As you can see, I’ve fallen behind on my cooking for this month. I was already still 8 recipes behind my goal for this point in the year. I generally catch up on cooking on the weekends, when I’ve got a little more time to devote to thinking about food, and more leisure to eat as well. I caught a cold last week, so I had absolutely no interest in cooking, or even eating in general. That, combined with not feeling well this week, led to a 6-recipe deficit for this month!
I figured that Lemon Ricotta Cookies with Lemon Glaze would be a great recipe to get myself excited about cooking and baking again. I bought the ricotta cheese for the cookies a few weeks ago, and finally got some lemons. Time to make cookies!
I used low-fat ricotta rather than full-fat. I forgot to soften my margarine before I started. As a result, I beat the sugar and margarine together 6 minutes instead of 3, trying to get it to be fluffy! I decided that 6 minutes was plenty, even though the sugar-butter just looked sandy. I added the eggs at the same time, then added the lemon juice, ricotta, and lemon zest. The lemon zest didn’t all get mixed in very well (I noticed it stuck to the end of my hand mixer (affiliate link) beaters when I washed them). Flour mixed with salt and baking powder went in last.
When I read the recipe, I was under the impression that I’d be able to fit all the cookies on 2 baking sheets. That wasn’t the case. I wasn’t sure about the spacing, so I spaced the soft dough about how I would space chocolate chip cookies, which was about the proper amount. I got 15 cookies on each sheet, so I had to use a third sheet for the other 14 cookies. I didn’t measure the dough – I actually eyeballed it as I spooned it onto the cookie sheets – so it’s pretty amazing to me that I got 44 cookies, the number I was supposed to make.
I baked these 8 minutes, switched the racks for the two pans and rotated them, and baked them another 7 minutes. The third (and smaller) sheet was baked for 15 minutes in the center of the oven. I cooled them for 20 minutes before glazing them.
The glaze was easy to make, as it was just lemon zest, lemon juice, and powdered sugar. I spooned a little on each cookie and spread it around with the back of the spoon. This worked pretty well. The glaze wasn’t too runny, but it did spread to the edges a little more after I spooned it on. The recipe said to let the glaze set for 2 hours before removing the cookies and storing them. This wasn’t important if all you wanted to do was eat the cookies, but removing the cookies early did crinkle the glaze.
These cookies were very good. Everyone in Alex’s lab meeting really liked them, as did everyone I gave them to at work. They were very lemony. They were also very soft and moist. I put them between layers of waxed paper in containers, which is a good thing, because they would have been very stuck together otherwise. As soon as you opened the container, you could smell the lemon. The glaze had a big lemon kick to it, since it was just powdered sugar, lemon juice, and lemon zest. It’s possible that using low-fat ricotta (and not softening my margarine) made these cookies not as fluffy as they could be, but they were still very soft and cakey. I highly recommend these if you want soft, cakey lemon cookies – or if you want to be able to tell someone that you have cheese in your cookies. I’ll make these again.
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