Lemon Cookies

Lemon Cookies

Making the Cookies

Cream the butter and sugar together.

Beat the eggs until frothy and lemon colored.

Add the buttermilk, vanilla and lemon zest to the whipped eggs, then mix into the sugar-butter cream.

In a separate bowl, sift flour and baking powder together.

Sift the flour into the wet ingredients, producing a soft dough.  Add more flour in half-cup increments, as needed, to produce a dough that can be formed into a ball.  Following the recipe as written produced a very wet and sticky dough that couldn't be formed until we added an extra cup of flour.

Refrigerate the dough to ripen for 2 hours (The recipe called for 3-4 hour ripening, which was new to us.  We let our dough ripen for two hours, which worked fine.)

Preheat the oven to 350oF.

Roll the dough onto a flour-dusted surface to ¼ inch thickness. We did this between two sheets of floured parchment, as the dough was still quite sticky.

Cut out cookie shapes with cookie cutters.  Using open cookie cutters was key, as the dough got stickier as it warmed to room temperature and had to be gently pushed out of the cutters.  We also recommend flouring the cookie cutter edges to reduce stickiness.

Place cookie shapes on a greased cookie sheets or cookies sheets with parchment.

Beat the egg white until stiff and forming peaks, then brush sparingly on the surface of each cookie shape.

Sprinkle lemon-sugar on surface of each cookie shape and decorate otherwise as desired.  We used red and green sugar sprinkles in addition to the lemon-sugar, as well as bourbon-soaked currants for the details.  Nuts, other dried fruits, additional sprinkles, and icing would work well too.

Bake in the oven for 15 minutes, until puffed and golden on the cookie bottom.

Cool cookies on racks, then store in airtight container (We stored the cookies in plastic freezer bags and froze them).

Read the Apeas Drop Cookies and Lemon Cookies Blog entry

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