Great recipe! I followed it exactly for the ingredients. But I refrigerated the dough (way too sticky) for 1 hour and was able to drop spoonfulls easily but it was a bit sticky. After 4 hours of refrigeration I found I could roll balls. Interestingly the cookies ended up the same either way both in size and texture. Oh I also made larger (1 inch balls) and cooked those for 15-17 minutes on a later batch. I will definitely make this recipe again. I brought them into work and they disappeared in a short time. I'm thinking it would work well with oranges. I'll try that next time.
After finding & reading the reviews, I decided
to change the lime juice to real key lime juice, plus I added 4 drops lime oil, along with the zest. My dough was also to soft so I added another 1/2 cup of flour.
After the first batch cooled for less than one minute, I placed them in a large ziplock with a cup of powdered sugar and shook it very easy, coating the entire cookie with the powdered sugar.
Use key lime juice. For those who are having problems with stickiness, just use a cookie scoop (like a small ice cream scoop). That way the dough never has to touch your hands. Don't add more flour - that would diminish the flavor. This cookie is very cake-like, just so you know.
I added 1 12 oz. bag (2 cups) of white chocolate chips and they made all the difference. The tastes are perfect this way if you use key lime juice (I use Nellie & Joe's Famous Key Lime Juice bottled). As other reviewers mentioned the dough is "wet" so I used teaspoons to round and drop them. I made them slightly larger and baked for 15-17 minutes. They never really "brown" on top so check the edges to make sure they don't burn.
I decided to use a frosting/pastry bag to make the intial batch and made small disk-shapes with peaks. They tasted great! To be experimental I decided to attempt to make balls as instructed but I added more flour to the rest of the batch since the dough with the inital ingredients is extremly wet! I added just enough to make the dough workable. The taste of the final cookies was doughie and I threw them all out. I suggest just using the original required amounts and instead of making balls just use a frosting bag and make small peaks (make sure they are small around and an inch across max). You can fit many together since they do not expand too much! Besides being less messy using the frosting bag they look better! Also do not even attempt to use a cookie gun/press. It was a disaster for me. The dough is just too soft for anything but a frosting bag!
I wish I would have read others reviews BEFORE I mixed everything in my mixer... I used a little less lime juice than called for but other than that I made as is. The dough was super sticky so I rolled it in parchment paper and froze it for an hour. However even after doing that it stuck to the parchment paper, my scoopers, my hands, everything that touched it. So I scraped what I could off the parchment paper and put it into a piping bag like another reviewer suggested, that was the only way I could get the cookies onto my baking sheet without a huge mess & even then I ended up having to throw a good amount of dough away because it stuck to everything it touched so bad. When these came out of the oven and cooled they had a nice lime flavor but I'm not a fan of cake-like cookies. These would make better cupcakes than they would cookies, in my opinion. So I'm giving these two stars for a good lime flavor but I wouldn't make these again. [[ EDIT ]] I'm changing my review from two stars, to one. These lost a lot of their lime flavor the next day & although these stayed together as a whole, once you bit into them they would crumble. Even my husband, who eats anything and everything, noticed this and commented about how they "needed something in them to hold them together".
I found this recipe very good but I made a few changes such as I used Key Limes and Zest and I added 1/4 cup more flour.I doubled the batch and placed it into a plastic lined bread baking tin and froze the dough for several hours which made it easier to handle.It's a keeper!!
WOW thanks Pam!!! I cook for a conference center in the Florida Keys and I am always looking for Key Lime recipes...This one is a keeper. My only suggestion is to roll the cookies in the powered sugar then you can sprinkel them after they are cooked. This took care of the sticky problem.
These are really good. They remind me of a lemon bar (which I love). My husband made these because he was the one to buy the bag of key limes (I didn't want to squeeze 2 dozen limes to get enough juice!!) and he thought the recipe was easy and we both love the flavor. Yumm.
