Lemon Hearts

This was originally supposed to be  "lemon stars", but I found I don't have a star shaped cookie cutter, so hearts it is. They are essentially lemon shortbread biscuits. This is a cookie best suited with tea or similar, they're a bit to dry to have on their own. The flavor is quite nice though, there's a definite taste of lemon.

This recipe is from an old-timey cookbook, which means that it's very short on details. For example, it doesn't state how long the cookies take to bake, it just says "until they have a nice color". That, coupled with a printing error, where it says to make the cookies 2 cm thick, when (I think) it should be 1/2 cm, means that I had to do some guesswork to make these. Rest assured though, I'm filling in all those blanks here and letting you know exactly how I made them.

Lemon Hearts

Ingredients
300g Flour
200g Butter
100g Sugar
1/2 Egg white
Juice of 1 lemon

1 Egg
Confectioners sugar

Ingredients

Whisk the 1/2 egg white to firm peaks.

Place the flour on the table, and make a well in the center. Put the butter, sugar, egg white, and lemon juice into the well and bring together into a dough.

This dough it very soft and sticky, so wrap it in cling film and place in the fridge for at least 1 hour in order to make it easier to handle.

Roll the dough out, between 2 pieces of parchment paper, to a thickness of 1/2 cm, and cut out the cookies with a cookie cutter. Take the remains of the dough, and repeat until there isn't enough dough left for any more cookies.

Place the cookies on a baking tray lined with parchment paper. Bake, in the middle of the oven, at 200°C, for 10-15 minutes. Keep a close eye on it towards the end, 1 extra minute can be the difference between beautiful and burnt. The cookies are done when the edges are golden brown.

Put together

Dough

Pre-oven

Post-oven