Soft Lemon Cookies
Every time I've brought these soft lemon cookies somewhere, people think they're boring little sugar cookies, and then after a bite, people are over-the-moon, stumbling over themselves to get the recipe!
🔍 Recipe At-A-Glance: Soft Lemon Cookies
- 🕰️ Prep Time: 35 minutes, plus chill time
- ⏰ Cook Time: 10 minutes
- 🍋 Flavor Profile: Secret agent cookies: they look boring and unassuming, but they are sweet, lemony, and melt in your mouth!
- 🎉 Good For: Adding some brightness to a Christmas cookie plate and breaking up all the heavier chocolate, nut, and holiday spice flavors.
- 🧡 Difficulty: Easy!
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🧡 Why You'll Love This Recipe
Hi friend: These soft lemon cookies are one of the cookie recipes that I get asked for year after year. The only cookie recipe more in demand is my nanaimo bars recipe!
I think the unassuming look of these cookies is probably a defense mechanism. If they looked as incredibly tasty as they are-bright, sweet, and full of lemon flavor-you'd never get them out of the kitchen. They're in disguise. And hidden under that disguise is pure cookie magic.
Here's why you'll love this recipe:
- It's a bright spot on a cookie plate. A fresh spark of lemon flavor provides a nice contrast to rich chocolate, nut, and gingerbread flavors typically found on a holiday cookie plate. Double up on the lemon flavor by sipping some homemade limoncello while enjoying your cookies.
- They are ready in an hour. This cookie dough comes together in a snap, and is ready to bake after a short 30-minute stint in the fridge.
- It's a well-worn recipe. I've been making these cookies for over a decade now, and I get asked for the recipe nearly every time I serve them.
🍋 The Ingredients You Need
- Lemon: You're gonna need both the zest and the juice from the lemon. The zest goes into the lemon sugar, while the juice gets mixed straight into the dough, infusing every bite with tart lemon flavor.
- Granulated sugar: Most cookie recipes start with having you cream sugar with butter, but I have a special step that comes before that...infusing the sugar with lemon zest!
Make sure to check the recipe card below for the full ingredients list, along with quantities and my expert tips and tricks.
🔁 Variations & Substitutions
- Make it chocolate: For a chocolate take on these cookies, try my chocolate snowball cookies!
- Orange clove crinkles: Orange zest and juice, plus maybe a tiny pinch of ground cloves would make for a delicious, holiday-flavored cookie.
- Key lime pie cookies: Replace the lemon with some key lime zest and juice to make for a cookie that is almost like a hand-held key lime pie!
- Sprite/7Up cookies: Use a mix of lemon and lime in these cookies and they could be Sprite/7Up cookies. Yum!
- Go gluten-free: To make these cookies gluten free, use Bob's Red Mill Gluten-free 1-to-1 Baking Flour instead of all-purpose flour. If it isn't coming together, add up to two tablespoons (18 grams) of additional 1-to-1 flour and mix again. Looking for more gluten-free cookie options? Try my peanut blossom cookies, almond flour chocolate chip cookies, and buckeye peanut butter balls!
🥣 Soft Lemon Cookies How-To
Step 1: Make lemon sugar. To make sure every bite of cookie is filled with lemon flavor, we need to infuse the sugar. Using clean hands, massage the lemon zest into the sugar until you can smell the citrus.
Step 2: Cream the butter with the lemon sugar. Add the rest of the wet ingredients and mix until they are combined. If it looks curdled, that's just because of the lemon juice-add the dry ingredients, and it will smooth out. Mix until the dough starts to form a ball.
Step 3: Chill the dough in the fridge for 30 minutes, and preheat the oven to 350°F. Roll the dough into 1 ½" balls and place on an ungreased cookie sheet. They will spread, so leave around two inches between the cookies.
Step 4: Bake the cookies for 8-10 minutes-err on the side of underdone for the best chewy cookies. They will still be very soft, so let them cool on the baking sheet for a few minutes before moving them to a wire rack to finish cooling.
Step 5: To give the cookies their melt-in-your-mouth finish, toss the cooled cookies in powdered sugar.
🙋🏻♀️ Soft Lemon Cookies FAQs
Like all chewy cookie recipes, the absolute key to getting the texture right is closely monitoring your cooking time. As a matter of principle, I underbake all my cookie by 3-4 minutes less than what the recipes call for. These you have to watch like hawk. You want them to just be slightly (like, barely) browned on the bottom, and a beautiful pale yellow color on top. I wouldn't leave the kitchen while these are baking, because 30-60 seconds in the oven too long, and your delicious, chewy cookies are instead delicious, crunchy cookies.
