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The holiday season is the perfect time for baking cookies! These easy Lemon Poppy Seed Soft Bake Cookies are quick and perfect to make with kids. No chilling of dough required and you can cut out any shapes you like!

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In college, I had a friend who baked dozens and dozens of cookies with her mom every Christmas. Even though we were both at home for the holidays, she’d always send me a box of their favorite cookies that they had made.

One year, instead of having all decadent, rich cookie flavors, she sent a sweet, lemon cookie. I’m obsessed with lemons anyway, but I particularly loved this cookie because it was so different from the rest.

Now making fruity, light cookies and deserts is one of my favorite things to do for the holidays.

It’s so easy to get weighed down (literally and figuratively) from all of the rich, heavy flavors of treats over the holidays. So making this recipe for lemon poppyseed soft batch cookies breaks up that over-richness so perfectly!

One of the best parts about these cookies is that the dough doesn’t have to be chilled first. When I was making it, I was a little nervous about being able to roll out the dough. I wanted these cookies to be soft and airy, but also for them to be kid friendly, which meant they needed to be able to be cut out with Christmas cookie cutters.

To my surprise, the dough ended up being the perfect consistency to be light and fluffy on the inside of the cookie, but firm enough to be able to be rolled out and cut out.

For the purpose of these photos, I just used a mason jar lid since I have plenty of them on hand and hadn’t dug out my cookie cutters yet. But you can totally have fun with these and use any shape of cookie cutter!

These cookies are also AMAZING with icing, if you prefer that kind of thing, but they’re so light without it that I could eat a handful at a time (and may have right after taking these photos).

Madison blogs over at A Joyfully Mad Kitchen. You’ll love her easy recipes, hospitality tips, and her Raspberry Souffle. While you’re at it, check out her Vanilla Pudding Chocolate Chip Cookies…yum!!!

Be sure to follow on Instagram and tag #amftrecipes when you share one of my recipes….so I can see all the wonderful recipes YOU make!

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Lemon Poppy Seed Soft Bake Cookies

Total Time

Ingredients

1/2 c butter, softened
1 c sugar
2 eggs
1/2 c milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 1/2 c flour, divided
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
Zest from whole lemon
Juice of half a lemon
2 tablespoons poppy seeds

Directions

Preheat oven to 350F.
Cream together butter and sugar until fluffy.
Add in lemon zest and juice, milk, eggs, and vanilla. Combine.
In another bowl, mix together 2 cups of flour, baking powder and salt.
Gradually add dry ingredients to wet, until dough beings to form.
Add poppy seeds to dough and mix together.
Then, add remaining flour 1/2 cup at a time until dough is stiff enough to roll out. Dough will be SOFT but won't completely stick to your hands when you try to pull it.
Cover a countertop or other clean surface with flour. Also rub flour onto a rolling pin.
Roll out dough to about 1/4" thickness.
Cut out cookies with your favorite cookie cutter.
Bake for 7-8 minutes on a parchment lined (or lightly greased) cookie sheets.
Cookies are done when they are a bit golden on the bottom and the cookies are puffy, but bounce back when you lightly touch the top.
Allow to cool for one minute on cookie sheet, then transfer to a wire cooling rack.