Lemon shortbread heart cookies are crispy, kissed with zest and glazed with an icing that hardens. This is a buttery dough that’s easy to work with and great for making cut-out cookies.
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Lemon Shortbread Heart Cookies Recipe
These cookies are crispy and just kissed with lemon, thanks to fresh zest in the dough. The tops of the cookies are dunked in a glaze, which hardens after about an hour. This is an easy cookie recipe made in your food processor.
This Cookie
I’m starting a deep, passionate love affair with shortbread cookie dough. It’s so easy to work with, especially if you want to make shaped cookies with cookie cutters. These espresso-chocolate shortbread heart cookies are another favorite.
Why this cookie? The natural food store near my house sold a lemon-glazed shortbread cookie for a while. But they were nearly $2 each. Do you know how many cookies I can bake for $2? Many more than one. That bakery cookie was delicious but I’m too cheap to spend that much on one cookie on a regular basis. And these cookies were so good I wanted one Every Single Day!
This Recipe
I will admit I had concerns about this particular cookie recipe. You make the dough in a food processor–flour, salt, sugar, butter and bit of lemon zest, which is an awful lot like my pie crust recipe, which I also make in the food processor. So I was questioning if these were really going to taste like cookies or not. But, they do and they are delicious.
Recipe Notes
This dough is a bit more looser than other shortbread doughs I’ve worked with. What I mean by that is it will be a fair amount of loose flour. It’s not going to magically form into a perfect ball of dough in your food processor. You’ll have to scoop up the loose flour mix with your hands and form it into a ball. But thanks to two sticks of butter, it will combine easily. Just keep scooping and patting and pushing together and you’ll have it.
This is a lemon cookie icing that hardens.
You’ll have a bit more icing than you need. Don’t throw it away!
- -use it to glaze homemade doughnuts
- -as a dip for pretzels
- -as a sauce for ice-cream–I think it would be delicious over vanilla ice-cream
Equipment Notes
For this recipe I used:
- -eight-cup Cuisinart food processor (This is the one I use only in silver)
- -microplane zester (I’ve had this one for over ten years and love it)
- -half sheet pan
- -rolling pin
- –bench scraper
- -wax paper
- -parchment paper
If you don’t have a food processor, use a hand-held mixer or a stand mixer.
Waxing about Wax Paper
You don’t want to use wax paper for baking but you can use it for nearly everything else you would use parchment paper for and save a lot of money doing so. A roll of wax paper is about $1.49 compared with $4.99 for parchment.
So, for any task you would normally grab parchment for, reach for a roll of wax paper instead. Unless that is, you’re lining a sheet pan or cookie sheet to go in the oven for cookies.
Uses for Wax Paper
- rolling out cookie dough to keep dough from sticking to counter
- rolling out pie crust to keep crust from sticking to counter or rolling pin
- protect counter tops while decorating cookies or candy
- prevent waste while measuring ingredients. Lay a piece of wax paper on counter before you measure flour, sugar or other ingredients. Pour back into container using wax paper.
- wrap cheese
- line a pan for fudge
- line cookie tins or boxes for gift giving
- use to keep beef patties from sticking together in freezer packaging
Lemon Shortbread Hearts Cookie Recipe
Ingredients
- Two cups all purpose flour
- ⅓ cup granulated sugar
- ⅓ cup confectioners’ sugar
- 2 tsp lemon zest grated
- ¼ tsp salt
- 2 sticks butter cubed
Lemon Glaze
- 2 cups confectioners’ sugar
- 2 Tbsp lemon zest grated
- ⅓ cup fresh lemon juice from 2 to 3 lemons
Instructions
- Grate zest.
- Cut each stick of butter into slices then dice into cubes.
- In the bowl of a food processor-8-cups or larger, pour flour, both sugars and salt. Pulse briefly, 3 to 5 seconds to combine. Add lemon zest and butter cubes. Pulse again, this time for 15 to 20 seconds until the dough has small flecks of butter and has started to combine. Don’t over mix.
- Take dough out of the food processor onto wax paper. Gather together with your hands and squish to combine. This is similar to making a pie crust. Don’t overwork the dough but just keep pushing any loose flour together until the dough is well-combined. Flatten into a circle. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap or slide into a plastic bag. Put dough in the refrigerator to chill for at least an hour.
- Remove the dough from fridge and let sit for about 15 to 20 minutes until the dough is room temperature.
- Put parchment paper on counter and using a rolling pin, roll the dough to about a ¼ inch. Cut with a cookie cutter and place on a parchment lined baking sheet. These cookies won’t spread so you can fit several on one cookie sheet depending on what size cookie cutter you’re using.
- Bake at 350 for 10 to 12 minutes.
Make lemon glaze
- In a medium-sized bowl or in a stand-mixer, combine two cups confectioners’s sugar and a third of a cup of freshly squeezed lemon juice until opaque and glossy-about two minutes.
- Let cookies cool completely before glazing.
- To glaze cookies, dip the top of each cookie in the bowl of lemon glaze, give a shake to remove any excess glaze. Put cookies on a rack or on a sheet of wax paper to let dry, which will take about 30 minutes.
More Citrus Recipes:
Three-Ingredient Grapefruit Martini
Lemon Drop Martini
Arnold Palmer Cookies
Chewy Lime Bars