You'll be tempted to leave them longer because they seem just so liquidy and gooey, but I promise, as they cool, they'll solidify. You want to err on the side of raw cookies on these guys. You want them to be jiggly enough that it's a little hard to wiggle them onto a spatula to take them off the tray.
That's how you end up with thin, flat lemon cookies. Chilling the dough + cool cookie sheets are key here.
When you've taken your first batch of cookies out of the oven and transferred them to a cooling rack, don't immediately go and place raw cookie dough on the hot cookie sheet. Instead, either wait 10-15 minutes for the cookie sheet to cool (or have a second cookie sheet that is cooling while your other one is the oven), or quickly run the sheet under cold water and dry it.
👩🏻🍳 My Expert Tips & Tricks
- Err on the side of underbaking: Don't let these cookies linger in the oven-to keep them chewy, you want them to be a little underdone. These cookies should be just be slightly (like, barely) browned on the bottom, a beautiful pale yellow color on top, and a tiny bit jiggly in the middle. We promise they will firm up further as they cool!
- Start with a cool cookie sheet: A warm cookie sheet starts the butter melting in cookies before they ever hit the oven, which means you'll end up with a liquid mess of cookie instead of a perfect pillow of lemonness.
🍪 More Festive Cookie Recipes:
If you tried these soft lemon cookies or any other recipe on my blog, please leave a 🌟 star rating and let me know how it went in the comments!
📖 Recipe
Soft and Chewy Lemon Cookies
Ingredients
- ⅔ cup granulated sugar
- 1 tablespoon finely grated lemon zest
- ½ cup unsalted butter at room temperature
- 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
- 2 tablespoons honey
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 teaspoon lemon extract
- 2 cups all-purpose flour (see note for gluten-free)
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- ¼ teaspoon sea salt
- ½ cup powdered sugar
Instructions
- Combine 1 tablespoon finely grated lemon zest and ⅔ cup granulated sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer. Using your hands, rub the zest into the sugar for a minute or so until the mixture is very fragrant.
- Add the ½ cup unsalted butter. Using the paddle attachment, cream together the butter and lemon sugar, stopping to scrape the sides of the bowl as necessary.
- Add the 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice, 2 tablespoons honey, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, and 1 teaspoon lemon extract and beat until combined. The mixture may look curdled because of the lemon juice.
- Add the 2 cups all-purpose flour, 1 teaspoon baking soda, and ¼ teaspoon sea salt, and beat until the dough comes together and begins to form a ball. Chill the dough in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.
- Preheat the oven to 350°F.
- Form the dough into balls about an inch and a half in diameter and place them two inches apart on a cool, ungreased cookie sheet.
- Bake in the preheated oven for 8-10 minutes, or until the bottoms are light golden brown.
- Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet for a couple of minutes, then carefully transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
- Once the cookies have cooled, toss them in ½ cup powdered sugar and serve. Store extras in an airtight container.
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I made these as part of my Christmas cookies...OH MY GOSH are they delicious! They are now a part of my personal recipes and will be made often. Love...thank you for sharing!
I could not get these cookies to set up. The dough is very lemon-y and they would've been wonderful if I could have gotten them to a proper consistency. I actually increased the baking time, and they were still more like sludge than cookie.
Me too!!!
Agree you should use juice of two lemons, although I did get about 1/3 cup from one lemon using a juicer. I used an organic lemon, which I thought would be more lemony.
Me too. So disappointed.
These sound fabulous. Do you roll the dough balls in the powdered sugar like the picture? Or does it go into the mixer with the other sugar?
You toss the cookies in the powdered sugar once they come out of the oven. It's in the last line of the directions in the recipe. 🙂
Hi! This recipe sounds delicious, and I'll try it for this Christmas. But I wonder - how much is a stick of butter in grams? (I live in Norway, and we use the metric system).
And by reading the earlier comments, I see it is about 113 grams. (Note to self - read Everything before asking☺☺)
Christmas baking has begun. Made these with my granddaughter yesterday and they are indeed fabulous. Had to freeze a batch right away or there wouldn't be any left for Christmas! Thanks for sharing this. Cheers.
No egg?
No egg.
Not sure what I did, but mine would not set up. I had to keep eating them to see if they were getting where they needed to be, haha! Mmmmm. Guess I will have to try again! I am loving the dough though.
