My Pioneer Adventure #6 - Citrus Butter Cookies

Citrus Butter Cookies

Baking is something I love to do. Breads, cakes, cookies, pies...I love it all! The intoxicating smells that radiate from my kitchen when I bake, tickle me pink!

Unless I burned something. Then...well, that's a story for a different day!

I would bake all the time if someone else would come behind me and clean up my colossal mess! But that's not gonna happen. Oh well, a girl can dream!

In all my baking endeavors over the years, cookies have been my least successful. Cakes are more my sweet spot. I baked and decorated cakes for many years before I "retired" due to the stress it caused me to put on myself. I did alright making a birthday cake or special occasion cake. But every single time I did a wedding cake, I became a basket case! It needed to be perfect! I would end up sick to my stomach pretty much every time. I decided to give it up. That was quite a few years ago, and I still don't regret it. I love to make a cake every now and then for a special occasion, and I still make them for my kids' birthdays. But I always remember why I stopped doing it in the first place!

Anywho...back to the cookies. I have one recipe for chocolate chip cookies that are out.of.this.world delicious and bake perfectly for me every time. An on-line friend shared the recipe with me years ago, and it has been my go-to recipe ever since. And I've had a few cookie recipes turn out pretty well. But I get nervous when looking at a new cookie recipe, because I know there's a good possibility it's going to flop for me.

And of course, there is would be a cookie recipe in this book! I decided to go ahead and tackle it and get it out of the way. Plus, I had all the ingredients on hand and was craving something sweet!

These require a little more effort than I usually want to put in for a cookie. There is a LOT of grating of zest to be done. But really, that is the most difficult part. The rest is a piece of cake.

Or cookie.

The result is a very citrus-y, soft, sweet, chewy cookie. Um, lots of cookies! I was a bit surprised when it made almost double the amount of cookies that the recipe said it would. I thought maybe I made mine too small. But then I compared them to Ree's pictures, and realized mine were bigger! The recipe on her site actually says 36 servings, which is closer to what I came out with. Mine made just under four dozen.

I had a difficult time with drizzling the icing, so I ended up just pouring some on each cookie and letting it form a solid layer of icing on top. I loved them that way, but some may find that to be much too sweet.

I knew that I couldn't bake this batch of cookies and keep them in my house, because they would continue to beckon me to them, and I'd eat pretty much all of them all on my own. Not that I've ever done anything like that before. Ahem.

Instead of listening to their cries from my kitchen, I took them to school on Monday and shared them with my coworkers. I asked them to rate them...delicious, terrible, or in between.

I got mixed reviews. A few thought they were too citrus-y. But I warned them that they were citrus cookies. These were ladies who aren't huge fans of citrus-types of foods. They were just a bit too sweet for a couple of people. But for the most part, they were a hit. No one said they were terrible. And I know these ladies...if it had been terrible, they would have told me! Needless to say, I wasn't stuck with four dozen cookies to consume by myself!

My kids liked them VERY much. Chip wasn't a huge fan.

I didn't eat four dozen, but refuse to admit how many I did eat!

You can find this recipe on Ree's blog right HERE. You will also find much prettier pictures! Her cookies were more photogenic than mine!