Lemon Jammies

As I was filling these cookies, I started thinking to myself, "This is tedious."  Then I thought, "Oh, this must be what Raymond feels like when he's making cookies."  Then I read his post, which begged for a cookie-free month.  Finally, I thought, "This book may be just a teensy bit heavy on the cookie chapter."  It's an interesting side effect of the bake-through.  When I read the table of contents and leafed through TBB, I definitely did not think, "And who's going to eat all these cookies?"  Whereas a cake or pie seems to disappear within 24 hours, the cookies hang around.

They're easy enough to put together.  I'm always happy when I see that I can make dough in a food processor because I know it's going to take me only about five minutes.  This is not the tedious part.

And I know it's going to be a plain, simple butter cookie livened up with a fair amount of lemon zest.  All is happiness so far.

The dough comes together nicely.  It looks so creamy and rich that you could eat it alone if you were a cookie dough kind of person.

And it rolls out nicely too.

I started having trouble when it turned out that the counter with the rolled-out cookie dough was directly in the brilliant spring sun, causing them to droop, lose their shape, and generally refuse to remain intact.  I gave up, pummeled it back in a ball, and stuck it back in the refrigerator.  Then I moved the  dough mat to the shade.

From there on out, everything was fine.  It was just a little ... tedious.  I got 38 cookies instead of 36, which means I cut out 76 cookies, and half of those had a scalloped hole cut out of the middle.  It was surprisingly hard to get that hole centered, so a fair number of my cookies were askew.  I finally made a mark in the middle of the cookie and went from there.  That helped, but it still wasn't perfect. 

Then I had to match cookie halves with each other, trying to match them by color and size.  Some of them stretched out on the way to the cookie sheet, and there was no matching half.  I had book club at my house tonight, and I was running out of time.  (Fortunately, I'm in more than one book club, and book clubs are excellent places to get rid of cookies or other things that you don't want around the house tempting you).  To save time, I didn't make the buttercream, or even make my own lemon curd. I bought Stonewall Kitchen lemon curd, which was surprisingly good.  I thought that raspberry jam would be pretty, so I used that on half the cookies.

My cookies' scallops don't match up perfectly with each other.  I'm tempted to go look at Rose's cookies, but I'm not sure I want to see how perfect they are.

The raspberry does look pretty, although it makes it look more like a Christmas cookie, and, honestly, the ones with the lemon curd are better.  They are so good that they made me forget my earlier complaints about tedium.  My book club was crazy about them.  I put out a plate of the dattelkonfekt too, and people ate them, but no one raved about them.  You know how sometimes people say, "Did you really make these yourself?"  And you modestly say, "yes, it was nothing."  And then people tell you how fabulous and amazing you are?  It happens now and then.  And I must say, it makes you feel quite good.  Good enough that you are not going to complain about the cookies being tedious to make and instead vow to make them again.  Very soon.