Milk & Cookies

Lemon zest

Well this baking session went about as well as everything else has been going for me this week, the main difference being that all the problems here were entirely my fault and preventable, like starting out without any butter in the kitchen, not being prepared for the 2 hour wait while the dough sits in the fridge, leaving out 33% of the sugar, and fatally burning 15% of the cookies. Whoops!

Before I manage to explode this blog post somehow, I’ll get to the recipe, from Joy the Baker. You can get the directions from her too, I won’t write them out because they’re so long.

• 2 sticks (8 ounces) unsalted butter (preferably high-fat, like Plugra), softened at room temperature
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar, sifted before measuring
• 1/2 teaspoon salt, preferably sea salt
• 2 large egg yolks, preferably at room temperature
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• zest of 1 lemon and zest of 1 lime

For the decoration (optional):

• 1 egg yolk
• Crystal or dazzle sugar

Not part of the unlucky 15%

Now here’s what I actually did:

• 2 sticks (8 ounces) unsalted butter (preferably high-fat, like Plugra), softened at room temperature
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup confectioners’ sugar, sifted before measuring
• 1/2 teaspoon salt, preferably sea salt
• 2 large egg yolks, preferably at room temperature
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• zest of 1 lemon and zest of 1 lime 1 lemon…. that is 2 lemons (Meyer lemons from my aunt Beth’s lemon tree in Berkeley)

For the decoration (optional):

• 1 egg yolk
• Crystal or dazzle sugar regular sugar
• that confectioner’s sugar from above, dusted over the cookies

The cow is back from haitus

As you can see, I didn’t follow the recipe exactly. And they get this ringing endorsement from Jason: “They taste a little like cardboard.” I actually think they taste fine. Maybe they’re not as good as the past few on here but hey, they can’t all get 5 stars.

Objects in oven may be smaller than they appear.

Last weekend Zoe’s parents came out to visit us and we spent some time hanging with the family. Some how we ended up inheriting a bag of fresh juicy lemons. How does that saying go? “When life gives you lemons…. you make lemon cookies!”

The recipe this week comes from AllRecipes. There are many variations on the internet for a recipe very similar to this one, so I wasn’t afraid to take some liberties to make it my own. Sadly, I couldn’t find any recipes that used fresh lemons very much in them, so even this recipe I substituted lemon extract for a combination of lemon juice and lemon zest in order to utilize our abundance of lemons.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 (18.25 ounce) package lemon cake mix
• 2 eggs
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 2 tspn. lemon zest
• 2 tspn. fresh lemon juice
• 1/2 cup powdered sugar (for decoration)

DIRECTIONS

The dough for these cookies takes almost no time at all, so go ahead and start off by preheating the oven to 350°F.
To make the dough, get out a medium mixing bowl, and your favorite rubber spatula. Combine the cake mix, eggs, oil, lemon zest, and lemon juice. Mix them together until the dough is smooth and consistent. You will have to mix by hand because this dough is pretty thick stuff.
On the side, prepare a small bowl with the powdered sugar, and lay out a sheet of parchment paper on a cookie tray. Take a teaspoon and scoop out dough balls one at a time. Roll each ball around in the powdered sugar bowl until it is nice and coated, and then place it on the cookie tray. These cookies expand a bit, but not too much, so you can place them about 1-2 inches apart. (I got ~25 per tray)
Once the tray is loaded up, pop the cookies into the oven for 7-9 minutes. They will start to brown just slightly around the edges when they are done.
Let them cool a bit and then start inhaling them. They are very small cookies so you probably want to eat like 3 or 4 cookies along with your glass of milk… maybe even more.