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Desserts
Lemon Crinkle Cookies
Chewy, bright, and rolled in powdered sugar: Wonderful® Seedless Lemons make every bite count.
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Chewy, bright, and rolled in powdered sugar: Wonderful® Seedless Lemons make every bite count.
Lemon crinkle cookies pair a satisfying visual payoff with flavor that is bright, tangy, and unmistakably citrus. Wonderful Seedless Lemons are what make the flavor clean and true, with no pesky seeds to pick out and no bitterness from handling the fruit. The dough chills for one hour, which is the longest part of the process.
Rub the zest into the sugar. This is the most important step in the recipe and the one most often skipped. The zest’s essential oils are fat-soluble, not water-soluble. Rubbing them into the sugar releases the oils and distributes them through the fat and eggs in the dough. The difference in flavor between rubbed and simply-mixed zest is dramatic.
Chill the dough fully. Warm dough spreads too much before setting, which prevents the crinkle from forming. The dough needs to be cold enough to hold its shape for 30 to 60 seconds on the hot baking sheet before it begins to spread. One hour is the minimum, and overnight chilling produces an even more tender, flavorful cookie.
Use two sugars, in order. Granulated sugar first, powdered sugar second, always. The granulated sugar creates a thin, slightly crispy layer that acts as a barrier. Without it, the powdered sugar absorbs into the wet dough before the cookie can crack and you lose the snowy white finish.
Do not flatten the dough balls. The cookies will spread and crack on their own. Pressing them down disrupts the crinkle mechanism and produces flat cookies rather than the puffy, cracked ones you want.
Pull the cookies when they look underdone. The centers should look slightly puffed and moist when you remove the pan from the oven. They firm up significantly on the hot pan during the five-minute resting period. Waiting until the center looks done in the oven produces a dry, crispy cookie rather than a chewy one.
Zest generously. Two tablespoons of lemon zest sounds like a lot, but it is not. Lemon flavor from zest alone can taste muted after baking. Generous zest plus the fresh juice produces a cookie that tastes unmistakably, confidently citrus.
Store with a slice of bread. A small piece of bread placed in the airtight container with the cooled cookies releases moisture slowly and keeps the cookies chewy for up to four days at room temperature.
Lemon Poppy Seed Crinkle Cookies. Add two teaspoons of poppy seeds to the dough with the flour mixture. The poppy seeds add a subtle nuttiness and a visual contrast that makes the cookies feel slightly more sophisticated, and the lemon flavor is unchanged.
Lemon Blueberry Crinkle Cookies. Fold ⅓ cup of dried blueberries into the dough after combining the wet and dry ingredients. The blueberries add a sweet, fruity counterpoint to the lemon and hold up well to the chilling and baking process.
Gluten-Free Lemon Crinkle Cookies. Replace the all-purpose flour with a 1:1 gluten-free flour blend. The texture will be slightly more delicate, and the chilling time may need to extend to two hours to get the dough firm enough to roll.
Lemon Cardamom Crinkle Cookies. Add ½ teaspoon of ground cardamom to the flour mixture. Cardamom and lemon is a pairing that appears throughout Scandinavian and Middle Eastern baking, and the spice adds a warm, floral note that deepens the citrus flavor without competing with it.
Meyer Lemon Crinkle Cookies. Replace the Wonderful Seedless Lemons juice and zest with equal amounts of Meyer lemon juice and zest. Meyer lemons are sweeter and more floral than standard lemons, producing a cookie with a gentler, less assertive citrus flavor. Consider reducing the granulated sugar in the dough by two tablespoons to account for the Meyer lemon’s natural sweetness.
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