Want a lemon? No? How about a cookie instead?

(This is a very picture-heavy post, sorry!) My baking addiction is moving ever forward. This week's adventure in baking involved taking a sugar cookie recipe I haven't tried before and altering it slightly. All the while I was hoping I wouldn't mess it all up.

And it worked! Lemon sugar cookies!

If you want to see the recipe I used, head over to Sweetopia (you have to scroll down a bit to get to the recipe itself). I swapped vanilla extract for lemon extract. Note that I halved this recipe, and still ended up with 50 cookies!

Once they were baked and cooled, I made a batch of royal icing, also with a recipe from Sweetopia (seriously, I love this site, it's amazing!). I used egg white powder instead of meringue powder, since the former is much easier to find in a grocery store than the latter! The icing also used lemon extract instead of vanilla. I halved this recipe, with plenty of icing for all the cookies and a little bit left over.

I made most of the icing yellow, but set aside a little bit to stay white for the top layer of decorations. But first - icing the base layer!

This part is getting easier, although I will say, I am rubbish at free-hand drawing, especially when it comes to making a proper circle! You'll notice some of the cookies have icing shapes which are anything but circular...

Once all the cookies had their base layer, I had to leave them 24 hours to make sure the icing was completely set and dry. Doing the next bit before the base layer hardened would have left me with 50 little disasters.

Once the base layer was dry, I got out my white icing and starting piping on the decorations. The goal here was to make the cookies look like lemon slices, to go with the lemon flavour I was aiming for. (I very nearly posted yet another picture of the completed cookies here, but there's one at the top, and I think this post already has enough pictures, don't you?)

So, there you have it! My very own lemon sugar cookies. They're not perfect by any stretch, but I had a lot of fun making them. Now I just need to figure out who's going to eat them all. Especially since I'm already gearing up to make a different kind of cookie this weekend!