Strawberry cookies made with real strawberries! These cookies are soft with slightly crispy edges and a thick, chewy middle. You can top them with a light glaze or roll them in sugar.

I was about to make our lemon drop cookies a few months ago when I got the brilliant idea that if a candy could be blended to flavor a cookie, surely freeze dried fruit could as well. Sure enough, a summer strawberry cookie was born! 

I thought strawberry was the absolute best flavor as a kid. Now I actually tend to go more raspberry out of the berry family (curious what you all would pick), but my kids are for sure on the childhood bandwagon of fresh, juicy red strawberries. They love that these cookies are dense and chewy but they have the pick of rolling in sugar or topping with a crackly glaze.

I personally prefer to make a lemon glaze to brighten up these sweet cookies, but you can do whatever makes you happy!

Ingredients for Strawberry Cookies

Most of the strawberry cookie recipes out there use strawberry cake mix or strawberry pudding to get the strawberry flavor (in fact we have our own strawberry pudding cookie recipe here on the blog), but I love using real strawberries in this recipe to get that true strawberry flavor. Here is what you will need to make these cookies:

For the Cookies

• Freeze Dried Strawberries: Don’t use fresh strawberries. They will add too much moisture to the dough and make the cookies cakey.
• Sugar: regular granulated white sugar
• Butter Flavored Shortening: You can also use regular shortening (you’ll lose a little richness in flavor) or just regular butter but they end up more dry with just butter.
• Unsalted Butter: softened, combined with the shortening, the cookies are tender and still rich in flavor
• Eggs: add structure to the cookies
• Vanilla: adds flavor
• Strawberry Extract: just for a little boost in flavor
• Flour: use all-purpose flour
• Baking Soda: leavening agent to give the cookies rise and fluffiness
• Baking Powder: leavening agent that works with the baking soda to help the cookies rise
• Salt: enhances all the flavors

For the Glaze

• Powdered Sugar: adds sweetness and structure to the glaze
• Milk or Water: milk will be a little more rich in flavor
• Lemon Juice: I love to add a little lemon juice to give a nice flavor burst to the cookie, but it is totally optional.
  • BONUS: You could also add a little strawberry extract to the glaze if you want even more strawberry flavor.

Sugar

• Sugar: Roll the cookie dough balls in sugar before baking if you prefer that instead of the glaze.

The measurements for all the ingredients and the instructions for making these cookies can all be found in the recipe card at the

Welcome to the weekend, my friends! We’re home again at last. We had a whole lot of fun exploring Tennessee with our youngest son. (And before I forget, big thanks to Mary for emailing me and recommending we try Hillbilly Golf while we were in Gatlinburg. What a fun afternoon!) Let me just admit right now that I am ecstatic not to be leaving home again until mid-July for our annual family camping trip.

Bring on the summer company, barbecues with friends, and lazy afternoons in the hammock and the rocking chairs. I am ready for it all. (Lest you think my life is picturesque at all times, there will also be 14,793 dishes to wash, piles of laundry for everyone to do, and many more mundane tasks.)

But amidst it all, there will be blue skies, sunshine, warm rain that brings on disgusting humidity (reality check there), and as many outdoor moments as possible. 

ON THE BLOGS this week: Crisp warm tortillas filled with chicken, bell peppers, and plenty of melting cheese are a terrific dinner or an excellent way to use up just a bit of leftovers. Who would turn down a piping hot chicken fajita quesadilla for lunch? (Not me!)

Red potatoes seasoned with Mexican spices are roasted and then tossed with sauteed onions, peppers, and beans, finished with a handful of barely wilted, warm spinach in this Black Bean Breakfast Skillet. Topped with a soft egg or scrambled eggs, this is a hearty and filling, slightly spicy weekend breakfast that can easily be doubled to feed a crowd.

Thanks to the magic of slow cooking, you can create these wonderfully buttery Slow Cooker Caramelized Onions with almost no effort at all.

With crunchy greens, juicy tomatoes, tender peas, cheddar cheese, plenty of bacon and eggs, and a bright, smoky dressing, this old fashioned 7 layer salad delivers more than you might be expecting.

Sweet corn, ripe bell peppers, red onion, and jalapenos are seasoned with a medley of aromatic spices and a touch of fresh cilantro to make each spoonful of this Fiesta Corn a fabulous blend of flavors.

