I love sugar cookies! There is something about that slightly crisp exterior and soft interior that is just a delight to me. Now most people only make them around Christmas time. It's fun to grap the kids and some decorations and let them play with their food. Sugar cookies don't just have to be for Christmas. I love playing around with my recipe throughout the year. One of my favorite flavors to add to a sugar cookie is citrus. When you add some zest it really ups the flavor ante. I recently received some Organic Finger Limes from Frieda's Produce, giving me another excuse to bust out the sugar cookie recipe just as I did during Sumo Mandarin season.
Organic Finger Limes are small tiny limes that when you cut on open little small balls that look like caviar come bursting out. This citrus caviar provides a burst of lime flavor. The perfect thing to top off on my sugar cookies. Now you could use the zest of these finger limes in the cookie dough itself however the amount of work it would take to get the zest and the high risk I would take off some of my skin with my zester lead me to just using some regular store bought limes for zesting purposes.
These might be some of the best sugar cookies I ever made. Adding the finger limes to the icing on top adds such a brilliant lime flavor. When you bite into the finger lime you get an extra burst of lime flavor. As I was eating them I thought these taste pretty good and when I got that first bite with the finger limes in it, all I can say is WOW! Definitely the tasty use I found so far for these little limes.
Ingredients
For the cookie dough
- 1 ½ cups powdered sugar sifted
- 1 cup 2 sticks butter (slightly softened)
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 ½ cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon cream of tartar
- ¼ teaspoon kosher salt
- zest of 1 lime
For the glaze
- 3 cups powdered sugar
- water
- 8-10 finger limes
Instructions
Making the cookies
- In a mixing bowl, cream together the butter and powdered sugar.
- Mix in the egg, vanilla, and zest. Thoroughly combine.
- In another bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, salt, and cream of tartar.
- Add the dry ingredients in batches to the creamed mixture until you have combined everything well.
- Cover and refrigerate the dough for at least 30 minutes. This is to harden up the fat so the cookies don't spread too much.
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees
- Cut the dough in half.
- Roll one half out onto a floured surface to around a quarter-inch thickness. Cut the cookies out with a round cookie cutter or what cookie cutter you like.
- Transfer cookies to a parchment or silicone lined half sheet pan. Do no more than 8 cookies on a pan.
- Bake for 10-14 minutes (depends on size of your cookie cutter) or until slightly browned.
- Allow to cool on a wire rack before glazing.
To glaze the cookies
- Mix together 1 tablespoon of water at a time the with powdered sugar. Mix and add water until you form a glaze that is spreadable without being too thick or too runny.
- Spread onto cookies as soon as they are cool enough to handle.
- Squeeze the "caviar" out of ½ of a finger lime per cookie. Work fast before the glaze dries so that the finger limes can stick.
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