Now that winter has finally thawed into spring, the next holiday is just around the corner.  Even though we are far out of the holiday season, Easter is still a big day to spend time with family, celebrate, and of course — eat.  And what’s the most important part of eating on a holiday?  That’s right, dessert.  So, if you’re going to a family or friends gathering and are looking for a simple, Easter dessert to bring, but you don’t want to take the easy way out and buy something, you came to the right place.

Lemon Cake Cookies are a quick and easy dessert that are nice and light for the spring, and the yellow color is perfect for Easter.  For this recipe, all you need is 3 ingredients: 1 package of lemon cake mix, eggs, and vegetable oil.

To start, preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Next, line a couple baking sheets with tin foil to eliminate the need to clean the sheets in the end.  You will definitely need at least 2 baking sheets, for this recipe will produce about 2 dozen cookies, depending on the size of each cookie.

Now that you have made all the necessary preparations, you can start baking!  Put the lemon cake mix, 2 eggs, and 1/3 cup of vegetable oil all in a bowl and mix.  When mixing, make sure to use some elbow grease since you’re trying to create cookie dough out of cake batter, so the mixture will be very thick; however, do not be alarmed if it looks like it is getting too thick and dry, this is normal.

When the dough is completely mixed, begin scooping roughly tablespoon sized balls of dough onto the baking sheet.  Depending on the size of your baking sheets, 12 cookies per sheet should be fine. Once the sheet is full, place it in the oven for about 8-10 minutes.  For me, 8 minutes was not long enough and the cookies still came out doughy, so I definitely recommend leaving them in for an extra minute or two.

While the cookies are baking, you can move on to making the icing.  This is quite simple and only calls for the confectioners’ sugar and milk.  Mix 1 cup of the sugar and 1 tablespoon of milk into a bowl.  If you really like lemon taste, you can add a 1/4 teaspoon of lemon extract to the icing. Personally, I left it out because the lemon cookies have more than enough of the lemon taste.  Also, while mixing the icing, you may notice that it is a lot thicker than you expect. To fix this, you can add a little bit of milk until the consistency of the icing is to your liking. I decided to add enough milk so the icing would drizzle, rather than spread, onto the cookies because it greatly enhances the presentation.

In addition, if you really want to make your Easter cookies look festive, try food coloring!  I put a little bit of icing into 3 separate bowls and added different colored food coloring to each of them.  I used blue, green, and red. You only need a small drop of coloring to create perfect Easter colors that are light and great for the spring.  For example, by only using a little red, I ended up creating pink, which is a great color for this holiday.

Now that you have your icing, let the cookies cool for about 10 minutes after they come out of the oven.  Then, right on the tin foil-covered cookie sheet, you can drizzle the icing onto the cookies.  I found this worked best with a fork. Once you have applied the icing, you are done and have a fantastic, homemade Easter dessert to show off to your family and friends on the holiday. You can finally make up for all the store bought goodies you’ve brought in the past, and no one even has to know that these wonderful looking cookies were so easy to make!