SPICE COOKIES WITH LEMON ICING - ebook
I am a sucker for a spice cookie and also a sucker for citrus in any kind of sweet, so these called to me. They looked pretty simple to convert to GF and veganize. You start by beating butter and sugar using a stand mixer, then add an egg and mix until combined. You then add in orange and lemon zest, raisins, vanilla, and cinnamon. Finally you add in your flour, baking powder, and baking soda. Roll into balls, flatten them a bit, and bake at 300 for 40 (!) minutes. My changes to this were using a GF flour mix (I went with King Arthur Measure-for-Measure), using a vegan butter, using an egg replacer and aquafaba instead of the single egg in the recipe, mixing the cinnamon in with the flour and leaveners (I feel it mixes in better this way), and substituting chopped dried sour cherries for the raisins, just because I really don’t care for raisins in cookies.
While the cookies are baking, you make the lemon icing by whisking lemon juice with confectioners’ sugar. Guess what? The amount of liquid given too much for the amount of sugar. See? It’s a theme. I ended up adding extra sugar to the glaze. I notice now that I was supposed to dip the tops of the cookies in the glaze. Wish I had done that. I spooned the glaze sloppily on top.
This is supposed to make 3 dozen cookies, if you are making the balls out of 1.5 to 2 Tbs of dough. Umm… I used 2 Tbs dough/ball, and got 17. I felt like the cooking time was too long, but I went with it because it was a lower temperature than I usually use. The cookies browned quite a bit, even the interior, which is unusual with a gluten-free dough. GF baked goods tend to stay paler than those made with wheat. I would prefer a paler cookie here, so would reduce the cook time in the future. I did reduce the time by 5 minutes on my second pan of these, but that wasn’t enough.
These are good, because they are cookies! The cinnamon is subtle, mostly overpowered by the lemon. What I really want here is ginger. So next time, I would add ginger (a lot of it), in addition to the other changes I made, and I would reduce the cook time. Let’s see, make it GF, make it vegan, change the spicing, change the cook time… yeah, that’s a whole new recipe.