Remember these?
Of all the recipes I have shouted about, both on Social Nesting and in person, this is the one that most people have come back to me to say
a) they tried it
and
b) they LOVED it.
This Lemon Crinkle Cookie recipe is pretty darn close to perfect and a worthy contest winner on the site that introduced it to me, LDS Living. And while my attempts to tamper with it as a cookie were futile, I was recently being über-lazy and trying to think of a way to shorten the necessary and delicious but tedious final step – rolling the individual balls of sticky dough in icing sugar. The answer came in brownie form…
And holy smokes, what a brownie!
If you liked (or just liked the sound of) the Lemon Crinkle Cookies, I have played around with the recipe to bring it to life in brownie form. Hold onto your chef’s hats for…
Lemon Burst Brownies
125g butter at room temperature
200g granulated sugar
½ tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
zest of 1 large lemon
juice of 1 large lemon
160g plain flour
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda
50g ground almonds
3 Tbsp of plain or lemon yoghurt
200g white chocolate, roughly chopped
75g blanched hazelnuts, roughly chopped
icing sugar for dusting
Preheat the oven to 170°C (325°F).
Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the vanilla extract and egg and beat until just combined. Add the lemon zest and juice and beat again until just combined. (Don’t worry if it looks a bit curdled at this point. It’s fine.)
In a separate bowl, sift the flour, salt, baking powder and soda and the ground almonds and add to the wet mixture in three stages, mixing between each addition. Mix in the yoghurt then add the chopped chocolate and hazelnuts.
Dust a 23cm x 23cm square baking pan with icing sugar – enough to thickly coat the base completely – then spoon the batter into the pan and spread out. Then dust the top of the batter with more icing sugar until completely covered.
Bake covered with foil for 30 minutes, then remove the foil and continue to bake for 15 minutes more. They should look something like this:
Let these cool completely before you try to cut them. I cooled them to room temperature then refrigerated them for 30 minutes before I cut them. They really need to firm up and they are actually a bit more delicious cold.
Some may call this a “blondie”, because it’s not brown, but to me, a brownie is a soft, dense sweet unctuous hand-held cake, often peppered with nuts and chunks. I am colour-blind when it comes to baked goods. And these beauties could go up against the finest chocolate incarnation and hold their own. Enjoy!