I just made these and added our lemon extract instead of vanilla and the favor is amazing!!!! This is now in the Christmas cookie gift giving wheel!! Simple yet so delicious. Can't thank you enough. Merry Christmas
Hi I made these tonight and I have to say I was pretty underwhelmed. They came out exactly like the picture and they're definitely chewy and pillowey like you said but all of us felt that there was a big lack of flavor and could barely taste the lemon. I did use fresh lemon and followed the recipe exactly and for the second batch I used even more lemon and they still really had no flavor. If anyone else encounters this I did spice them up by putting Martha Stewart's lemon glaze on top and now they're a bit better.
Bummer! I'm sorry they didn't turn out for you. I made them again last night, and still find them plenty lemon-y, but different palettes taste things differently. Sorry you didn't enjoy them!
Made these the other night and LOVED them! So easy and SO delicious.
I made these tonight! I loved how they came together quickly with regular ingredients. They really did bake quicker than I expected! I like how soft and lemony they are!
I made these last night--yum! Perfectly sweet and lemon-y, without being too buttery or gummy. Also I love that the recipe only has one stick of butter (most chewy cookie recipes I see around the holidays seem to start with three!)
These look delish! I think I'll be making them for xmas gifts this year!
These look amazing! I'm very eager to make them. Just wanting to confirm the quantity of butter. 1 stick = grams? I've seen it's equivalent to 113g. Is this right?
Thanks!
Yup! 113. 🙂 Here's a great butter converter that tells you it in all kinds of measurements: http://www.traditionaloven.com/conversions_of_measures/butter_converter.html
These sounds amazing! I love lemon flavor! Question: any tips for zesting a lemon? Last time I tried the zesty parts mostly stuck to my zesting grater. Which was frustrating. Could I use lemon juice from a bottle?
(*These sound amazing!* Ack typos. I'm just really excited about chewy lemon cookies!)
You could use lemon juice from a bottle, but fresh has a more intense flavor. And do you have a good zester? That's absolutely key! And they zest definitely sticks to it, just take a finger and wipe down the back of the zester to get all that goodness (some zesters even come with a squeegee to get all that goodness off).
made these today for a neighbor!! It was hard to keep my fiance from eating them all before i got them in the cookie tin! will definitely make again 🙂 thanks so much!
I just made these today without a lemon! To replace the juice and zest of 1 lemon I used 2 tsp lemon extract and 3 tbsp lemon juice
I agree with Brittany - "Your styling and photography are stunning." I am so making these cookies..you had me at lemon.
Chiming in in 2021 to say that I made these. A) they're absolutely wonderful, b) make sure you follow the directions/take them out when you're supposed to, and c) the texture (for me, but I think I rolled mine too large) was soft and pillowy vs what I think of when I think of the word chewy. They weren't hard, but they didn't have a 'chewy' coating or anything, just soft cookies with a wonderful texture on their own. I also advise not to judge them until you've taken them out, you have the powdered sugar on, and it's been a few hours sitting in your tin or wherever you're keeping them. These really blew me away the next day. The flavor is clear and bright and more zesty/aromatic than like biting into a lemon bar and it's confusing kind of if you're expecting that but I will certainly be making these again. When I do I'll make them smaller and see if I can get them to spread out a bit more. I might also do what another commenter said about dipping them in sugar + lemon juice just to see how it is. Either way don't worry about the negative comments, take them out early enough (it will feel too early but do it anyways) and you really can't mess them up. As far as the zest goes, I made sure to pack my measuring spoon and I'm glad I did. Thank you so much for posting this:)
Beauties !
Gorgeous photos! Man, the conviction with which you talked up these cookies had me looking in the cupboard for icing sugar before I'd even gotten through the reading the post. I'm sold!
Seriously woman. Your styling and photography are stunning.
Mmm those look good! Love that they are chewy, that is the best kind of cookie 🙂
they are not good at all...scroll down to what everyone has said that has made them. You cannot even taste the lemon. This is the third time I have wasted time and food making an "Online" recipe like this that was terrible. Stick with proven recipes.
I scrolled down and read all of the comments. Seems like most people love the recipe, and some just need to make small adjustments. Everyone's ingredients and equipment are probably different, so there are any number of variables that might give you a different result. How many times did you attempt to make them? Did you make any changes to try and improve the outcome? Why would you try to discourage people from trying something just because you had one failed attempt? Judging by all of the *positive* comments I've seen, I'm convinced I'd like to give them a try.
Omg are you kidding me! Better take baking lessons these are amazing!
These r the best cookies ever! They just need some additional flour and that's it! My husband and son love them!
I loved them and they were the first to go off my cookie tray.
Maybe your sour attitude was the problem LIz.. (as long as you are dishing it out...)