There's an unspoken trust that makes it possible to follow a stranger's recipes. I think that's enough philosophizing for one day.
First of all my initial preparation was different from the original. I was not manic. I'd manage to keep some money in my account throughout the week. And finally my motivation was curiosity and a desire to make something. I appreciate that these are all confounding factors, but I believe, nonetheless, that I can still comment on the reported recipe.
Ingredients:
Flour - I didn't need to buy this because I still had some left over from my last apartment. It was in a green reusable shopping bag under my bed. Unfortunately my new place, although reported as being fully furnished, seems to lack any measuring utensils. Hence the flour, and every other ingredient was measured by eye. In retrospect this was not completely ideal.
Powdered sugar - I did need to buy this. However the nomenclature completely misled me, and I ended up buying some sort of fine sugar instead. I am not claiming that the original information was deceitful, but I would ask that readers consider all the facts and make up their own minds.
Butter - Easy!
Egg - There are way too many options for eggs but that's neither here nor there.
Milk - Ditto.
Lemon Pudding Mix - OK. Now this should probably be explained for people who, like myself until recently, have never purchased pudding mixes. Pudding mixes (or at least the one I purchased) contain two packets in them, both of which are unlabeled. One packet is the actual pudding/flavor stuff, which you can tell by the strong lemony smell. The other packet is flour and stuff I think, but anyway is not needed.
Baking Soda - Was in the same green bag as the flour.
Vanilla Extract - Actually already had this as I have an underutilized but nonetheless impressive collection of spices and other flavoring goods.
Extras? Nothing. What can I say?
Preparation: As I said above, I didn't have any measuring utensils so a lot of estimating was involved. It was mostly straight forward, except that I really wasn't sure how much flour I needed to keep adding, but my impression by the end is that it definitely shouldn't be sticky (i.e. if it is sticky then add more flour) and also that because they're so quick to bake, it's worth doing a trial batch with 2 or 3 cookies just to see if it's fine.
Outcome and conclusions: If I have to be honest then they didn't turn out great. Not to say that they weren't tasty - it be hard to mess up that bad, but still, they were a bit too hard for my taste. (Yes, I know). And again, I'm not sure if it was an issue with volumes, but the vanilla flavour was far more prominent than the lemon flavour from the pudding powder.
Otherwise it was all good. I managed to finally get the rest of my cooking supplies out of my bedroom, and making the cookies public foods is good for breaking in a new house, I think. For the record, there's five of us in the house, and the cookies lasted two and a half days.