Why It Matters

• Most cookie recipes begin by instructing you to cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. This serves a couple of important purposes. As the beater itself and sharp-edged sugar crystals whip through the butter, they create millions of tiny air pockets in the solid fat. When you bake the cookies, the gas released by the dough's baking soda or baking powder fills those tiny pockets and makes your sugar cookies light and crisp. The same porous texture helps the water-based eggs form a smooth mixture with the fat-based butter, creating a dough with light and even texture.

The Easy Option

• Almost any solid fat can be used for sugar cookies. For example, in her Mennonite-themed cookbook "Food that Really Schmecks," writer Edna Staebler noted that farmwives in her region favored chicken fat. That's not a practical -- or appealing -- option for urban bakers, but vegetable-oil shortening is a perfectly pragmatic option. It's widely available, neutral in flavor and contains no animal fats. Use 1 to 2 tablespoons less than the amount of butter your recipe calls for, because shortening is all fat and butter is not. Shortening doesn't give your cookies any flavor, but you can compensate by adding a splash of buttermilk to the dough if you're not avoiding dairy products.

The Hydrogenation Thing

• The only real issue with vegetable shortening, aside from its lack of flavor, is that it's usually made with hydrogenated fats. Those are considered unhealthy, so using conventional shortening to replace the saturated fats in butter is of minimal health benefit. Many manufacturers now make non-hydrogenated shortening, often based on coconut oil because it's naturally solid at room temperatures. Alternatively, you can simply purchase pure coconut oil at a health food store and use it as your cookie-making fat. It will lend your sugar cookies a faint but discernible hint of coconut flavor.

Oil-Based Recipes

• Coconut oil is solid in part because it's high in naturally saturated fats, much like butter. Its advocates argue that those specific saturated fats are not unhealthy, but if you'd rather avoid solid fats entirely, it is possible to make an acceptable cookie using liquid oil. Many recipes are available online or in publications that cater to light or healthy eating, so try a few and see which ones appeal to you. In general, oil-based doughs are too soft to roll and cut in the conventional sugar-cookie manner. Instead, most are shaped into balls or dropped on a cookie sheet and then flattened by hand. Their consistency tends to be cakey, rather than crisp like a conventional sugar cookie, but they're pleasant in their own right.