Lemon Thumbprint Cookies

Filled with lemon curd and topped with lemon glaze, these triple lemon thumbprint cookies are surprisingly quick and easy – but seriously delicious! The perfectly sweet tart citrus treat for all the lemon lovers in your life.

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Every year, my friend Erin at The Speckled Palate hosts The Sweetest Season Cookie Exchange – a week full of all sorts of amazing cookie recipes.  I’m excited to participate once again this year with a super lemon-y take on a classic cookie: a triple lemon thumbprint cookie!

For previous years, I’ve shared chewy chocolate mint cookies, toffee crunch cookies, black and white cookies, and chocolate pinwheel cookies for the Sweetest Season.  And all those cookies are delicious.  But some of them are also a little (or a lot) time consuming.  (I’m looking at you, black and white cookies and pinwheel cookies.)

This year, with everyone sick over Thanksgiving, and hosting Thanksgiving, and starting a new job (don’t worry, still a scientist – Bunsen Burner Bakery is still an appropriate blog name!), I just didn’t have the time for a long, involved cookie recipe.

Thumbprint cookies are the perfect short-on-time recipe!  Chilling dough?  Nope!  Complicated recipe?  No way!  Lots of cooling and glazing steps?  Not a chance.

Usually thumbprint cookies use jam, but if you’re a regular Bunsen Burner Bakery reader, you know lemon is my absolute all time favorite dessert flavor.  So we’re filling these with lemon curd.  And because a little lemon is good, but lots of lemon is better, we’re making these triple lemon!

Lemon zest in the cookie dough.  Lemon curd for filling.  And lemon glaze on top.

And the whole recipe is fast enough that I made them, start to finish, including photographing them, on a weeknight after work after putting my kids to bed.

If that’s not a winning cookie recipe for all your holiday parties, gatherings, and cookie exchanges, I just don’t know what is.