Patience is not an attribute I’m overburdened with, as you’ll be able to corroborate if you ever witness me bashing the crossing light buttons at an intersection and the up or down arrows on an elevator. However, patience demonstrated her rewards to me with these lemon, turmeric, black pepper and white chocolate cookies, which started off fine, blameless, but not quite right on day one — too crisp and crunchy, prompting a back-to-the-drawing-board sigh. By day two they’d relaxed and softened and become exactly what I wanted — tender, yielding, just a little chewy. Though I’m not the most credible ambassador for ongoing acts of patience; in this case — I get it!

While I’m unsure if it’s a culinary pun or culinary irony, I do like that these lemon-flavoured cookies are radiating pure yellow, like a child’s crayon rendering of the sun, even though the yellow colour comes from another ingredient entirely. For those of you familiar with haldi doodh, the Indian turmeric-tinted warm milk drink, the flavours in these cookies will come as no shock; but I can see how more broadly they might nonetheless need a little explaining, which, fortunately, I love doing.

Starting with the visual cue, the turmeric brings an almost carroty freshness, a startling, inescapable hue, and a rhizome cadence of warmth without generating any real heat, like watching a looped youtube video of a crackling fireplace. The black pepper coaxes out the health benefits of the turmeric’s curcumin and lends a surprisingly mild base note. The lemon lifts it all up, with its lightness of energy and feathery zest, and then there’s the white chocolate. You may well ask whether I’m putting white chocolate on everything out of muscle memory but my intent is true and it makes sense here, I vehemently assure you. Its vanilla plushness and soft, snappish crunch is just what the cookies need, it makes the lemon more vivid and the turmeric more earthy.

Agonising though it may be to wait overnight to eat them, it’s worth it, though if you’re more of a crisp-crunchy cookie person then you get to jump the queue. While the four-pronged flavour concept appeared to me all at once, I used this easy and useful recipe as a starting point for the cookies themselves and found they came together easily — a little light mixing, a pliant and easily-shaped dough, and a purposefully cracked surface, like parched desert sand, golden as a baby duckling rising from an egg shell.

Should you find yourself wanting more beguilingly lemon-scented food, I recommend these ginger, lemon, and brown butter kisses, this fennel seed cake, or this entire round up of lemon recipes.

Lemon, turmeric, black pepper and white chocolate cookies

Each of these flavours is equally important and I wouldn’t want to be without any of them — if you really don’t like white chocolate this probably won’t convince you, but try it nonetheless. I adapted the base cookie recipe just slightly from this recipe at Little Blog of Vegan.

• 75g soft butter
• 180g icing sugar
• 2 lemons
• 2 teaspoons turmeric
• several twists of black pepper
• 200g flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 150g white chocolate

1: Set your oven to 180C/350F, and line a flat baking tray with baking paper. Using a wooden spoon, beat together the 75g soft butter and 180g icing sugar until light and fluffy — carefully at first, so that you don’t shunt clouds of icing sugar everywhere, then more vigorously as the sugar becomes incorporated.

2: Finely grate the zest from one of the lemons and add this to the butter and sugar along with 4 tablespoons of its juice. Next, stir in the two teaspoons of turmeric and several twists from a pepper grinder — if you’re nervous, just do a couple, but the pepper is fairly unobtrusive.

3: Into this fabulously yellow mixture tip the 200g flour, then sift in the teaspoon of baking powder and the 1/4 teaspoon baking soda. Stir carefully to form a ball of bright yellow dough.

4: Roll heaped teaspoons of this dough into balls — it will be wonderfully pliant, like play-dough — and place on the paper-lined tray, flattening just a little. Leave an inch or so space between each cookie; they don’t spread hugely but they will flatten out somewhat.

5: Bake the cookies for 12 minutes, then cool on a rack. The surface will be cracked; this is completely fine.

6: Once the cookies are completely cool, melt the white chocolate — either in the microwave in short bursts or in a metal bowl resting over a pan of simmering water — and using a teaspoon, drizzle it over half of each cookie. Before you do that, finely grate the zest from the second lemon so you can sprinkle a little zest on each chocolate-drizzled cookie. Hold onto the now-nude zested lemon for another purpose, and let the white chocolate firm up before transferring the cookies to a sealed container.

If you can — wait overnight before eating these, at which point they’ll soften up a little and the flavour feels like it deepens, too.

Makes around 16 cookies.

music lately:

Leave Them All Behind by Ride, who I happily saw live last week, they played this song last, it was worth waiting for. That sparkly little loop at the start makes me feel not unlike a bubble in a glass of champagne.

On My Own from Les Miserables by Nikki M James; I desperately wish there was a recording of the revival cast she was part of, I am obsessed with the stretchy quality of her voice.

Rejoice by Julien Baker…at first I thought it was merely a good song but then it gets so BIG halfway through and now I feel equally largely about it.

Boléro by Ravel, which I also got to see live last week — for the first time in my life! — and the experience positively sent me into conniptions, it was so deliriously, magnificently persistent.

PS: As I’ve said previously, ReliefAid’s Gaza Appeal is important to me. Their team, through perishingly difficult circumstances, are on the ground trying to help. It’s been a while since their last update at the end of May but if you’re looking for relief effort to support in Palestine, I suggest them as a starting point.