Little Lemon Cakes

A little warning ahead - this recipe was a disaster when I made it, and I had to rescue it at multiple steps (see important comments). With these alterations, though it turned out pretty well.

Ingredients:

Baking sheet

Parchment paper

50 g butter

100 g marzipan paste

2 eggs

100 g powdered sugar

1 package vanilla sugar or some vanilla aroma

1 lemon (zest)

100 g flour

2 tablespoons milk

Filling:

Marmelade (I used lemon curd instead)

Decoration:

100 g semisweet chocolate

A little coconut oil

Preparation:

1. Line baking sheet with parchment paper. Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius (350 F).

2. Separate egg. Beat egg whites until very stiff. Cut marzipan paste into small pieces.

3. Using an electric hand mixer mix butter, marzipan paste and egg yolks until soft.

4. Add powdered sugar (sifted if necessary), vanilla sugar or some vanilla aroma, and lemon zest, and keep mixing until a smooth batter has formed (3 minutes).

5. Sift flour, and add flour alternating with milk. Lastly, fold egg whites into batter.

6. Fill batter into a piping bag, and squeeze small cookie circles onto baking sheet.

7. Bake cookies at 180 degrees Celsius (350 F) for 10 minutes. Remove baking sheet from oven, let cool down briefly, then remove cookies sliding a knife under. Let cookies cool down fully.

8. Filling: Spread marmelade or lemon curd on one half of the cookies, put a second cookie on top.

9. Decoration: Melt chocolate and coconut oil in a bowl over hot water. Dip cookies halfway into chocolate, then put on parchment paper. When the chocolate is solid, put the cookies into a box.

Comments:

1. The disaster started after I filled the batter into the piping bag. The batter was too solid to be squeezed out. So I scraped the batter out again, added more milk, and tried again. This time I was able to squeeze little cookies onto the baking sheet, but they started running during baking forming all sort of amorphous shapes. No two cookies looked the same.

Here's my solution: I first added lemon curd to one cookie half, added the second cookie on top, then used a small round cookie cutter and cut out the center. Now all cookies look the same, almost like coins.

Some other idea: Instead of cutting the double cookie, spread the batter onto parchment paper, and bake as a sheet. Remove parchment paper, then cut cookies out with a cookie cutter.

2. The cookies are made from a dough that is a cross between a sponge cake and a pound cake. They are very soft, and tend to stick to each other. When you let them cool, do not stack them on top of each other, they will stick together.

3. I also prepared the batter with Trader Joe's gluten-free flour. The texture is almost identical, the cookies are not crumbling, which can be a problem when you use gluten-free flour. A little success!