Lemon Oatmeal Cream Pies
Oatmeal Cream Pies are a snack cake made by Little Debbie that have a sweet cream filling sandwiched between two soft oatmeal cookies. The treat is essentially a whoopie pie that uses oatmeal cookies as a base, but whatever you call them, the pies are pretty tasty. These Lemon Oatmeal Cream Pies are a springtime variation on those popular pies.
The cookies are a fairly straightforward oatmeal cookie that bakes up to be thin and fairly crisp. They’re flavored with fresh lemon zest and a little bit of lemon juice, which gives them a bright but subtle lemon flavor. The crisp cookies are also very easy to handle and work with because they’re not as fragile as thin, chewy cookies can be. When you add the lemon filling to sandwich them together, the cookies soften up and the whole thing takes on the perfect, slightly chewy texture that you want to find in any oatmeal pie.
I added my lemon zest to my butter and sugar while creaming them together to start the cookie dough. Beating your zest with the sugar helps to release even more lemon oil from that lemon zest, and you’ll get a bit more flavor adding it in at this point than you would if you stirred the zest in later in the recipe. If you don’t have fresh lemon to flavor these pies, you can substitute a little bit of lemon extract into the cookie dough and the filling to give them a nice lemon flavor, but you will get the best flavor when using fresh lemon zest and juice.
The cookie store very well and actually get better after a day or so has gone by, since the lemon flavor becomes more pronounced and the cookies only improve in texture with time. Keep them stored in an airtight container and these cookies will be an excellent choice for a bake-ahead dessert for a springtime brunch – or just to enjoy as an everyday treat.
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