Gluten Free Recipe - GF Lemon Drop Cookies

At long last, I have FINALLY found a GF sugar cookie recipe that I like!  Let us all shout for joy! It took a little work, tweaking a couple of different recipes to get one that worked for me, but let me tell you, these are good.  I'll first share the recipe for the standard drop sugar cookie and then the modification to turn them into lemon drop cookies.

GF DROP SUGAR COOKIES

First off, your ingredients...

- 2 sticks (one cup) softened butter
- 1 3/4 cups sugar
- 2 large eggs
- 2 tsp. vanilla
- 2 cups asian white rice flour
- 1/3 cup cornstarch
- 1/3 cup sweet rice flour
- **1 cup - 1 1/2 cups GF baking blend **
- 1 tsp. baking soda
- 1/2 tsp. xanthan gum
- 1/2 tsp. salt

Alright, alright, alright.  Let's get this going.

- Preheat to 350 degrees and line your cookie sheets with parchment paper.  DON'T FORGET THE PARCHMENT PAPER.
- Mix your butter and sugar really, really well.  Beat the eggs in, one at a time, scraping the sides of the bowl in between.  Go ahead and throw in your vanilla too and mix it in.
- In the meantime... mix your rice flour, cornstarch, sweet rice flour, baking soda, xanthan gum and salt.

** OK, here's the tricky part.  I've found that recipes that work for other people, don't work well for me because of the flour content.  I added at least a cup of the GF Baking Blend that I know and love to the recipe to get the texture of the dough that I need.  You can try using just more white rice flour instead of the baking blend.  I recommend that you try it and bake it, a little at a time until you get the texture of cookie that you  are looking for.  If the dough is too gooey, your cookies will just melt and you'll end up with something that looks a lot more like a stained glass window than a midnight snack.  You want your dough to be the consistency of Play Dough.  For reals....

See this?  This is BAD.  You don't want your dough to look like this. Too gooey.

See this?  This dough is much thicker.  It balls up a little when you mix it in the mixer. I think I ultimately added 1 1/2 cups of Baking Blend to the original recipe.  It's a firmer dough that will hold up to the heat.  Do what you've gotta do to get to this texture, just keep track of what you're doing so that you can write it down :)

- OK, at this point, you can roll your dough into balls, place on that parchment paper and bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes.  

Before and After

- If you want, just stop right here.  These are fantastic cookies.  They are perfect topped with some pink frosting and sprinkles.

Now, the modification to make LEMON DROP COOKIES...

You'll need...

- Half a bag of lemon drops, pulverized.

- The zest of two lemons

- The juice of one lemon mixed with about a cup of powdered sugar - for the glaze.

- After you get your standard sugar cookie dough prepared, smash up about half a bag of lemon drops.  Then throw them in the mixer along with the lemon zest.

- Bake them for 10-12 minutes at 350.  Make sure you've got that parchment paper on those cookie sheets.  Remember that you're melting hard candy and it can make a big, sticky mess.  In the end, you should end up with something like this...

- Allow them to cool for a couple minutes before pulling them off the cookie sheet.  Place on a separate piece of parchment paper to cool and brush on some of that lemon juice and powdered sugar glaze that you whipped up.

Yum.

Then, dig in.  This dough refrigerates well, but you'll have to let it warm up a bit before you can form it into balls.  Good luck!  And enjoy!