These cute little gluten free cookies are so easy. You will be amazed at how few ingredients you need to make them. You don’t need any eggs and they don’t have gluten!
Kids love these. They aren’t fancy, just morish, in fact, they are so small and delicious it’s easy to eat 4 before you know you have.
These have to be the easiest biscuits or cookies you will ever make. Everyone always says this about every recipe right? This is true.
They only have 4 ingredients. No beating, just a little mixing, and rolling.
What’s in them?
- Condensed milk: Just ordinary tinned condensed milk. This provides the sweetness and the milky component of these shortbreads. Even though they are made with condensed milk, surprisingly they are not in the least bit sweet
- Butter: This of course gives the “shortbread” element of shortness to the cookies. Combined with condensed milk butter cooks up into a short crumbly biscuit texture that is irresistible
- cornflour. makes the cookies gluten free and nice and short and crumbly
- Vanilla or lemon. These two flavouring are completely optional but one or the other will flavour the cookies nicely. Both are wonderful
- The few ingredients that make the Sequilhos Cookies. Condensed milk, butter, cornflour and lemon or vanilla
- A bowl with softened butter and condensed milk. The butter needs to be nice and soft or you will end up with lumps of butter
- Butter and condensed milk mixed up well together
- Adding the cornflour and mixing to a nice dough
Add other flavours to these cookies too!
You can add other flavours to these cookies too!
Add dried spices like cinnamon, cardamom or even ginger to the dough or even zest of orange instead of lemon zest
These special little balls can be filled with chocolate or sugared ginger or even dried fruits. To make your icing you could use orange juice or even passionfruit. woo hoo!
The inspiration for these little babies came from TikTok.@bdylanhollis who is:
Your mid-century baking specialist 🙂
Exploring vintage recipes one horror at a time.
I watched him make these beauties on his 8.4 million follower Tik tok. There were a few recipes on the internet all different but all fun. Dylan saw them in a vintage cookbook from 1919.
I had no idea gluten free cookies were a thing way back then.
Try these other cookies
If you love cookies I have lots and lots to choose from:
- Try these chunky chocolate stir together cookies
- Or these Vegan Peanut Butter cookies
- I LOVE these Levain bakery cookies!
- AND Brookies cookies
Gluten free cookies, Melt Aways or Sequillhos
Ingredients
Method
- Set the oven to 160 C / 320F. Line two baking trays with baking paper. Or 1 large tray
- Whisk together the softened butter and the condensed milk with the lemon zest and vanilla until well combined
- Add all the 260 gm of cornflour and stir in gradually. It will take a bit of mixing, but combine all the cornflour well
- The mixture should be just sticky and easy to roll into balls. If it is too sticky add the extra 30 gm of cornflour (but this should not be the case). By adding more cornflour the biscuits become drier so go easy.
- Roll into even sized 20 gm balls about the size of a walnut (if you've ever seen one of those). You should get around 24 and I weighed mine
- Put all of them side by side onto a tray and bake for approximately 15 minutes. They look butter when they don't brown too much.
- Put the icing sugar into a bowl. Add 1 tablespoon of lemon juice and stir. Add extra lemon juice a tiny bit more at a time until the icing just runs off the spoon. The icing should just run a little when spooned onto the top of the shortbread
Hi! Just about to make these 🙂
Is it softened butter or melted butter, please? Ingredients list and instructions are different. Thank you
Hi Lilla, yes use softened butter for a better final result
Hi Lilla
I am sorry for not answering sooner I was unwell this morning
It is butter to have extremely soft butter rather than completely melted butter, as these will turn out fluffier.
I am sorry for the confusing directions. I have corrected this now.
Although they would still have turned out they would need a bit more chilling before rolling into balls
Thanks for your email
Tania
Can these be made in a pan for more traditional shortbread presentation?
I have not tried. You could give it a try.
I haven’t made them yet, just wanted to point out you say “no eggs, no butter and no gluten!” Up top which is a little oopsie you may want to fix. I was looking for this exact recipe so thanks for having it
Oh dear how silly of me. I’ve changed that cause they surely do have butter!
I love how you write with such clarity and depth, making even the most complex topics easy to understand. Your writing style is engaging, and I always feel like I’m having a conversation with a friend when I read your posts.
I love how you have a step by step instructions on how to make gluten free cookies. They came out perfect loved them.
Hi Carol. Thanks. I hope you liked them
Yum! I am going to make this for sure!!!!
Oh you should they are so easy. They take 5 minutes
Great article! So interesting recipy! Thanks for sharing 🙂