Lemon cookies with Strawberry Filling!

So the other day I saw these totally cute cookies from another food blog!

After a quick glance at the ingredients needed, I had no hesitation in deciding to try making them! 

The author of the blog made it really clear with step-by-step pictures on how to bake these cuties, so please try this recipe out!

I modified the recipe a little. Less sugar and butter and more lemon! ^^ They still taste so rich and delicious so you may try my modified version if you like! ^^

Ingredients (Makes 30 cookies for me~!):

Lemon Cookies

- 1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

- 1/3 cup cornstarch

- 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

- 7 tablespoons of butter ( I used about 100g of butter) at room temperature

- 3 tablespoons of icing sugar

- 2 teaspoons of vanilla sugar ( if you don't have this, just replace with icing sugar. Add 1 teaspoon of vanilla paste if you still want the vanilla taste! ^^)

- 2 tablespoons lemon juice

Strawberry Filling

- 3 tablespoons butter, at room temperature

- 4 finely diced strawberries

- 1 cup icing sugar

1) Preheat the oven to 175℃.

2) Mix all the dry ingredients in the recipe for Lemon Cookies together. (This means the flour, the cornstarch, the baking powder, icing sugar, vanilla sugar.)

3) After you have mixed them well, cut in the butter and lemon juice. Form a big dough ball! ^^

4) After that, roll out the dough to about 1/8 inch thick! 

Usually I do this: 

I will cut out 2 large pieces of parchment paper, and put my dough ball in between these 2 pieces of parchment paper. 

I will then roll out the dough flat using a rolling pin on the surface of the parchment paper where my dough ball is safely kept under on another piece of parchment paper! 

This ensures that my dough ball won't stick to the table or my rolling pin! It's a very clean way of doing things. 

Of course, you can do it the usual way of flouring your tabletop and rolling pin to ensure the dough won't stick. ^^

5) Using a small round cookie cutter, cut out as many cookies as you can! 

Place the cookies on lined baking sheets about 1/4-inch apart. (You can see the pictures in the blog in detail!) 

For the leftover dough, just roll it into a ball again, and then roll it flat with your rolling pin to cut even more cookies! ^^

6) Put the cookies in your oven! 

My oven tends to burn the bottom of my cookies so easily! So I put my tray of cookies at the uppermost rack! My heating element is at the bottom of the oven, you see. I don't know how your oven works for you, but when my oven is in baking mode, only the bottom heating element heats up. So if you have a similar oven and problem with me, try it my way? 

Once I smell the buttery aroma of my cookies, I take them out! Leaving them in there any longer will only burn them. That's for my situation. haha! Sometimes, when the 5~6 minutes is up, I will just leave them in the oven with the heat off. This is when I can't leave something I'm doing at the moment.

(Edit: I now know that my oven is a convection oven. Haha! I'm slow, I know. Most people now use a conventional oven. So, to clarify:

Conventional oven: bake for 8~10minutes at 175℃.
Convection oven: bake for 5~6 minutes at 150℃.

Since this post, all my other baking recipes I post using conventional oven baking temperatures and time. ^^

If you are using convection oven still, like me, just minus 25℃ of the baking temperature and minus 1/4 of the baking time needed by a conventional oven.)

However, usually, I will take the tray of cookies out, flip the cookies onto a cooling rack and allow them to cool. 

Cookies usually still continue 'baking' when you bring them out to cool, so don't make the mistake I made when I first baked cookies! I baked them till they looked golden brown and the touch of them was a solid, tough one instead of a soft one. After they cooled down, they became as hard as rocks. Impossible to bite through. Your grandmother will not be pleased to be offered one. True story.

Also, the bottom of my cookies were burnt. 

I also double-pan my cookies. I don't lay them directly on the tray. I use another big rectangular baking pan, lining it with parchment paper, and then I put my cookies in this baking pan, on top of the tray instead. Now I have no more problems of cookies being burnt. So if you always have a problem with cookies being burnt, feel free to try out my tips.

7) Make the strawberry filling! Just throw in all the ingredients of the strawberry filling and whip them till they look like a good consistency to you! I'm sure you have eaten sandwich cookies with icing before (think Oreo as a popular example?). So try to make your filling to that kind of Oreo cream filling consistency.

If they are too watery, add in more sugar. Or, if you are not sure, put your bowl of whipped filling into the fridge first. It usually hardens a little and becomes easier to spread on your cookies! ^^

8) Wait for the cookies to completely cool before spreading your filling on them, or the heat from your cookies will melt the filling and it will look like a disaster.

My cookies cooled, but my filling wasn't hard enough, so my cookies looked like this:

A little bit runny. When I put the strawberry filling in the refrigerator overnight, they became so much easier to spread! 

These cookies can be easily made vegan by using vegan butter (Nuttelax, Earth Balance etc) or margarine! ^^

Ok! I hope you enjoy this recipe! They were delicious! They're all gone now in fact!