Cherry Lemonade Cookies

I bought a bag of cherries recently and when it rang up at the grocery store, I nearly died when I saw that the price for these little beauties was $12.48. It was a bag, not a bushel. I thought about being outraged and saying take them back but one of my darlings had already broken 4 eggs and the other one managed to pinch the checkers hand in that weird round-about thing they use to bag the groceries, so, you know, I was kind of at the point where I just wanted to go.

Go where, you ask? Far, far away where it is quiet and I don't have to ask 87 times in 20 minutes if you remember what your inside voice sounds like. For the record, when you've asked something 87 times in 20 minutes, your voice takes on a rather un-inside-voice quality that sounds a lot like yelling.

When we arrived home, I decided that the boys would love cherries for a snack. I was wrong. First they wanted me to pit them because they were "afraid" of the seeds. Um, we'd recently been to the doctor for a rock shoved up your nose and you're afraid of a cherry seed? Boy brains make no sense. Do you think I could find the pitter? No. Of course I could not. So I sliced the cherries in half and popped the seed out. The boys then consumed exactly one-half of one cherry and walked away.

Well, that's not stopping me. These cherries were not going to waste. I ate some myself and set about making dinner. I put the cherries in a spinach salad with bacon, almonds and this very delicious lemon dressing.  It was a great change from my strawberry and spinach salad that I usually make.

So now I was down to about 80% of my bag of cherries and guess what happened? I stumbled across THIS recipe and fell in love with a new blog. First of all, a cookie that requires no measuring is my very good friend. And it would use up about 20 of my cherries.

I set out to make the cookies but the chocolate chips I was sure I had stashed somewhere were nowhere to be found. There was a huge bag of lemons though so I modified Jen's recipe and came up with these which were, if I do say so myself, delicious.

Cherry Lemonade Cookies
Recipe by Michelle's Dinner Bell

1 yellow cake mix
2 eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 tbs fresh lemon juice
1 tsp grated lemon zest
20 cherries, pitted and chopped

Glaze
1 cup powdered sugar
2 tbs fresh lemon juice
1/2 tsp grated lemon zest

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. In large mixing bowl, combine all ingredients for cookies except for cherries and mix well.
3. Fold in cherries gently.
4. Drop cookies on cookie sheet lined with parchment and bake 9-10 minutes.
5. For glaze, mix glaze ingredients together. 
6. When cookies are cool, dip in glaze and set aside until glaze sets.

Enjoy!