Zesty

Lemon Pie Cookies - Closeup

Lisa signed us up to bring "snacks"/ dessert to small group this week, and as is our first time with this new group, I felt we should really bring our A game and do something amazing instead of swinging by the local grocery and picking up two pound bucket of cookies.

I had found a recipe by Claire Robinson of Food Network fame for "Lemon Pie Cookies"that I thought looked to be tasty, non-traditionally Lemon vs chocolate, and looked like they might be less work than they actually looked like. The commenters had some suggestions for how to make the cookies better so I incorporated those and then doubled the recipe for the number of people we were expecting to have consume them. (And lets be honest, I don't imagine having these ready to go frozen would hurt anything either)

Here's the modified, doubled recipe:

Lemon Pie Sandwich Cookies (doubled) - Yield 36 cookies  

Ingredients:

• 4 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature

• 5 cups confectioners' sugar, divided, plus more for garnish

• 1 teaspoon salt

• 4 lemons, zested and juiced, divided (about 5 tablespoons zest and 4 tablespoons juice)

• 4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

• 16 ounces cream cheese, room temperature

Directions: 

In the bowl of a stand mixer, beat the butter, 3 cups of the sugar and the salt (1 teaspoon) until smooth. Add all of the lemon juice (4 tablespoons) and half of the zest (2.5 tablespoons). On a low speed, add the flour, 1/2 cup at a time, (8 1/2 cups) until just incorporated. Turn the cookie dough out onto a board and roll it into a log. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate (suggested to freeze) for at least 1 hour and up to 24 hours. 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. 

Remove log from the refrigerator/freezer and cut it into thin 1/4-inch thick discs. If using 1 baking sheet, bake the cookies in batches. Arrange the discs on 2 silicone or parchment lined baking sheets, 1-inch apart, and bake until the edges are just golden, about 10-15 minutes. Remove the cookies from the oven and transfer them to a wire rack to cool completely. 

Filling: 

Using stand mixer or hand mixer, mix cream cheese (16oz) with the remaining 2 cups confectioners' sugar and remaining half of the lemon zest. (2.5 tablespoons) 

Top half of the cookies with the cream cheese mixture and cover with another cookie to make a sandwich. Dust the top of the cookie sandwiches with confectioners' sugar and serve. Another suggestion was to spritz lemon juice on top and once it was dried to add confectioners' sugar.

Lots of sugar and butter. Obviously bound to be good for you, but we're here in Houston. "Good for you" doesn't really survive well in this city. 

Lemon Pie Cookies

Some notes on production: We created the dough and the filling the night before. We started at 8pm and by 9:05pm everything was mixed, rolled, chilling AND the dishes were cleaned. So the dough wasn't too much work, I think perhaps it took 15 minutes of mixing and another 15 minutes to cajole the dough (which is the consistency of butter cream frosting) into round logs. Another 15 minutes to put the filling together and another 15 minutes of cleanup. (Lisa had already spent the time zesting and juicing the lemons, so maybe another 20 minutes for that)

Freezing the dough turned out to be a good idea. Even refrigerated the tough was really soft. Lisa laid the dough-log out beside a ruler and scored a mark every 1/4th of an inch and then went to work on slicing them. I then placed them on a cookie sheet. Cook time was about 15 minutes no matter if they were frozen or defrosted. Non of them got burned or even a dark brown. So it could almost go longer... however our oven might be lower temp or something, we haven't tried it.

Frosting/ filling wise we ended up with about twenty five percent of the stuff left over. Pre-frosting the cookies were crisp like a cracker and after frosting they were soft. The lemon flavor was also not intense but mild and sugary. Good stuff.

In the end I was going to powder sugar the top, I was even thinking about doing a pattern out of parchment paper and doing that on each cookie... but I just don't have the energy for that. The cookie's didn't even get dusted with powdered sugar. They survived though.

Alright, enough with the cookies. They were good, they were work. People consumed them, but we have some left for the freezer.

Sorry for those of you that have to suffer through the occasional food entry. 

~B.
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