I hate to be that baker posting her whole life story before writing out a recipe for cookies but it’s a pretty short story. So, endure it. Deal with it. Cookies.

            Last night at work, my assistant manager offered me a lemon drizzle cookie. I really, really enthusiastically took one. I ate it and I was like, fuck me,holy shit! Point is, it was a good biscuit. I resolved then to make some today. It’s Christmas time so it’s the period to really be baking, and also I’m playing Dungeons and Dragons tonight so I thought it would be pretty nice of me to bring some for my group. 🙂

            With the help of In Katrina’s Kitchen, I adapted a lovely sugar cookie recipe with lemon zest and juice. You may notice that there is a shocking lack of lemon drizzle on my lemon drizzle biscuits from the photo, and that is because when I went shopping there was absolutely zero icing sugar about. Fucking Christmas. I’ll get into what I did instead below:

WHAT YOU’LL NEED: 

• 225 grams softened, unsalted butter.
• 200 grams white granulated sugar.
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract (I used Madagascan vanilla and it smelled fucking amazing btw).
• 1 egg.
• 2 teaspoons baking powder.
• ½ teaspoon salt.
• 375 grams plain flour.
• Zest of one lemon (but next time I’ll use more)
• Juice of one lemon, but again I’ll use more)
• I didn’t use and lemon flavourings but when I experiment with these biscuits again I’ll use more, to really up that citrusy flavour.
• For the icing (which I couldn’t made L ) eyeball out some icing sugar and add some lemon juice, and then mix it until smooth. Add more sugar/juice until it’s at the consistency you need/want.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Start preheating the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. I, without fail, consistently forget to preheat my oven but luckily I made pizza for lunch before this, so its warmth acted as a reminded to keep it on and turn it down to 180.
2. Beat together your butter and sugar until it’s a light yellow colour that reminds you of Easter!
3. After beating for around 3 minutes, beat in the egg, lemon juice and vanilla extract.
4. Separately,combine flour, baking powder and salt by sieving into a bowl all together. Zest a lemon into your mix (pro tip: zest the lemon before you juice it into your wet ingredients) and stir in.
5. Start adding your dry ingredients into your wet ingredients bit by bit, whisking as you do.
6. Normally I chill sugar cookie dough but this recipe yelled at me in all caps to NOT CHILL THE DOUGH!!!!! So I didn’t. I did leave it for a while though as I ate my aforementioned pizza (which was really nice). Instead of chilling, divide it up into workable batches; I managed to work with two batches of dough. Roll it out until it’s about as thick as your finger. I did a lot of mines thinner than my finger and they were too thin; the ones that were as thick as or thicker than my finger were fluffier and lighter.
7. This shit bakes quick, by the way. Pop them into your oven for 6-8 minutes but keep a close eye on them. When out, transfer them to a cooling rack.
8. Instead of the lemon drizzle I had planned, I planned on combining lemon juice and white chocolate.Please don’t do this. It smells so gross and it looks so curdled that its comparable to scrambled eggs in appearance. This is not what chocolate should look like. Please learn from my mistakes: don’t do this. Don’ do it. Instead of adding drizzle, I squeezed some lemon juice into a bowl and took one of those cute little pastry brushes and brushed my cooled cookies with lemon juice.

Final thoughts:

            The recipe I used highlighted that cookies made from it would have clean edges but mines kind of like, expanded out a wee bit. All good though, just means the cookies weren’t as clean cut as I would have maybe liked.

            I wanted to make my own recipe for lemon drizzle cookies, which is why I used this basic sugar cookie recipe as a guide, but for next time I definitely need to add a lot more lemon flavour. If I can get a lemon extract or something, I’ll add that. If not, I’m just gonna up the lemon juice and content levels waaaaaay up.

            End of the day, these cookies are light and tasty, if not a bit basic in flavour. I love the bitterness of lemon so much (I can just like, eat lemon wedges as snacks) so in the future I’m going to make more effort to incorporate that.