Lemon Panko Cookies Recipe

You may not consider panko in desserts, relegating it as an alternative to breading responsibility for cutlets or utilizing it as a crispy casserole topping. However the craggy, irregular breadcrumbs have their place within the sweets realm. In these Lemon Panko Cookies, the ethereal crumbs do what they do finest — create a light-weight crunch on the outside — whereas the panko that’s labored into the dough retains the feel tender and barely chewy, a lot much less dense than cookies made completely with flour. Suppose snowball cookies combined with shortbread, with a light-weight lemon raise and pleasantly crisp coating that retains you coming again for extra.

The strategy is surprisingly easy: Powdered sugar incorporates shortly with softened butter, requiring much less beating time for aeration. Contemporary lemon zest (you possibly can swap in orange if you happen to’d like) perfumes the dough, and a splash of lemon juice and a scraping of vanilla bean seeds spherical out the flavour with raise and depth. A brief chill within the fridge corporations up the dough simply sufficient to roll into neat balls, which get tumbled in flippantly crushed panko earlier than baking. 

The cookies dome fantastically within the oven, and so they’re flippantly dusted with powdered sugar once they’re carried out for a snowcapped look. The result’s a cookie that’s elegantly easy, flippantly candy, and uniquely textured — a surprisingly easy deal with that you simply’ll need to share with associates over a cup of tea or espresso.

Why it’s essential to use a kitchen scale to measure the panko for these cookies

In baking, precision is vital, and measuring substances by weight is extra exact than measuring by quantity. That is significantly true with regards to getting the correct quantity of panko for these cookies. Panko’s coarseness varies so much from model to model. Throughout our testing, we weighed 1 1/4 cups of three totally different manufacturers of panko; the identical quantity quantity ranged from 2.8 ounces to 4 ounces in weight. In baking, modifications like this may have main penalties, main you both to tender cookies or to dry, powerful ones. So make certain to weigh the panko you’re utilizing, aiming for 3 1/8 ounces.

How to make sure your cookies don’t burn

Do you end up saying, “My cookies all the time are likely to burn on the underside”? If that’s the case, the decrease heating factor of your oven would possibly run too scorching. If that’s the case, stack issues in your favor by including extra insulation to guard the dough: Nestle two baking sheets or sheet pans on high of one another, and bake the cookies on the double layer of metallic. In the event you don’t have sufficient pans to do that, you possibly can attempt elevating the oven rack one place increased.

Notes from the Meals & Wine Take a look at Kitchen

• A #100 cookie scoop is the proper measurement to shortly and effectively portion the dough. 
• It may be tough to evaluate doneness at a look for the reason that tops of the cookies keep pale; as an alternative, gently raise one of many cookies and peek on the backside to test doneness.
• In the event you don’t have an electrical mixer or don’t need to use it, you may make the dough by hand. It simply takes a little bit elbow grease to cream the butter and sugar collectively. It helps to have the butter very mushy; attempt permitting it to take a seat at room temperature in a single day.

This recipe was developed by Cheryl Slocum; the textual content was written by Ann Taylor Pittman.