Since I am doing a lot of entertaining this week I thought it would be fun to make a springlike cookie – so I made 4 dozen raspberry lemon cookies! Lemon cookies always make me think of sunshine and spring, and raspberry plus lemon has got to be one of the best combos out there. These cookies turned out great, and are very tasty and pretty!

For my recipe I looked through all my recipe books at home and couldn’t find the right springlike cookie. I then went browsing for lemon cookie recipes on Pinterest and found the perfect recipe: Raspberry Lemon Cookies by the baking blog Bake.Eat.Repeat (recipe at http://bakeeatrepeat.ca/raspberry-lemon-cookies-recipe/). The ingredients are pretty simple for these cookies; standard cookie dough ingredients plus frozen raspberries and the zest and juice of a lemon. The original recipe was for 24 cookies so I doubled it to make 48 cookies (but ended up with 52 cookies, yay for more cookies!).

When baking these cookies the most important thing to keep in mind is that the frozen raspberries will thaw really quickly once they are out of the freezer. After taking my ingredients picture I tossed the raspberries right back in the freezer while I put together the rest of the cookie dough ingredients. The raspberries will be the very last ingredient you add to the dough; and once you add the raspberries they begin to melt right away, making this already sticky dough even stickier! This makes it vital that you form your cookies as fast as you can and get them in the oven. While a batch is in the oven refrigerate the remaining dough to ensure your raspberries don’t melt.

One thing I would have done differently with this recipe was to not use the frozen raspberries I had opened for breakfast smoothies a while back; they had excess ice which really made my dough sticky! I tried to remove the extra ice as much as I could but some of it definitely made it’s way into my dough.

I was especially excited to bake cookies because I bought a cookie scoop recently and hadn’t tried it yet. After baking my biggest batch of assorted Christmas baking ever in December (over 16 dozen pieces!) I realized I really needed a faster way to scoop dough. I bought the medium sized OXO cookie scoop online from Bed Bath and Beyond (http://www.bedbathandbeyond.ca/store/product/oxo-good-grips-reg-cookie-scoop/102818). It works great and saved me lots of time, plus it makes very uniformly sized cookies which is a big plus for sure!

I hope I’ve enticed you to make these great cookies; if you do end up making them please let me know how they turn out!

Do you have a favourite spring baking recipe? Let me know in the comments!