Italian Lemon Cookies

There is a particular kind of June light that I associate with my own childhood, and it visited the kitchen this week and I let it stay. The week was a summer week, the kind where the light through the kitchen window arrives at a particular angle and the freezer hums in a different register depending on the temperature in the garage. I made notes in my prep notebook on Sunday afternoon, the way I always do: meal name, ingredient list, cost per serving, prep time, freezer instructions. Twenty-eight bags. Two hours and eleven minutes. A little slow this week, by my standards, but Brandon was helping and the conversation was good, and I have learned, slowly and against my own grain, that the conversation is sometimes the point and the time is sometimes a courtesy I extend to my husband for being willing to chop onions on a Sunday afternoon.

The children are doing what they do, which is the central report of every week of my adult life. Ethan is 21, in Manila on his mission, and his last email mentioned a chicken adobo so good he is going to make me make it when he comes home. Olivia is 19, at BYU studying elementary education — the path she chose at age seven and has not deviated from once. Mason, 16, is in Brazil on his mission. His weekly emails are short and full of jokes. He does not write much about the work. He writes about the food. Lily is 14, in high school, asking the kind of questions in Sunday School that make the teachers uncomfortable, which I find difficult and also, secretly, admirable. Noah is 12, the comedian, the performer — the kid who does an impression of my disappointed face in front of company, and gets away with it. That is the family report. I do not have a system for these reports. I just listen and remember and call back when I said I would call back, which is most of the time and not all of the time, and the difference between most and all is the territory of motherhood.

The recipe of the week was snickerdoodles, which I have made some specific number of times in my life and have refined to a system that I now hand to other people in printed form. The version I made this week fed eight, cost under fifteen dollars, and required twenty-six minutes of active prep, which is within my requirements and not a coincidence. I labeled every bag — meal, date, reheating instructions, servings — because future-me is the woman I am writing for, and future-me is tired. I have stopped explaining the freezer-meal philosophy to people who already follow my work, and I have stopped apologizing for it to people who do not. The philosophy is simple: tomorrow is coming whether you are ready or not. You can either be ready or not. I pick ready.

Brandon and I sat at the kitchen island on Thursday night and did not talk much, and the not-talking was a language we built in therapy and have refused to unlearn. We have been married a long time. The arithmetic of it is the arithmetic of my whole life. There were years we missed each other in the same room, and there are years we find each other in the silences, and this is one of the latter, and I am old enough now to know that the latter is the achievement and the former was the cost.

Twenty-eight bags. Labeled. Dated. Stacked. The week, in the only currency that matters in this house.

I said the recipe of the week was snickerdoodles, and it was — but the batch I tested the Sunday before, the one Brandon and I ate standing at the counter before I decided they weren’t quite right for the bags, was these: Italian lemon cookies, soft and bright and glazed, the kind of thing that tastes like the specific quality of June light I described and cannot fully explain. I keep coming back to them because they batch well, they freeze beautifully, and there is something about lemon in summer that functions the way a good silence does — it doesn’t need to explain itself to do its work.

Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 12 min | Total Time: 32 min | Servings: 30 cookies

Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice (about 2 lemons)
1 tablespoon lemon zest
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
For the glaze:
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon lemon zest, plus more for garnish

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Heat your oven to 350°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.
Whisk dry ingredients. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside.
Cream butter and sugar. In a large bowl, beat the softened butter and granulated sugar together on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 2–3 minutes.
Add eggs and lemon. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then mix in the lemon juice, lemon zest, and vanilla extract. The mixture may look slightly curdled — that’s fine.
Combine. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and stir until just combined. Do not overmix. The dough will be soft and slightly sticky.
Scoop and bake. Drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto the prepared baking sheets, spacing them about 2 inches apart. Bake for 11–13 minutes, until the edges are just set and the tops are no longer glossy. They should not brown. Remove and cool on the pan for 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely before glazing.
Make the glaze. Whisk together the powdered sugar, lemon juice, and lemon zest in a small bowl until smooth. The glaze should be thick but pourable — add lemon juice a teaspoon at a time to adjust consistency.
Glaze and set. Spoon or dip the tops of the cooled cookies in the glaze. Set back on the rack and scatter a pinch of lemon zest over the top of each. Allow the glaze to set fully, about 20 minutes, before stacking or bagging.
To freeze. Layer glazed, fully set cookies between sheets of parchment in a zip-top freezer bag. Label with the date and “thaw 30 min at room temp.” Keeps up to 3 months.

Nutrition (per serving)

Italian Lemon Cookies — What I Made the Week the June Light Came Back