The Perfect Cup: Great Homemade Coffee with James Hoffmann

Now it's time to answer your cooking questions and kitchen mysteries with my co-host Sara Moulton.

Sarah is, of course, the author of Home Cooking 101.

She also stars in Sarah's Weeknight Meals on public television.

Hi Sarah.

Hello Chris.

Do you want to take the first call? Yes, I do.

Welcome to Milk Street.

Who's calling?

Hi, this is Gwen in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Hi Gwen.

How can we help you today?

I am calling because I need some advice on how to make a basic lemon sugar cookie recipe more lemony and sweeter.

Tell me what's in the current recipe you're making.

I cut the recipe in half because I don't like to usually make however many dozens a full recipe will make.

With that being said, it calls for a cup of sugar, two and a quarter teaspoons of lemon juice, and then a half a tablespoon of lemon zest.

What I do with that is just to amplify the sugar and the lemon part I just add maybe one and a half to two tablespoons of sugar.

And then I think I ended up adding like a tablespoon of the lemon juice.

The flavor ends up being really great, but the cookies are deflated and they spread.

There's some egg in there and some flour.

And is there leavener as well?

There's baking powder and baking soda.

Okay, I would really up the lemon flavor through the zest more than the juice because the juice is liquid.

A batter can spread because there's too much liquid in there or there's too much sugar because sugars tend to make crispier, thinner cookies.

What I would do, you probably added extra sugar because you added extra lemon too, so you had to balance the two, but if you just upped the zest...

Mix the zest, by the way, with the sugar, the sugar that was in the original recipe, sort of to distribute it more, really up the zest.