Lemon Crisps: or, More fun with a cookie press!

For some reason, a couple of lemons mysteriously landed in the grocery cart.

Lemon Crisps 1 cup shortening ½ cup sugar ½ cup brown sugar 1 egg 1 teaspoon grated lemon rind 2½ cups sifted flour ¼ tsp salt ¼ tsp baking soda 2 tbsp lemon juice Heat oven to 400°. Have ungreased cookie sheets ready. In a large bowl, cream the shortening until very soft. Gradually add sugar and lemon juice, beating well. Add egg and grated lemon rind. Sift the flour, salt, and baking soda. Add to creamed mixture a little at a time. Put dough into a cookie press and form cookies on the ungreased cookie sheets. Bake until golden around the edges, about 10-12 minutes (mine were done in 7). Source: Mirro cookie press instruction sheet (undated, but it looks like the mid-1940s)

Today, we are making another recipe from the Mirro instruction sheet. As I've said (often), they may have made a lousy cookie press, but their recipes are fantastic.

One lemon did not yield enough rind for this recipe. Well, maybe one of those giant lemons would have, but oversized fruits are usually bland. Also, I am suspicious of unnaturally large fruits and vegetables. At any rate, we got half a recipe's worth of rind from one lemon, but we got two batches' worth of juice. So as a bonus, we were able to put the surplus (fresh-squeezed!) lemon juice on pasta salad a few days later. 

We do not skimp on lemons in this house.

After creaming everything together, the mixture was a lot paler than I expected. I wondered if I had somehow accidentally undermeasured the brown sugar. But then again, the recipes from this instruction sheet start out unnaturally white. So perhaps it was reverting to its true form.

And so, it was time to get the dough into our press! I decided to try out the five-pointed star stencil. They looked a lot more raggedy than the picture on the box. Since I didn't feel like reloading the dough and trying again, I left them on the pan to see how they baked. 

A lot of pressed-out cookie recipes hold onto their shape pretty well, but these spread out a bit. So in choosing what stencil shapes to use, pick one that will still look cute if it gets a little rounded out. I've said this before, but the stencil shaped like a big asterisk always comes out cute, even when your other cookies look like blobs. 

 

Once again, the Mirro people gave us an excellent cookie recipe. It's a real shame I can't make it using their own press, but I am very glad I nabbed the instruction sheet from some random Ebay seller's page. It makes me feel kinda bad for the people who resolutely made the plain spritz cookies every year for Christmas and never tried any of the other recipes that were right there on the same page.

The small hint of brown sugar gave extra depth to the lemon flavoring without overpowering it. And adding all of that lemon rind was definitely worth it. If you make these, definitely buy two lemons to grate into it. And just like the recipe title implies, they were very crisp. As with every other recipe I've made from the Mirro sheet, I would make these again.