C – The Meyer lemons on my neighbor’s tree are perfectly ripe.
I am so excited. They have allowed us to use them. I have been looking forward to this week’s theme for a while and I almost completely forgot about it. So it’s Meyer lemon week. Of course, Jim cautioned me not to go overboard on making sweets.
I think he knows me too well. I had four desserts already lined up this week. Good call, Jim. Now, there are only two recipes that are sweet.
First off, a sweet recipe, lemon shortbread cookies. A quick and easy cookie. The hardest part is rolling the things out and making shapes. I need practice. I am not a big fan of working with dough. I guess I need to be more mindful and relaxed about it. I need to remember I am not in a hurry making these.
They turned out fine. The first batch made me a bit stressed. I didn’t flour the surface and the rolling pin enough, so it was a bit sticky. The second batch was much easier to handle.
The baking part was a snap. Since they are shortbread cookies, they don’t expand much. I ended up loading the sheet pans with as many as I could. It only took me 16 minutes to cook all my batches.
Our favorite part is always the taste test. The cookies were flavorful. Not too sweet, with a wonderful, light lemon taste to them. They were really nice by themselves. I also ate them with some lemon curd and they were great. The texture was wonderfully tender and delicate. You could cook them a bit more to make them almost a sweet cracker, if you would like.
| Meyer Lemon Shortbread Cookies |
- ½ pound unsalted butter, room temperature
- 2 Meyer lemons, finely zested
- 1 cup superfine sugar (or, process regular sugar in a food processor for 30 seconds)
- ½ teaspoon salt
- 1 large egg yolk
- 1 large egg
- 2 tsp vanilla
- 2½ cups all-purpose flour
- Cream butter, lemon zest, sugar and salt in a large bowl with a mixer at medium speed.
- Add in the egg yolk. Mix well.
- Add in the egg and the vanilla. Mix well.
- Reduce speed and add the flour until just combined.
- Divide the dough in half and wrap in plastic. Place in refrigerator for at least one hour (up to two days).
- Preheat oven to 375 degrees with two racks, one in the upper third and one in the lower third of the oven.
- Working with one batch of dough at a time, roll out the dough to ⅛ inch thickness on a well floured surface.
- Cut out shapes with cutters, try using as much dough as possible. The dough should only be re-rolled once.
- Bake 2 sheets at a time until the cookies are slightly golden brown at the edges (about 6-8 minutes). If you cookies are thicker than ⅛ inch, you may have to bake them longer.
- After baking, immediately transfer to a cooling rack and cool to room temperature.
- Serve or store in an air tight container up to a week.
- Enjoy!
The taste test went almost too well. I was getting scared the cookies would be gone before we finished shooting. They were so good.
I loved them! It was a great start to Meyer lemon week.