Lemon Sugar Cookies

I've gotten into the (probably not the greatest) habit the last few weeks of baking on Sunday nights. Last Sunday's was a bit of a disaster (hence the dearth of a blog post), as the cookies were the wrong consistency and consequently very thin and crispy, in the way a cookie should not be. We were trying to use up some margerine that we had lying around that had been bought by accident. Now we know why we hadn't used it up before.

This week, I had some lemons that needed a home in a recipe, so I decided that this recipe for lemon sugar cookies would be the perfect use for them. This time, we had real butter, so I felt much more confident about the cookies. I also did a good job of leaving out the butter to let it soften (rather than microwaving it). Ed has a bit of a bad habit of putting away the butter when he sees it out of the fridge (not realizing that it was there on purpose), but this time he caught himself and left it alone.

The recipe starts with a "healthy" serving of butter (obviously I'm using healthy to mean large, not actually healthy :) ), blended with sugar and lemon zest. 

After adding in the rest of the ingredients, we had lovely (and delicious) dough to work with!

Each ball is rolled in sugar (though I think that the cookies were made a bit too big - the cookies spread out more than they should have) and baked for 8 - 10 minutes. 

They came out golden and delicious!

In reading so many cooking blogs, I decided I really wanted to try to make frosting (and thought these cookies could be tasty with it), so I "made" powder sugar (blended normal sugar). Unfortunately, this didn't really powder the sugar like it should have, so the frosting was a bust. It did look pretty, though!

These ended up being the only two that got frosted (and the back one got the frosting wiped off). 

Still, these cookies have a great, light flavor, and are such a nice treat!