Lemon Cookies

Last week, one of our neighbors brought over a few lemons from her mother's lemon tree. They were so yellow and beautiful and incredibly juicy. They were quite amazing, really. I thought and thought about what to make with them and finally decided on these lemon cookies.

They were delicious! I think you'd have to start with really good lemons, so if you've got some handy, this recipe is certainly worthy.

You start out by making a lemon curd - already one if my favorites. After seeking out a good recipe about a year ago, I finally settled on Martha's. I've made it a million times, including for a friend's wedding cake, and it has yet to fail me. For the cookies, I halved the recipe, but you could probably even third(?) it.

Then you get cracking on the cookie dough. You have to refrigerate it for one hour, but you might want to make the lemon curd in the morning and cookies in the afternoon to give the curd enough time to settle.

Roll the dough into little balls, I used a 1/2 tablespoon as my standard and flatten them. (This made close to 60 cookies.) The recipe says to use the palm of your hand (I think), but I found that difficult. I just used a few fingers.




The poke a little hole using your thumb. I found that the more I did this, the more the dough stuck to my finger. I figured out that dipping my thumb/finger in water every few cookies made this process way easier.

Finally pipe in the lemon curd. At first I didn't want to pipe it. I was being lazy and didn't want to deal with putting it into a bag and then having to wash tips. I tried to just spoon in the curd on the first few cookies, but it wasn't working out so well. I finally just put it into a baggie and chopped off the corner (a bit lame, but it works - and no washing tips!!). It was SO much easier this way. I totally recommend doing this from the start. It really takes no effort.





On top of it, once they are cooked, you can totally see the difference. The piped ones look so much cleaner.




Spooned vs.



Piped

The cookies were quite delicious this way, so if you leave off the powdered sugar, piping is important. I was tempted to leave them like this, but they looked like fried eggs to me and started to creep me out.

I ended up sprinkling the powdered sugar on and I think they look quite cute and for some reason a tad bit less like fried eggs.

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