Time for February Secret Recipe Club!
I am very excited that Secret Recipe Club is back after our holiday hiatus! This month I was assigned Emily's lovely blog, It Bakes Me Happy. Her blog is so pretty and the pictures/ recipes all sounded delicious! It was very hard to pick just one to make! There was one treat that jumped out at me while I was browsing and it was the Lemon Poppy Seed Thumbprint Cookies. They looked so great and imagined the buttery cookie with the tart curd being utterly fantastic! I have to say that her Chocolate Strawberry Shortcake was also on my shortlist!
One of the reasons I wanted to give these cookies a try was the curd. The curd does not have any eggs, butter or diary and uses coconut oil and almond milk in place. I loved the idea of lightening up the curd for the cookies and letting the tart lemon shine even brighter. The curd was really easy to make, but I couldn't get mine to a clear consistency, but the flavor and texture was still amazing. The second part of this marriage is the cookies. The cookies. The buttery little morsels of poppy seed yumminess! They are great and paired with the curd- fantastic.
This recipe makes about 2 dozen cookies and we ate them in about 4 hours..... we may have shared a few with my parents, but the damage was done by Ron and I. This is why we can't have nice things.... no control. However, I loved how easy these were and trying different flavors of curds would be a delicious experiment!
Thank you Emily for a wonderful and delicious cookie!
Ingredients
For the curd:
1/2 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup water
2/3 cup sugar
2 Tbl corn starch
2 Tbl almond milk
2 tsp coconut oil
zest of one lemon
pinch of salt
For the cookies:
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1/3 cup sugar
1 large egg yolk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp poppy seeds
Instructions
For the curd:
In a saucepan over medium heat combine the lemon juice, water, sugar, corn starch, salt and zest; whisk until the mixture boils. Cook for an addition minute undisturbed, it should turn clear and be thicker (mine did not turn clear, but it thickened). Remove from the heat and whisk in the almond milk and coconut oil, whisk until the mixture is smooth. Pour the curd into a glass jar and let cool to room temperature, store in the fridge.
For the cookies:
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees, and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
In the bowl of your electric mixer on medium-high, beat together the butter and sugar until
light and fluffy, about 2-3 minutes. Beat in egg yolk and vanilla. Next add the flour, salt and poppy seeds, mix until the dough starts to stick together.
Form the dough into 1" balls and arrange them on the baking sheets. Flatten each ball slightly with your thumb, leaving an indentation in the center of each cookie.
Bake for 10 minutes.Remove the baking sheet from oven (if the indentations look shallow push them down slightly). Fill each thumbprint with 1/2 tsp of lemon curd.
Bake for an additional 2/3 minutes, until the curd is set and the edges of cookies are lightly golden. Transfer to wire racks to cool completely, serve.