Rhubarb Bars with a shortbread crust and tangy rhubarb custard filling are a fun, easy spring dessert. And this Rhubarb Sauce with Strawberry Jello is a favorite old-fashioned rhubarb treat. Serve it over ice cream or eat it in a bowl just like you would applesauce.

Moist, sweet, and lightly spiced, this car

Warm and fragrant cinnamon spice blends perfectly with cool, velvety ice cream to create an irresistible treat with caramelized pieces of cereal in this Cinnamon Toast Crunch Ice Cream.

What is Cereal Milk?

There is a certain nostalgia for me in playing with a recipe that uses cereal milk. What is cereal milk? Well, it’s exactly what it sounds like–pretty much the best part of eating a bowl of sugary cereal.

There weren’t a lot of sweets in our house growing up. So, I have some very fond childhood memories of slurping up the sweetened milk that remained in the bowl after finishing my cereal.

It was extremely rare that my mom purchased a sweetened, name-brand cereal. She was far more likely to return from the store with a giant bag of puffed rice. But, we kids used the sugar bowl with reckless, gleeful abandon at breakfast.

I don’t eat cereal very often, these days. But, that nostalgia still hits hard. So, if you’ve never enjoyed this treat, PLEASE do yourself a favor and add it to your bucket list. You won’t regret it.

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Chocolate and toasted coconut stuffed inside chewy blondies, could any dessert possibly make me happier? For the moment, not a chance. These coconut cookie bars just plain make me happy.

Coconut Blondies

Oh, how I love blondie cookie bars. From classic chocolate chip blondies to fully loaded cookie bars with coconut and pecans, or a dark chocolate and cashew combination, there are endless ways to make a pan of blondies extra special.

Unless you are a coconut hater (completely inconceivable to me!), you are likely to adore these coconut blondies.

I typically cut these bars small, basically just so that I can keep going back into the kitchen for repeated tastings. Plus, they are pretty rich, so smaller servings work well with this recipe.

Blondies with Chocolate Chips

If you love bakery-style chocolate chip cookies with crisp edges and perfectly chewy centers (and you’re anything like me with less time on your hands with every passing day), these blondies with chocolate chips are likely to be made more often than those cookies we all love so much.

Blondies give you the crisp edges (especially the awesome edges pieces!) and the chewy centers of chocolate chip cookies, and they do it in less time with far less effort. No rolling or scooping is required, just stir the dough

Moist, sweet, and lightly spiced, this carrot cake with cream cheese frosting is the food of which sweet tooth dreams are made. 

Pioneer Woman Carrot Cake

For the longest time, years actually, I was on a hunt for the best carrot cake recipe. Carrot cake is one of Sean’s favorite cakes and I tried several cakes that were good, but they just didn’t measure up to our expectations. We both have a hard time resisting carrot cake anytime it is served, so the idea of making the perfect carrot cake at home was irresistible.

Then I found Ree Drummond’s carrot cake recipe and let me tell you, this baby measures up. I haven’t tried another recipe since I made this one for the first time over ten years ago. I make it at least once a year, sometimes more often than that.

This carrot cake is moist and sweet and incredibly flavorful. Classic carrot cake often includes pecans in the frosting, so I’ve listed them below as optional. (I rarely include nuts in my cakes and frostings, so I often skip them when making a cake just for my family to enjoy.)

Simple Carrot Cake

It shouldn’t come as news to any of you that I am not a cake decorator. Not even a little bit. My sister and I baked this cake one time when I was visiting her and while the word “rustic” covers a multitude of mistakes, it might be pushing it here.

When you’re spending time with your sister, laughing at your mistakes is way more fun than attempting to fix them.

As long as a cake is covered in frosting, I’m happy.

I’ve tried to force myself to care what a final cake looks like, but even for a pretty blog post, I’m just not that girl. (You can thank my sister Jenny for the fact that she added flowers to the cake the first time I photographed this cake and managed to make it presentable.)

My favorite cakes are almost always baked in sheet pans or flipped out of a bundt pan. Jenny and I doubled the recipe and made two generously sized cakes–a layered round cake and a bundt cake–to serve a ton of people.

The recipe as written below makes a cake that’s larg