Lemons are the quintessential summer fruit and though our summers are {hopefully} winding down to a dull burn, we can still enjoy the pleasures that this snappy little citrus provides.
Conjured into life by Lauren Brennan, these gently sweet, chewy and tender Lemon Crinkle Cookies are award winning, and you’ll know why the moment you take one bite and let the flavors dance on your tongue. Stirred up with zest and freshly squeezed lemon juice and rolled in a soft dusting of powdered sugar, they are the perfect punch for your lemon craving.
Here’s the recipe:
Lemon Crinkle Cookies
By Lauren Brennan
Makes 2-3 dozen (if you don’t get generous in your scooping)
Ingredients:
½ cups butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
½ teaspoons vanilla extract
1 whole egg
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1 Tablespoon fresh lemon juice
¼ teaspoons salt
¼ teaspoons baking powder
⅛ teaspoons baking soda
1-½ cup all-purpose flour
½ cups powdered sugar
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease light colored baking sheets with non-stick cooking spray and set aside.
In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Whip in vanilla, egg, lemon zest, and juice. Scrape sides and mix again. Stir in all dry ingredients slowly until just combined, excluding the powdered sugar. Scrape sides of bowl and mix again briefly. Pour powdered sugar onto a large plate. Roll a heaping teaspoon of dough into a ball and roll in powdered sugar. Place on baking sheet and repeat with remaining dough.
Bake for 9-11 minutes or until bottoms begin to barely brown and cookies look matte {not melty or shiny}. Remove from oven and cool cookies about 3 minutes before transferring to cooling rack.
*If using a non-stick darker baking tray, reduce baking time by about 2 minutes.
Now, try to keep you kids from weedling you into giving them handfuls so they can have one little treat in their lunch boxes tomorrow. Good luck!
For another aaaaamazing lemon recipe from Christene you have to check out her Lemon Curd Cheesecake or if Chocolate and Peanutbutter are more your style you have to check out this recipe!
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YUM! This sounds good! I can’t wait to try it! Printing your recipe right…now!
yummilicious!
Those sound amazing! We love anything with lemons. Your photo is gorgeous too! Thanks for sharing!
Wow! Heather, these look so delicious and I love the styling in your photograph 🙂
Yummy. Gotta try to make these. 🙂
Ummm….yeah…I have a lemon recipe ready for this week! I LOVE lemon. Like, adore. I can’t wait to try these! Yummers!
Great lookin cookies!
Oh these look delish! And an amazing photo!!
Jo-Anna
Do you think I could leave out the lemon juice and zest and substitue almond extract? If so, how much would I add to keep the consistency of the cookies right?
Kim, you’d have to mess with it. There’s a whole Tablespoon of juice that you put in, so you might have to add milk. Let’s say 2 t. milk and 1 t. almond extract while omitting the zest entirely. Try it out. My dough was very soft. You could test out the moisture by adding a little milk at a time to be sure. Let me know how it turns out!
Oh how I love lemon….and I do love the way they “pucker” up too 🙂 they look delicious.
wow so pretty
WOW! These look great! I want one!
Such sweet & pretty little cookies 🙂
Thanks for the love, ladies! I hope you try and enjoy these sweet little gems!
Your photo is gorgeous! I love a good puckery lemon dessert. These cookies look delightful.
ohhh I’m going to have to try and make these gluten free.. they sound delicious!
Let me know if you do! I would love to learn how…
kisses
heather
Oh goodness! I made these for a get together this evening and everyone RAVED about them! Wonderful recipe…definitely one for the book;)
These cookies look quite tasty – and pretty!
How much of the baking soda?? Thanks!
Hey there, I made these yummy cookies a while ago in Germany (where everybody loved them) using unsalted butter cause this is what’s normal for us. Now I am in the States and started wondering if you actually meant unsalted butter.
And is it really inportant to make a ball and roll it in the powdered sugar? Cause I had some troubles forming balls.
Happy birthday to me…literally. YOu posted on my birthday. HOW appropriate!
Do you flatten them before baking or do they flatten themselves during baking?
I made them last night, and just put them on the pan as balls. Mine didn’t flatten like these, they were more domed. So next time I’ll try flattening them a little.
Just made these with Meyer lemons and they are freakin’ awesome! Definitely a keeper in my recipe book – thx!
Hi!
I’d love it if you’d stop by and link these up to A Themed Bakers Sunday! The theme this week is anything Citrus!
Hope to see you there!
Cupcakeapothecary.blogspot.com
Amazing–made them exactly as the recipe stated and baked them for 8 minutes and they were perfect!
This is seriously my favorite cookie recipe…I could literally eat the entire batch. Made these several times now! Thanks Lauren & Heather!
Sarah- I’m so glad!! Thanks so much for sharing the love…
kisses // heather
YUM!!! I saw this today and went straight to my kitchen and made them for my grandma. She loves lemons!! She said I could leave out some sugar and make them more tart. 🙂 That's my grandma! The person who surprised me was my son. He does NOT like sour… and he loved them!! They are so soft and yummy! This recipe is going into my binder full of favorite recipes. Thank you for posting it!!!
Oh Jennifer… I’m so excited that you liked them!! They are some of my favorites too!!
kisses // heather
Really great recipe! I’ve been wanting to try a lemon cookie recipe for a while so I finally made these for my 96 year old grandmother a few days ago. She fell in love with them instantly and Grandpa loves them too! I just made up another quadruple batch of dough for her to keep in the fridge so she can bake a few at a time when she feels like something sweet (the recipe as written is very small). They don’t flatten or crinkle for me though. I started flattening the balls before baking and they are turning out more like the photo but still puffed up in the middle and not crinkly. I also abandoned rolling them in the confectioners sugar (it takes too much time) and instead just dust them with it when they come out of the oven. I also found that baking them on parchment paper works great. You can reuse the paper several times and it makes it so easy for cooling. Just lift the paper with the cookies still on it off of the baking sheet and place the whole thing (paper and cookies) onto a cooling rack to cool. No need to transfer them one by one!
This was a great comment! I will try out the parchment paper- it seems very convenient. Also, do you think they would still turn out okay if I didn’t use powdered sugar at all?
These cookies are so cute and packed with great lemon flavor!
I was making a bunch of other cookies and had a lot of cream cheese frosting left over, so I just dumped a bunch of lemon juice in it and put it on the cookies and it was great!
Definitely a fun and easy recipe to hold on to!
ok so i made these thrice and once i added fresh mint + like cut open a bag of moroccan mint tea and put it in there and then the second time i used fresh basil and the third time i used like english lavender that was really sick so i def reccomend that
also i had this idea to llike use orange stuff instead of lemon stuff and then throw some earl grey in there so maybe that wont be as good but pretty neat idk im gonna do it today
Just wanted you to know these are my all time favorite cookies! Thanks so much for posting?
Thanks so cool Annie! Thanks for sharing!!
Do you think these could be frozen after baked and cooled?
I think they would work great that way. However, none have ever stayed around long enough to freeze 😉
Just wondering about the amount of flour. Is it 1,5 cups of flour, or 0,5-1 cups? Can’t wait to try!