holiday citrus shortbread
NYT cooking
I made these for the Easter Sunday reception at Park Street Church. I had wanted to try the recipe for a while. I don't have any cookie cutters, nor any interest in purchasing them, so I made them in the slice-and-bake style. The icing was my first time working with food coloring. I initially tried making purple by mixing blue and red together, but it came out a hideous murky-grey color. Alas, that batch of icing was forsaken. I had better success making yellow and green icings, which did not require mixing colors. Going forward, I will stick to one food color at a time.
One thing I learned while making these cookies is the role of baking sheets. I baked half of these cookies on a dirt-cheap, flimsy baking sheet, and the other half on a sturdier one. The cookies baked on the thin, flimsy sheet baked more quickly. Their bottoms were visibly darker and more crumbly. The cookies on the thicker sheet baked more evenly. If you look closely at the picture, you can see the difference among the cookies; some have a uniform color throughout, whereas others have a darkened, crumbly bottom. It seems that the thicker baking sheet facilitated a better overall bake because it did not get as hot as quickly. Just food for thought.
I was pleased with how the cookies turned out. They had the buttery, soft bite of shortbread, with a gentle kick from the orange zest. I will say that while the icing looks nice, it has a one-note flavor, since it's made entirely from powdered sugar and lemon juice. One could argue that the icing is a distraction from the shortbread, which has much more interesting texture and flavor. I still thought the cookies tasted great, but some possible variations you could make are:
- drizzling streaks of icing over the cookies, so that they are still decorated but the icing flavor is toned down.
- Adding sour cream or cream cheese to the icing, so that it has more dynamic flavor and there are thickening agents besides powdered sugar
Overall, these cookies came out great, and the variations above are just ideas. If you make them exactly as instructed, they will be plenty delicious.
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Comments:
On April 6, 2026 Alice Morgan wrote:
They look yum.