I’m feeling slightly less whimsical about Dumbo, so I wanted to make something simple. My first thought was palmiers, AKA Elephant Ears, but let’s just say you’ll be seeing those eventually. My second thought was doing something like those classic circus balls.

In terms of simple, I’d heard of really light and fluffy, soft sugar cookies made from a boxed cake mix. The only issue with that was some of the ingredients not being vegan, so I did some reverse-engineering to figure out what the dry ingredients were.

For this recipe, you’ll need:

• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 cup vegan butter
• 2 fake eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 2 cups flour
• 1 3/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 cup soy milk
• red, yellow, and blue food coloring
• coarse sugar to coat

For these cookies, I used the creaming method, which is mixing softened butter with the sugar until it looks light and fluffy. To that, I added the fake eggs and vanilla and let it mix for a couple minutes.

Then I added my flour and baking powder and mixed it, and finally, the milk. Originally, I only used 1 1/2 cups flour, but my cookie dough turned out more like a cake batter, and I added extra flour in a later step to make the cookies easier to shape. 2 cups is an approximation of what I ended up using.

So how do we get it to look like those iconic circus balls? I separated my dough into three small bowls, and added a few drops of red, blue, or yellow into each. While food coloring is almost always vegan, some vegans object to the use of certain colors due to being tested on animals. I use Chefmaster food coloring, as they have an all-natural line. I also poured some coarse sugar into a small bowl to coat the cookies in. This can also be a bit iffy, as white sugars are refined using bone char.

(You can tell my dough is much more like a batter here; this is before I added more flour)

Take about a teaspoon of each color, roll it into a ball in your hands, and then roll each dough ball in the coarse sugar. Bake your cookies at 350 F for 10-12 minutes, and they’re all done!

Some of mine look very much like a circus ball, and others have the colors a bit more swirled together. It doesn’t really matter, they’re all delicious!