Carrot & Cinnamon Cookies (Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Vegan)

Budget friendly sweet carrot biscuits (or cookies if you like) infused with orange oil and cinnamon and inspired by a old fashioned war time recipe. Healthy biscuit snack made with gluten free flour and plant based ingredients – perfect for gluten-free, dairy free, egg free, vegan diets and Low FODMAP too.

This is a very simple biscuit recipe to make, originally based on an old-fashioned recipe from the second world war, when vegetables featured often in cake and biscuit recipes. It’s also a perfect budget recipe and you can always swap around the ingredients to suit you.

This war time carrot cookies recipe also taste great with a handful of raisins or currants (or any of the dried currants substitutes).

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Why make this recipe?

• Frugal recipe to make – budge friendly ingredients
• Dairy & Gluten free + Vegan
• Great biscuits to take for a walk or work (they don’t crumble easily)
• Healthy snack
• Great to pack as a gift for our foodie friends

Notes on Ingredients

Carrot

I’ve tried both coarse and finely grated carrots with this recipe and they both work fine. Using finely grated carrots will give you more mellow/fine crumb on your biscuit and you might need to bake the biscuit for a little longer as it will be slightly more moist.

Oil

I’ve used coconut oil, but the original recipe has margarine. Any kind of butter, oil or margarine will be fine with this recipe.

Sugar

I’ve used basic white caster sugar, but brown or dark sugar would work well too. Blend of white and brown sugar (or coconut sugar substitutes) – would work well with this carrot cookie recipe.

I’ve already cut down the sugar in this wartime carrot cookie recipe, as the original recipe had far too much in (and was really too sweet). You are welcome to further cut down the sugar by another half if you prefer to keep your sugar intake on a lower side.

Flour

The original wartime carrot biscuits recipe has regular flour, but I’ve used gluten-free flour and added the baking powder and xantham gum. You are welcome to use regular plain or self-raising flour and just leave out the other ingredients.

Baking powder

Only use it if you are using gluten-free flour or plain flour.

Cinnamon

I thought any kind of sweet mixed spice will go well with this recipe and a simple cinnamon complements the flavours beautifully.

Orange flavouring 

This is optional, but I think it’s so worth adding in! A hint of orange to go well with the carrots and cinnamon flavour!

Xanthan gum

Use xanthan gum if your flour blend doesn’t already include it.

Salt

Always use a tiny pinch of salt to balance out all the flavours.

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How to make wartime carrot cookies

This carrot cookie recipe is very easy to make. The dough is quite firm (but the biscuits will come out nice and crunchy, I promise), because it doesn’t contain any egg, milk or other liquids. The moisture comes from the grated carrots and the coconut oil.

• Cream the coconut oil and sugar together until it’s well combined
• Mix in the orange flavouring and grated carrot.
• Mix the flour with baking powder, salt and xantham gum
• Add the flour mixture to the rest of the ingredients

You can see that the carrot cookie dough looks quite dry, but it will come together when you mix everything in properly.

• Divide into small pieces. I weigh mine at 15 grams each.
• Roll into small balls, gently flatten in your palm and place on the baking tray lined with baking parchment

You don’t need to weight your cookies, you can also roll the dough into a thicker sausage and then cut into 1,5 cm (1/2 inch) pieces (roughly).

Whilst it’s not absolutely necessary to have each biscuit the same weight and size, it does help to have them similarly sized, because they will bake the same. If you have very different sizes, you might end up with some smaller carrot cookies already baked, when the bigger ones need longer. You’ll either need to take the smaller ones out or leave them to get slightly overbaked.

Another way to solve this little puzzle, is to have two smaller trays and as you are making the cookies, if you see that are bigger than the others, sort them out immediately – one tray for bigger cookies and one for smaller ones.

Place the large ones in the middle of your oven and the smaller ones in the shelf below. This way, the large cookies will take on more heat (and get done quicker) and the smaller cookies will take longer. If this little trick doesn’t work, you can always take the tray with the smaller biscuits out first as it will be baked quicker.

• Bake for 7-10 minutes in preheated oven 180 Celsius, 350 Fahrenheit until golden brown.

Allergies & dietary requirements

This wartime carrot cookies recipe is suitable for number of different diets and it’s very versatile recipe to make as you can swap around the ingredients without affecting the functionality of the recipe.

• Dairy Free
• Gluten – Free
• Nut-Free
• Egg-Free
• Vegan & vegetarian friendly
• Low FODMPAP recipe – easy to digest

Batch size

You’ll get approximately 15 biscuits, but it depends on how big or small you make them.

Scaling up or down this carrot biscuits recipe

You can easily double or triple this wartime biscuits recipe ingredients and make large quantities. Baking time will remain the same and you’ll need extra trays to bake your biscuits.

How to store carrot cookies

Any air tight container will be fine and your carrot biscuits should be O.K for about 7 days. I’ve not tried to freeze them, but I think it would be possible.

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This wartime carrot cookies recipe and me

I love history and travelling and often pick up books from local antique bookshop or charity shop. I’ve originally bought this cookbook for the photos and old-fashioned advertisements and never actually intended to making any of the recipes. Then last year, I’ve been going through all my cookery books and decided to make the Carrot Biscuits recipe.

Carrots are one of the vegetables I can eat lots of and I’ve adapted the carrot cookie recipe to suit my dairy free & gluten free diet (which is also Low FODMAP diet).

Since then I’ve made quite a few recipes from this book and they all turned out really well. One thing I would say, if you are thinking of buying this cookery book, is because sugar wasn’t rationed during the war, most baking recipes have rather large amounts of sugar in comparison to the rest of the ingredients.

I’ve adjusted the sugar in my version of this recipe, but you might want to be careful when you are trying the recipes for yourself.

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This blog post was originally written on 8 June 2021 and last updated on 2 April 2023