Lemon Almond Raisin Drops

June 27, 2018 |

What a treat to make cookies with my Mom! My parents were visiting me in Denver, so of course my Mom and I had to make cookies together…I love you Mom! We decided on Lemon Almond Raisin Drops because we thought they sounded good! Lemon, almond, and raisins…seemed like a good combination to us!

We hadn’t made this recipe before, so we didn’t know what to expect. It seemed like a simple recipe and it was! We followed the recipe as written with very minor adjustments (butter for shortening).

I am rating this Lemon Raisin Almond drops two-stars for cookie difficulty. It is a basic drop cookie recipe, but there are a couple of steps with simmering down the raisins and grating the lemon rind. We decided to frost the cookies, so that’s another step. Also, this recipe makes a ton of cookies, so you need some time to bake the whole batch.

We got our ingredients together and started with the first step.

The first step in the instructions is to boil the raisins. Neither of us had done that before, so we weren’t sure what to expect. We boiled the water and raisins, simmered them for 5 minutes, and then let them cool. The result was plump raisins that absorbed most of the water.

Neither my Mom or I like to bake with shortening, so we substituted butter. We used a 1:1 substitute which seemed to work just fine. We mixed the butter with sugar, eggs, almond extract, and then added the lemon zest.

Next for the dry ingredients, we didn’t add the full teaspoon of salt. I tend to use salted butter, so I rarely use the full amount of salt when baking. I definitely find it hard to add an entire teaspoon! We added about ¼ teaspoon. As with some of the other recipes, we needed to add a bit more flour. This time, we added about 1 ½ tablespoons just to firm up the dough a bit. This worked well, giving us a really nice cookie dough.

When we added the raisins per the recipe, we didn’t add the left-over water. We thought the water would make the dough too wet, so we drained the water just adding the plumb raisins.

I have to spend a minute on the cookie dough. It was beautiful! My mom and I couldn’t get over it! It was a really nice light yellow, almost golden color. The light raisins gave it a nice texture and color contrast. And it tasted great with the lemon and almond flavors! ?

I also want to mention that this recipe makes a TON of cookies! We decided to make them small and bite size as the larger the cookie, the more it spread out and didn’t look as nice. The smaller cookies showed the raisins better which helped the overall appearance of this drop cookie. With 3 cups of flour, we knew we’d have a lot, but 200 cookies?? We couldn’t believe it!

To make the smaller cookie, we used about ½ teaspoon of dough for each cookie. Place them about 1 ½ inch apart of the cookie sheet as the cookies will spread while baking.

The recipe calls for a 10 – 12 minutes baking time. We ended up baking for 9 minutes. This kept the nice golden color with a slight browning to show they are done.

When the cookies were done, both my Mom and I commented that they needed something extra. They are a great basic drop cookie, but we thought they would look great with a simple white frosting. We decided the Juice Frosting recipe (see the Rich Flavor Christmas Cookies recipe) would work great. To accentuate the lemon flavor of the cookie, so we just flipped the amounts for the lemon and orange juices to make lemon the feature flavor. So yummy!

The cookies themselves have a very unique flavor. The lemon with the almond extract is quite interesting when you first taste it in the dough. When eating the baked cookies, you taste the lemon on your first bite and then taste the almond flavor after you swallow.

This is a simple drop cookie recipe that can be made quickly and results in a ton of cookies. Frosted or just plain, this is a uniquely flavored cookie that will add a bit of golden sunshine to your cookie collection!

I hope you enjoy these fun flavored Lemon Almond Raisin Drops!

XXOO!

Janet