The Cursed Cookie

So in the end, I put a lot more effort into these cookies than should ever be necessary for any cookie ever. I basically fail-boated my way to the results.

It started out well enough, I tried making my own strawberry jam, and set a pot of strawberry puree on a burner. There was a bowl I had used to wash the berries on another burner. Guess which burner I turned on. Sigh. I freaked out and poured water on it, it broke in four pieces right away. Science!



The recipe I used for the cookie asked for 1 1/2 sticks of butter. Somehow this translated to 1 1/2 CUPS of butter (3 sticks) in my genius mind. So I inadvertently doubled the recipe. I thought the dough seemed just a bit more buttery than you'd think a sugar cookie dough to be. At first I just thought it was a Paula Deen recipe.

Not that that's a bad thing.

I finally caught my mistake and rectified it, but I'd already added the flour so the whole thing ended up having half the sugar it should have had.

Besides that, I think I dirtied every dish in the house, splashed water all over my floor/myself, got powdered sugar everywhere. It's been a day.

So here's the recipe and results!

Strawberry Linzer Cookies

• 2 C flour
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp ginger
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 C ground pecans
• 1 1/2 sticks (3/4 C) butter
• 3/4 C sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla
• strawberry jam
• powdered sugar (for rolling)

Set oven to 375 degrees.

In medium bowl, combine flour, salt, ginger, cinnamon and ground pecans (pulverized in a food processor,) and set aside. 

In large mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla, mix thoroughly. Slowly blend in flour mixture until completely incorporated. Form dough into a ball, and then into a disk. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour.

Roll out dough on powdered sugar dusted surface and cut out your shapes. I didn't have a cutter for the middle circle cutout, so I used a shotglass instead. Bake approximately 5-7 minutes until slightly golden brown around the edges.

Let cool completely and dust the hole-y cookies with powdered sugar. Shmear your jam on the unholy cookies (lol) and sandwich them together so they look all pretty like.

I used this dough to experiment with different shapes and techniques. These were the prettiest, by far. I like that the dough stays tender even after re-rolling it a few times. Fun fact, I didn't know until after baking these that the dough I made was basically a variation of a Linzer cookie.

As for the jam, I did make this myself, but I can't really share a recipe because I made it in such a backwards way and it required a lot of fiddling to get the consistency right. Do yourself a favor and spend a few bucks on some premium jam, flavor of your choice, it'll be just as good!