These chewy, lemon and almond-scented cookies are made with little more than almond flour, egg whites and sugar, meaning they are naturally gluten-free!
A riff on my popular soft amaretti cookies, these almond flour crinkle cookies will spread a bit more in the oven, resulting in a lighter, chewier texture with crisp edges and eye-catching powdered sugar-coated crackly tops.
I’ve been wanting to do a lemon amaretti cookie recipe for sometime now.
Rather than just adapting my always popular soft amaretti cookie recipe for yet another flavor (I’ve done 13 so far from matcha to hazelnut), I decided to tweak the recipe a little bit more to change the shape and texture of the final cookie. Not that the original isn’t perfect as is (why fix what’s not broken) but I still wanted to do something a little different lest I start to sound like a broken record.
During my testing, I discovered that by adding a tiny bit of liquid (lemon juice in this case) and an even tinier amount of baking soda/powder, the cookies, instead of retaining their ball-like shape, spread into a delightfully crackly finish. The added leavening results in a lighter interior as well, with a wonderful chewy texture (people say they like chewy cookies but these, these are truly chewy).