Lemon Raspberry Sugar Cookie Bars

This year for Mother's Day we kept it small again: like last year, I went to Auntie Vicki and Uncle Rob's house. It was the three of us, Carly, and Nonni. This time, Uncle Rob's mom Ruth joined us as well. As always I offered to make dessert. Auntie Vicki suggested something fruity, specifically raspberry or lemon, and cookie bars. So after looking through my magazine cutouts, I started combing through Pinterest (it's actually a bit quick to go through when you're looking for something specific). I ended up finding a recipe that was both raspberry and lemon from the blog Butter with a Side of Bread.

Jell-O Cookies

While delicious, my chocolate caramel macarons unfortunately didn't last long. Apparently, while great in theory, adding caramel ice cream topping to the filling of sandwich cookies that aren't going in the fridge leads to white fuzzy mold after a couple months (especially when there are some warm days during that time). So I had to toss my hard work in the trash and find a new recipe. Fortunately for my indecisive brain, I had a starting point.

You see, a year ago while on Facebook during lockdown, I came across a sponsored post for an artisanal soft pretzel company called Eastern Standard Provisions. I was hooked from the start. There are two options for buying the various types they offer: individually or as a variety in a box. Almost everything comes with regular salt but one of the boxes, a collaboration with St. Jude's, comes with Raspberry Lime sugar. Since I like my soft pretzels plain I usually toss the salt but I decided to keep the sugar when I bought the St. Jude's box, figuring I'd bake with it.

Because it's sugar I decided to take the obvious route and find some cookies to roll in it (like with snickerdoodles). As always I wasn't sure where to start on Pinterest at first. Except with lemon, since that's a flavor that goes well with both raspberry and lime. After some searching I decided to look at the Jell-O cookie recipes I've saved and see if there was one that included rolling the cookie dough in sugar. Didn't find that so I just decided to pick one and roll as many cookies as I could. I finally settled on a recipe from 99 Easy Recipes.