many of our sugar-free recipes.
In our recipe, we rolled out the cookie dough thinly to get light and ultra-crispy cookies. Feel free to make them thicker and pepper them with white chocolate chunks to get classic soft cookies!
Just don't cook them for too long, so you won't affect the final colour. Super precise recipe instructions are below, so just follow along without worries!
And if you're looking for more delicious recipes with butterfly pea powder, try these blue chia pudding, butterfly pea cake, and blue latte!
Ingredients
| Self-Raising Flour | 150 g |
| Almond Meal | 75 g |
| Caster Sugar (or sugar-free erythritol) | 80 g |
| Coconut Oil (at room temperature) | 100 g |
| Butterfly Pea Powder | 1 tsp |
| Plant-Based Milk (oat, coconut, or almond milk) | 60 mL |
| Almond Extract (optional) | 1/2 tsp |
Step 1
Mix self-raising flour with almond meal, sugar, and a pinch of salt in a bowl.
You can swap sugar with zero-calorie erythritol for a sugar-free option.
Then, add in the coconut oil, softened at room temperature, and rub it with the flours using your fingertips until you have a crumbly, sandy mix
Step 2
Whisk butterfly pea powder with plant-based milk (we used coconut drink) in a small cup or jug until it's completely dissolved and you have no lumps.
At this point, tip in the almond essence if you're using it.
Step 3
Now, add the butterfly pea milk to the flour mix and work all into a blue cookie dough.
Roll the dough into a ball, wrap it with cling film, and let it chill and harden in the fridge for 15 minutes.
This way, it will be easier to roll out and cut into cookies.
Step 4
Now, use a rolling pin to roll out the cookie dough over a sheet of baking paper.
Make sure the dough is about 4mm thick.
If you make it thicker, the cookies will be softer. Thin cookies, instead, will be crunchy and crispy.
Next, cut out the cookies with a 6 cm (2.3 inches) round cookie cutter dusted with a little flour.
Step 5
Transfer the prepared cookies over a baking tray lined with parchment paper.
Then, gather any dough scraps, roll them back into a ball, and repeat step 4 until you have used all the dough.
If the dough becomes too soft to handle, put it back in the fridge to chill and set for 5-10 minutes.
Place the tray with the blue cookies in the fridge while you heat the oven to 180°C (355°F).
Step 6
Bake the butterfly pea cookies at 180°C (355°F) for 6-7 minutes.
You need to bake the cookies for a little less than what you would usually do because you don't want them to brown and change colour.
As soon as the bottom of the cookies starts to brown, remove the cookies from the oven.
Carefully transfer them onto a wire rack with the help of a spatula and let them cool down completely.
Don't worry if the cookies feel soft to the touch now that they're hot; as they cool down, the cookies will harden and crisp up nicely.
Enjoy these wonderful vegan butterfly pea cookies with a hot mug of butterfly pea latte!
Tips
You can decorate these pretty butterfly pea cookies with our sugar-free icing glaze if you like. Or you can make sandwich cookies filling them with our sugar-free papaya jam or vegan passion fruit curd.