Lemon Sugar Cookies
I don’t even know how many days we’ve been in Covid quarantine, but it’s well over a month now. My teen daughters have been immersed in their screens for weeks, so I thought that if I baked some sugar cookies and made some icing they would be lured into the kitchen for a fun mother-daughter creative food project. I was right. My girls and I gathered around our kitchen island for the afternoon and had fun mixing colors and creating designs on the cookies. This easy recipe is perfect for kids and adults of all ages who need a creative outlet with the reward of something sweet!
Lemon Sugar Cookies
- 1 1/4 cups unsalted butter, room temperature (20 TBS or 2 1/4 sticks)
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 TBS lemon zest (zest from about 1 lemon)
- 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 egg
- 1 TBS lemon juice (juice from about 1 small lemon)
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 3 cups of all-purpose flour
In a large bowl (or a stand mixer), beat butter on medium speed about 45 seconds. Add sugar, lemon zest, and baking powder. Beat until combined. Turn off mixer and scrape down sides of bowl. Add egg, lemon, juice, vanilla and salt and mix on medium for a minute or two until combined. Add flour slowly and mix until combined.
Divide dough into three portions and place on plastic wrap and wrap each lump, forming into a 1/2″ disc inside the plastic wrap. Refrigerate the discs. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Once oven comes to temperature, take one of the dough discs from the fridge and roll out on a floured surface to about 1/4″ to 1/8″ thick. I personally like thinner cookies which will be more crispy, but thicker cookies will have a bit more chewy-ness to them.
Cut out shapes in the dough with cookie cutters (your choice of shapes). Transfer with a spatula to a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake for about 7 minutes at 375 degrees until cookies are just golden around the edges. Reform leftover dough into a ball, sprinkle with more flour, roll out and repeat the cookie cutting process, until you’ve cut and baked all the dough. Let cool completely (won’t take long!) and then decorate with royal icing. If you don’t want to bake all the cookies, you can leave the dough tightly wrapped in the fridge and bake the next day.
Makes about 4 dozen cookies, depending on size of cookie cutters and thickness of cookies.
Royal Icing
- 4 cups of powdered sugar
- 3 TBS meringue powder
- 1/2 tsp cream of tartar
- 1/2 cup warm water
- 1 tsp vanilla
- Assorted food coloring and/or gel paste and/or chocolate pens (from Williams Sonoma), sprinkles, etc. for decorating
In a large mixing bowl, stir together powdered sugar, meringue powder, and cream of tartar. Add the warm water and vanilla. Beat with a mixer for a few minutes until silky. Separate into several bowls so you can create different colors. You can dip cookies, or use a spoon to spread the icing on the cookie. To keep icing from dripping over the edge you can pipe chocolate with the pens around the edge. If a hard surface forms on the icing, just mix it up again with a spoon. Decorate with sprinkles, colored sugar or any other decorative edibles.
