My Orange Drop Cookies Are a Burst of Sunshine

If you want to taste a delicious cookie, there are so many to choose from depending on what type that you are in the mood for. I didn’t feel like chocolate, vanilla, oatmeal or some form of spice cookies or doing too much work. All I knew was that I wanted something soft over a harder cookie. Suddenly I gained instant clarity and recalled my orange drop cookies and how delectable and buttery these cake-like cookies were with just orange juice and its grated rind as sole flavoring to set them apart.

My orange drop cookies gain some of their extra tenderness from sour cream in addition to my strict use of butter for this recipe. It adds so much to the flavor and pillow-like texture to those little mounds that really gives them beautiful simplicity as far as taste goes. You can really appreciate what the bit of orange juice and grated rind contribute to further brighten it up.

Though some people may prefer confectioners’ sugar icing, I honestly think it is a waste for such a good cookie of this magnitude to steal some of its thunder. The only time I make an icing for it is when my one relative is coming to visit. Ever since she tasted a batch I made that had the juice and rind of one orange to one cup of powdered sugar and teaspoon of butter, she couldn’t stop raving about them with that frosting. I thought the flavor was a bit sweet with frosting.

As you know, laboring over a recipe and devoting too much time to it is not for me. Therefore, I’ll reveal my secret for speeding up the cookie baking process. What I usually do to save time is to set the butter out to warm at room temperature first. If I forget to take it out of the refrigerator and it’s still too hard to start creaming, I stick it in a small covered microwave dish and defrost for a few seconds to warm it up, which does the trick.

By chance, if your butter melts just a tad, it won’t hurt the creaming of ingredients for your recipe. A trick I do is saving the butter papers for greasing the cookie sheets. After I emptied the butter into my mixing bowl, I inserted my butter paper to wipe any melted butter to keep on greasing.

The majority of the work is cleaning the orange and start grating the rind. Next, I take out my juicer and squeeze what I can to save for the recipe. Once you take care of that step, you breeze through the rest of the recipe.

Another helpful trick to cut my time in the kitchen is lining up my ingredients next. When you have everything in front of you, you can finish up in record time.

You can use teaspoons to drop the cookie dough onto your greased cookie sheets. However, I drop mine with a small, spring release melon scoop. I never get slowed down because I always keep a cup with some water to dip after depositing each load of batter onto the cookie sheet. This lubricates the scoop well enough that the cookie dough slides out so much easier than trying to scrape it off with those spoons or forcing it out of the scoop when it is reluctant to go anywhere.

The next time that you are hungry for something good, try my recipe! I think you will be glad that you did once you sample my orange drop cookies. You also might want to try my  orange cookies with candy-like icing and my orange-chocolate chip bars.  Type orange into my search box because I have a lot more tried and tested treasured recipes using orange as well.

Orange Drop Cookies

1-1/4 cups of sugar
1 cup of butter
1 large egg
½ cups of sour cream
2-1/4 cup flour
½ teaspoons of baking soda, leveled
½ teaspoons of baking powder, leveled
juice and grated rind of 1 orange

Cream the butter and sugar thoroughly before beating in the egg.

Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugar, and salt into your mixing bowl followed by the sour cream, juice and grated rind. Beat again to blend in well.

Drop by teaspoons or using a small melon scoop onto greased cookie sheets.

Bake in 350-degree oven for eight to 10 minutes, depending on how your oven is regulated. The edges and bottoms should become slightly golden in color.

Allow these to cool in the pan for about five minutes before you attempt to remove them. These are very soft and will break if you try to speed them up.

ENJOY!