Lemon Chick Cookies

Motto: If I can do it, so can you. I am probably the least artistically inclined baker in the universe. I'm not particularly visual in general and I care a lot more about how a food tastes than how it looks.

But this week in-laws came to visit and my mother-in-law brought a magazine with these cute little chick cookies. How could we resist? We both thought the kids would love them. The original recipe was a cake box recipe. If you follow this blog at all, you know that I'm not a huge fan of cake box recipes in general. Although truth be told, I might have just gone with it for cuteness sake. Except that I had a better idea. What if I made the chicks with my Lemon Doodle recipe? Why, yes, it was brilliant.

Although when I first pulled those "chicks" out of the oven, I wasn't so sure. They were, to put it sweetly, the most obese chicks I'd ever seen. They'd spread quite a bit and run into each other and I couldn't picture them ever looking like chicks. In fact, I didn't even bother taking a picture of the cookies straight out of the oven because I was so sure they wouldn't make it onto this blog.

But then we added the eyes and little beaks and I'll be darned if they didn't come alive--those fat little Siamese-twinned cookies.

So then we decided just to do this thing and topped them off with little tufts of chicky, um, hair.

And of course there had to be a girl chick too (long hair and even some accidental eyelashes from those melty chocolate chip eyes because we all know--at least if we are four--that long hair and eyelashes is what makes someone a girl).

And then we ate them and they were soooo delicious. And so cute. And they would be super easy to make into snowmen in the winter. Or cats for Halloween (tail plus pointy ears).

I should also say that your chicks may actually come out not obese. We like to mess things up a little just to keep it real. We did not chill our dough as we were supposed to and my 9-year-old was measuring flour with a 1/4 C measuring cup and at one point lost count. This may have resulted in 1/4-1/2 C less flour than we were supposed to use. Can I just say that you know a recipe is a winner when you mess it up and it still comes out okay.

What You'll Need:

-Lemon Doodle dough
-Lemon sugar (optional). You could also use yellow sprinkles to very good effect if you've got them.
-mini chocolate chips (for eyes)
-Orange Tic Tacs (for nose)
-a bit of white frosting (for "hair")

What to Do:

1. Make 1 recipe of Lemon Doodle cookie dough (1/2 recipe is one sheet of cookies and actually what we did). Dye it yellow if you wish. We did and used several drops yellow food coloring.

2. Make your lemon sugar for the lemon doodles and dye it yellow as well if you wish. To do this, put the sugar and lemon zest in a Ziploc bag with a few drops of food coloring and mash it around (see here). (Note: If you don't love lemon or lemon zest, you can just use sugar).

3. Chill the dough if you want slightly less obese chicks.

4. Roll dough into small balls and big balls. Our small balls were about one inch and our big ones were about two inches. Note: I was worried the small would cook too fast and be burned, but surprisingly this was not the case. It just worked.

5. Place on cookie sheet--little ball touching big ball with plenty of space in between chicks. Bake for about 10 minutes at 400.

6. AS SOON AS cookies come out, plop on some mini chocolate chips for eyes and an orange Tic Tacs for the nose. You've got to do this while the dough is warm or it will be hard to get them to stick into the face properly.

7. Let cool. Then, if you desire, pipe a tiny bit of frosting onto the top for "hair." I had a little bit of this white chocolate frosting left in my fridge and that's what I used (though this would work too). I just scooped it into a Ziploc bag, cut a tiny bit off the corner and piped away. I should say, though, that if you skip the "hair," probably no one will hate you and they're still pretty cute...

Some of you want that cake box recipe, don't you. Fine. Though I'm gonna promise you that they won't taste nearly as good (and I'm even going to say that that Lemon Doodle recipe is not that hard to put together). This is from Woman's World.

1 pkg. lemon cake mix
2 eggs
1/3 C oil
yellow food coloring

Mix this together, then follow the directions above.