Lemon Oatmeal No-Bake Cookies Recipe

Lemon oatmeal no-bake cookies are cooked on the stove, not in the oven: sugar, butter and milk are boiled for one minute and stirred with oats, and the cookies set as they cool. This version adds white chocolate, the zest of two lemons, a tablespoon of juice and coconut. It makes twenty cookies, and the one minute of boiling is the step that decides whether they hold together.

What sets lemon oatmeal no-bake cookies

The cookies are a candy holding oats together. Wikipedia's article on candy making puts the principle in one sentence: sugar is dissolved in water or milk to a syrup, which is boiled until it reaches the wanted concentration, and how long it boils determines what it becomes.

Here the syrup boils for one minute. Counted from the moment the whole surface bubbles and the bubbles do not stop when stirred, that minute drives off enough water for the mixture to set soft but firm.

Recipe

Lemon Oatmeal No-Bake Cookies

No-bake cookies with lemon zest and juice, white chocolate, quick oats and coconut, set by a one-minute boil of sugar, butter and milk. Twenty cookies.

3.3 (3)Print

Prep

10 min

Cook

5 min

Total

45 min

Serves

20

Cuisine

American

Ingredients

• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup unsalted butter
• 1/4 cup whole milk
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup white chocolate chips
• 1 tablespoon finely grated lemon zest
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 cups quick-cooking oats
• 1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

Instructions

1. Line a baking sheet with parchment. Measure out all the ingredients before the pan goes on the heat.
2. Put the sugar, the butter, the milk and the salt in a saucepan over medium heat and stir until the butter has melted and the mixture comes to a full, rolling boil.
3. Boil for exactly 1 minute, stirring, then take the pan off the heat.
4. Stir in the white chocolate chips until melted, then the lemon zest, the lemon juice and the vanilla.
5. Stir in the oats and the coconut until evenly coated.
6. Drop the mixture by heaped tablespoons onto the parchment, to make 20 mounds, and let them stand for 30 minutes, until firm.

Nutrition

Calories:

130

Calculated from the ingredient quantities above using the USDA FoodData Central database, then divided by the number of servings. It is an estimate and will vary with the exact products you use.

Sticky, or dry and crumbly

• Sticky cookies that never firm up were not boiled long enough, or the minute was counted from the first bubbles at the edge. Chilling them makes them firm enough to eat.
• Dry, crumbly cookies were boiled too long. Fifteen seconds over is enough to do it.
• A humid day slows the setting. Give the cookies an hour, or put the sheet in the refrigerator.

Zest for the flavour, a little juice

Most of the lemon flavour is in the zest. A tablespoon is about what two lemons give; grate only the yellow layer, since the white underneath is bitter.

The juice stays at one tablespoon. Juice is mostly water, and water put back into the pan after the boil undoes part of what the boil did. The white chocolate helps the other way: it melts into the syrup and hardens again as the cookies cool.

For lemon in a baked cookie, the Trefoils page has a zest variation of its shortbread.

Quick oats or old-fashioned

Quick-cooking oats are cut smaller and soften in the hot syrup. Old-fashioned rolled oats stay chewy and make a looser cookie; pulsing them five times in a food processor brings them close to quick oats.

A week in a tin

The cookies keep a week in a closed tin at room temperature, with parchment between the layers, and three months in the freezer.

Other cookies on this site that need no oven are the haystack cookies and the no-bake peanut butter cheesecake balls.