It’s spring and time for me to return to cookie recipes. Of course, lemon-blueberry is the flavor I chose to play with. This is a delightful cookie that looks like an individual little tart. It looks like it should take a lot of time, but they actually come together pretty quickly. I have used my jumbo muffin tin as well as a standard one to bake these and both work well. The main difference is the size of the cookies. If you’d like to try a different flavor, replace the lemon zest with 1 teaspoon of almond extract and the blueberry jam with seedless raspberry—delicious. Strawberry would go well with the lemon as well. If I’m going to be honest, I did make these twice within four days. They are that good.
- 1 cup butter, softened
- 1/3 cup powdered sugar
- ¼ cup granulated sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- finely grated zest of 1 large lemon
- 2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- ½ cup blueberry jam
- Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a jumbo* muffin tin with cooking spray; set aside.
- To make the crust and the topping, beat together the butter, the sugars, the vanilla, and the lemon zest until creamy, 2-3 minutes.
- Add in the flour and salt and mix just until combined. The mixture should look crumbly. Don’t overmix or the dough will be tough.
- Using a measuring cup, scoop ¼ cup of mixture into each muffin cup. Press gently into the bottom and up the sides a little, to form a shallow cup. Do not pack the crust of the dough will be tough. You will have extra dough which will be used for the topping.
- Spoon ½-1 Tablespoon of blueberry jam into the center of each cookie.
- Sprinkle each cookie with 1 heaping Tablespoon of the remaining crumb mixture.
- Bake for 18-22 minutes or until lightly browned.
- Let cool completely before removing from pan. Run a butter knife around the edge and they should pop right out.
*You can use a standard muffin cup for smaller cookies. Follow the directions using a sparse ¼ cup of crumbs for the base. Bake for 10-12 minutes until lightly browned. You will get more of the smaller cookies.
Makes 12 large cookies.