When life gives you lemons, make these

Going to Pat’s house is like having a own culinary library at my finger at my disposal. She subscribes to numerous cooking and home mags. I love looking through the ones that I would never buy myself but have gorgeous pictures and occasionally, recipes I think are worth trying.

This recipe is for the famed Lemon-Cream Sandwich Cookies from Citizen Cake in San Francisco. I’ve been to SF but alas, never to this famed place, so I had to google for the cookies to see what I could find. I didn’t find much. I guess these cookies are so good no one thinks to snap a photo first.

Some mods:

• I picked a fluted circle a tad shy of the 2-inch size the recipe suggested. The recipe calls for you to roll the dough out to scant 3/8-inch thickness, which seemed ludicrous. This was clearly going to be a thick cookie. I figured there was NO way this was going to yield 24 sandwich cookies.

  And…I ended up with 36. Oh me of little faith.

  As written, these cookies do turn out quite thick. Next time I would roll the dough a little thinner, cut down the baking time, and use an even smaller cookie cutter, perhaps 1-1/2 inches.

• The recipe calls for chilling the dough for 4 hours or up to a day. I divided my dough into thirds and rolled out to the recommended thickness BEFORE chilling. I placed the dough circles on waxed paper, set them on a cookie sheet, and put them on our front porch. The one advantage to living in Winter Wonderland? Your porch becomes a walk-in cooler.

  I’ve worked with enough rolled cookie dough recipes to know that exact temp is crucial when making cookies like these. Too cold and the dough will crack when rolled. Too warm and the shape won’t hold in the oven. By chilling the dough after I rolled it I was able to bring it in, let it sit for a minute and get cutting. My shapes held beautifully because I was handling the dough as little as possible. I may try this for my next batch of Christmas cookies.

• These cookies were full of lemon flavor, and the filling, though not too sweet, was difficult to spread due to the ridiculous amount of powdered sugar called for (2 packed cups!). If I make these again, I will cut down on the sugar a bit to make the filling easier to spread. I found that 2 tsp of filling in each cookie seemed a bit like overkill, so mine probably ended up taking about half of that.

These are so rich that anything larger than a 2-inch cookie will probably send you into diabetic shock. But man, are they great with a glass of milk or a cup of tea.

The recipe can be found here on epicurious.com.