Gluten Free Lemon Cookies

From Fearless Dining. Trying to make these for a friend who is gluten intolerant.

• Used the same flour as in the recipe, Bob’s Red Mill 1-to-1.
• Added more lemon than the recipe said (1.5 - 2 tbsp), as I didn’t have lemon extract and I like it lemony.

• Dough wound up greasy and kind of slack and difficult to work with. Had to roll the cookie balls up quickly and dump them in the sugar so they didn’t warm up and stick to my hands.
• Waited 30 minutes, took it out of the fridge, still seemed sticky, put it back in for another 15. Didn’t really make much difference.
  • I’m unsure what purpose the fridge rest has in the recipe, I’m guessing it’s just to make the dough easier to work with.
• Baked 12 minutes. Cookies are chewy, but without much strength. Might try baking longer next time to try to stiffen them up a bit.

Results

They taste good but are a little slack. During baking they expanded out a lot and barely rose at all.

I didn’t put them far enough apart and they wound up fusing:

In what is probably a rookie move I tried to separate them with a pie spatula before they had cooled, damaging some.

Not sure whether to blame the structural weakness of these on the flour, my technique, or possibly my baking powder running out of pep. Possibly this is the reason the recipe uses lemon extract with a note about too much liquid interfering with the texture.

Maybe if I tried to work the dough a little more after mixing? Does that even work with gluten-free flour? Is xanthan gum amenable to working a little harder for me?