I’ve been looking for different ways to battle my depression, and so I’ve bought a couple baking books this year. Why baking books? Because it’s difficult to remain depressed when you’re making cookies.

Last purchase was Nancy Baggett’s All-American Cookie Book, which I’d been eying for the past year or so.

After the book came, I spent a couple evenings on the sofa, first looking through the book, and then marking the recipes I wanted to try. Since I needed a recipe that didn’t have nuts or too much chocolate (due to Grandmom’s diet limitations) I decided to try the Lemon Jumbles, since after chocolate, my next favorite flavor is lemon.

If you are going to make cookies (or anything else) with lemon, always use fresh lemon. Most good lemon recipes call for both lemon zest and lemon juice.

I learned a trick (I think it was in Rose Braenbaum’s cake bible, but perhaps not) about working with lemon zest. If you possible can, pulse the lemon zest several times with the sugar. This will get the zest finer than even a microplane zester (a must have) can get the zest.

The recipe called for making rings by hand. I used a 2 tablespoon scoop, and then rolled out the dough and formed a ring.

The cookies were supposed to have holes in the center, but I like smaller cookies, and in making the cookies smaller, I ended up with round cookies with a dent in the center.

After cooling, the cookies are dipped in lemon icing. I ended up making my icing a little too runny.

However, runny icing or not, the jumbles are delicious. Next time I think I’ll skip trying to make rings, and just make a smaller cookie, which will probably double the amount of cookies the recipe makes, but will give me the satisfaction of being able to eat two cookies instead of one.