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.
Video
Notes
Nutrition
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Mine taste amazing but they didn't spread at all. They are still balls. Should I smash them with a cup or add less flour? Instead of regular honey though I used some local lavender infused honey! So yummy!
These look so incredible.... I love lemon desserts. But, I’ll need to do gluten free flour.
How many cookies does this recipe make?
About 2 dozen!
This recipe is fantastic. I used 1 large lemon and it was just the right amount of lemoniness. Sweet but not too sweet delicious. The only adjustment I made to the recipe was the cook time. The recipe calls for the cook time to be 5-7 minutes. I found this to just not be enough. Although delicious when I pulled them out of the oven after a 7 minute cook time, they were just too soft. I put them back in for an additional 5 minutes making it a total of 12 minute cook time and they were perfect! My boyfriend is happy. As am I. 🙂
Make these!
These are terrible, they taste doughy and bland. This recipe is all wrong. Third time I have blindly made an "online recipe"...stick with proven recipes!
Excellent! Well done and thanks for posting this 🙂 I love the way you presented them, actually the beautiful snowflake is what lured me to these delicious cookies that turned out to be divine!! Would it be too much if I asked you where I can grab one like/similar?? 🙂
Thanks for the post
Cassie: Thank-you so much for sharing this recipe. They are devine!Used a small lemon, adjusting the flour to a little more and baked a minute more.
Turned out fab!
Wondering if you can freeze the dough or could you freeze the cookies once baked? Trying to do as much ahead of time!
Thanks so much!
Would like to try these, I can 'taste' the lemon! I see the recipe has Baking Soda, but being in New Zealand could you advise whether the 'all purpose' flour you use has baking powder in it as well? Thanks.
Has anyone tries substituting coconut oil for the butter?
These did not work at all! I followed the recipe to a T. I am an experienced baker and the cookies did not set, only spread like pancakes when baking. I tried freezing my dough after making the ball shapes for baking. They still spread. If you think about it, the honey should be substituted for sugar, more flour added - maybe then thwy would be more like shortbread? Perhaps an egg would add the protein binder that these lack. The flavor profile is there, but did not bake well at all.
Hi!
I am a sucker for lemony treats and was really excited to try out this recipe. The taste of the cookie itself was delish! However, I wouldn't say that they are "chewy", they were soft and light but had zero of the chewy texture I was expecting.. My cookies didn't flattened either like the photos. They remained in little balls originally formed. I will mold them next time so that they resemble cookies rather than odd dough balls. Otherwise, they were good!
Just made these and they turned out teribbly! Not sure what I did wrong 🙁 The dough was almost "moussey" when I put them on the cool pans and now they are round spongey messes and have to throw the whole batch out. Any idea what happened?
Sounds like you may have over mixed your dough. Mix just till it comes together, for traditional thick cookie texture we don't want to incorporate too much air and have mousse like dough as you say. Possibly you had more lemon juice than average, and could try balancing it out a Tb at a time with flour until your dough comes back together? Give it a second try! Learning problem solving in the kitchen turns a good baker into an awesome baker and is so worth the time.
Mine were terrible too, this recipe is horrible, and all wrong.
These are so delicious they are going to make me gain 10 lbs!!
Mine came out wafer thin. What did I do wrong? Also, they don't taste sweet OR lemony! ?
These look delicious! Does the powdered sugar go into the cookie dough, or is that ingredient only for dusting the cookies after baking?
Just for dusting them after baking. 🙂
How much lemon zest and lemon juice are needed? I've never used lemon zest before and I'm not sure how to go about it.
The 2nd line of the recipe says the zest and lemon juice from one lemon.
Average juice from a medium size lemon is about 3 Tablespoons.
This might be where previous posters have not gotten enough lemon flavor, or had difficulties with the dough.
The lemons I have in the fridge are very small, so I might use 1 1/2 or 2, and will definitely be measuring my juice to get at least 3 Tbl
Good Luck
I used two lemons because the juice from one didn't look like enough and they came out perfectly.
What happens if you cook them cold?
The butter stays chilled long enough not to spread in the oven.
Can you make this dough ahead of time and refridgerate it until ready to bake?
Sure can! Just bring it back to room temp before baking.
Made these today and they were perfect!!!!
Just made these and they are tasty, though I would like a stronger lemon flavor. However, mine lost their puffiness as soon as they were out of the oven. I'm not sure what went wrong. And yet, they did not last!
This is exactly what happened to me. Now they are thin as wafers.