What the what?! It’s a recipe!? Dear reader, how can I not? This recipe did not fail me on my first attempt! And I suck at baking cookies! It’s a Christmas miracle and I certainly could not keep it from you. Consider this my present for you, try them out because they are just too easy — but in a good way. I’d bake them and bring them round your house for some good chit-chat if it were possible, but hey…
I got this recipe from my friend who got it out of the Dutch magazine ‘Land Idee’. I’ve put the whole recipe with some accompanying ‘how-to’ pictures for fellow cookie-noobs under ‘read more’. So, cheers!
This recipe should make you around 20 cookies.
Total time is around 85 minutes.
Ingredients:
300 grams of flour
125 grams of sugar
2 teaspoons of vanilla sugar (or a whole packet of 8 grams)
1 egg
150 grams of cold butter
some extra flour (and a rolling pin)
+/- 100 gr red jam (raspberry is nice)
some powdered sugar to sprinkle
Instructions:
Cut up the butter into little pieces. Put the flour through a sieve in a bowl, add the granulated sugar, vanilla sugar, the egg and the pieces of butter.
Knead into a smooth dough. I heard the more you kneed the tougher the cookie… keep this in mind. Wrap into foil and put to rest in the fridge for about an hour.
Preheat the oven to 175°C. Divide the dough in small portions and, on a well floured surface, roll out to about 4 mm. I’d flour both the surface and your rolling pin for optimal non-stickiness.
Next, make an equal amount of cookies with a cookie cutter. I used a star-shape because Christmas. Make sure to make a whole in the middle of half of the cookies. You’ll see the red jam through these little wholes making the cookies extra appealing and Christmassy.
Put some baking sheet on your baking tin, and put the star-shaped (or whatever you like) dough on it. If you only have one tray you can wait with the next batch of cookies after the first one is done. No problem for the dough.
Bake the cookies in the preheated oven in about 15 minutes, until there a nice shade of golden-brown.
Let the cookies cool off for a little bit so you can ‘handle them’. Heat up the jam (I used a microwave, less washing up afterwards) and cover the cookies without holes with a little dollop of jam in the middle.
Sprinkle the cookies with a whole with the icing sugar (to help create a subtle, even layer use a little sieve). Lightly press the cookies with icing sugar on top of the cookies with jam. And ta-da!
Let the cookies dry and cool down for a little while, and they’ll be ready to serve — maybe with a delicious cup of Empress Grey? Hm, yes? When can I come by?
Important facts to know before starting your bake-off:
Prep time: 10 minutes
Waiting time: 60 minutes
Baking time: +/- 15 minutes
Total time: 85 minutes
