Another day, another recipe

I recently tried to make these "lemon crinkle cookies", they seem to be American and are soft and fudgy in texture, and are covered in powdered sugar. The sugar is what gives them their cracked or 'crinkled' surface after baking.

I'd never tried these before, so I was keen to make them so that I could try them out, as I haven't really seen them anywhere in UK shops.

I combined two recipes, as I had the ingredients for the "Chocolate fudge crinkle biscuits" but I didn't have the cocoa powder. But! I had lemon juice so I found this other recipe for the measurement of the lemon juice.

finished batch

Ingredients

So, I fused the two recipes I've mentioned above into this ingredient list:

60 millilitres of lemon juice
1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
200 grams caster sugar
60 millilitres of vegetable oil (I only had olive oil)
2 large eggs
180 grams plain flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
roughly 100 grams of icing sugar

ingredients

I realise the original recipe yielded like 35 mini biscuits, but I think I only had roughly 19 or 21? I definitely made them too big!

Steps

So first I whisked together the caster sugar, oil and eggs (one at a time) completely. I also added the vanilla essence and lemon juice here too.

step 1

Next, I didn't listen to the recipe and added everything straight into the same bowl, but reading back now it was supposed to be too separate bowls haha.
This was stirring in the flour, baking powder, and a pinch of salt, until a really soft dough formed. too soft really.

runny mixture

I think this resembled a pancake mixture to be honest, but I don't know if this is right and wrong.

Because it was so runny, I chilled it in the fridge for an hour.

after chilling

The above picture is after it was chilled, I know it looks exactly the same but this is definitely the picture of it after chilling! I think it did help it firm up a bit.

It's been really hot in the UK, yesterday it got to 31 degrees Celsius, which is really hot for us here as our buildings aren't designed for it and are meant to keep heat in. I do wonder if this heat affected my batter as when I did the next step, it felt like my batter was melting??

the set up

This next step is crucial for the crinkle texture. I put the icing sugar on a plate, and did teaspoons of the mixture rolling it around in the sugar. As I did this, the balls kept almost melting into puddles on the tray!
It's worth mentioning I had the oven on to preheat, at 190 degrees Celsius.

I couldn't take a picture of this bit because it was messy, I kept finding myself having to top up the icing sugar on the plate, and sprinkling some on top of the biscuits on the tray.

After cooking the biscuits in batches for about 10 to 15 minutes each, here's what it looked like.

first batch

The first batch was quite pale, I only put it in for 10 mins, but they did have a little bit of the crinkle texture.

The rest I did for about 14 minutes or 15 mins, these came out a lot more browned, I think too much so.

done!

Review

Overall, the recipe was definitely easy, but I just feel like they didn't come out as crinkled as they should have. On top of that, I found that the flavour had really disappeared, barely any lemon coming through. The texture was more like those French macarons.