Milk & Cookies

Objects in oven may be smaller than they appear.

Last weekend Zoe’s parents came out to visit us and we spent some time hanging with the family. Some how we ended up inheriting a bag of fresh juicy lemons. How does that saying go? “When life gives you lemons…. you make lemon cookies!”

The recipe this week comes from AllRecipes. There are many variations on the internet for a recipe very similar to this one, so I wasn’t afraid to take some liberties to make it my own. Sadly, I couldn’t find any recipes that used fresh lemons very much in them, so even this recipe I substituted lemon extract for a combination of lemon juice and lemon zest in order to utilize our abundance of lemons.

INGREDIENTS

• 1 (18.25 ounce) package lemon cake mix
• 2 eggs
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 2 tspn. lemon zest
• 2 tspn. fresh lemon juice
• 1/2 cup powdered sugar (for decoration)

DIRECTIONS

The dough for these cookies takes almost no time at all, so go ahead and start off by preheating the oven to 350°F.
To make the dough, get out a medium mixing bowl, and your favorite rubber spatula. Combine the cake mix, eggs, oil, lemon zest, and lemon juice. Mix them together until the dough is smooth and consistent. You will have to mix by hand because this dough is pretty thick stuff.
On the side, prepare a small bowl with the powdered sugar, and lay out a sheet of parchment paper on a cookie tray. Take a teaspoon and scoop out dough balls one at a time. Roll each ball around in the powdered sugar bowl until it is nice and coated, and then place it on the cookie tray. These cookies expand a bit, but not too much, so you can place them about 1-2 inches apart. (I got ~25 per tray)
Once the tray is loaded up, pop the cookies into the oven for 7-9 minutes. They will start to brown just slightly around the edges when they are done.
Let them cool a bit and then start inhaling them. They are very small cookies so you probably want to eat like 3 or 4 cookies along with your glass of milk… maybe even more.