The Best Ever Pink Lemonade Thumbprint Cookies
You are going to fall in love with this pink lemonade thumbprint cookie. I was eating the icing with a spoon! This is a perfect cookie to make for Valentine's Day or bridal showers.
Pink Lemonade Thumbprint cookies are simple to make. This is basically a shortbread dough imprinted with your thumb or the end of a wooden spoon and filled with a three-ingredient icing.
One of the icing ingredients is a single, fresh raspberry.
You'll blend the raspberry into confectioner's sugar and lemon juice until it the raspberry has broken up and your icing turns pink!
This pink lemonade icing is so good I ate it with a spoon--after filling the thumbprint cookies of course...
Watch to find out how to make pink lemonade icing for these Pink Lemonade Thumbprint Cookies.
The Best Ever Pink Lemonade Thumbprint Cookies
Recipe details
Ingredients
- 2&1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 2 cups confectioners sugar, sifted plus more for sprinkling over cookies
- 1 teaspoon sea salt
- 1 cup (two sticks), unsalted room temperature butter
- 2 Tablespoons fresh lemon zest (2-3 medium lemons)
- 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
- 1 fresh raspberry
Instructions
- In a large bowl sift the confectioner's sugar and set aside.
- Measure flour and salt and one cup of the sugar into a medium bowl and set aside.
- Zest the lemons using a Microplane grater over a piece of wax paper until you get two tablespoons. The wax paper will help with cleanup and getting every last bit of the zest saved.
- Once the lemons are zested, slice in half and juice over a small bowl using a sturdy fork or a citrus reamer. Set aside.
- In another large bowl, using a hand mixer or a stand mixer on medium speed, beat butter, 1/4 cup of the confectioner's sugar, the lemon zest and 2 tablespoons of the lemon juice until pale, about three minutes. Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture and blend until just combined.
- Scoop the dough and roll into one-inch balls using a cookie scoop or a tablespoon. Place the balls on a parchment-lined baking sheet about two inches apart. You should get 12 balls of dough on a tray. Freeze for ten minutes or until firm.
- Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 325 F.
- Pull the cookies out of the freezer and bake for ten minutes.
- Pull out after ten minutes and carefully without applying too much pressure, make a shallow indentation on top of each cookie using either a rounded teaspoon or your thumb.
- Once you've made your indentations, put cookies back in the oven for 15 to 16 minutes.
- While cookies are on their second bake, make the icing in a bowl with a hand mixer or a stand mixer or use a whisk. I'm lazy so I used my stand mixer.
- Whisk 1&1/4 cups confectioner's sugar, two tablespoons of lemon juice and the single raspberry together until smooth and pink.
- Remove cookies from oven and let cool on a baking rack before dusting with confectioner's sugar and filling with icing.
- Let the icing set up at least 20 minutes before packaging.
Tips
- Don't skip over the step of freezing the balls of dough before baking. This will help them keep their shape.
- No eggs used in the making of this cookie.
- No granulated sugar used either--just confectioner's sugar.
- Fresh lemon juice is a must.
Comments
Share your thoughts, or ask a question!
I’ve read and re-read the instructions 5 times and still don’t understand how a bowl of flour, salt, and sugar becomes dough without liquid. Am I missing something? No I didn’t watch the video. No time for that.
This sounds like a great recipe! I think Gill’s confusion is valid though. I’ve made basic scotch shortbread 200 times & there is no liquid. It’s simply butter, sugar & flour! However...there is a step missing in these instructions (between 5 & 6). They’ve skipped the step of adding the medium sized bowl of flour/sugar/salt TO the large bowl of creamed butter/sugar/lemon. That part is, indeed, necessary to create a dough. If the author could revise by adding that step, it would be much clearer.