Thumbprints of an Insomniac

“Second star to the left and straight on til morning.” – J.M. Barrie

Hello, everyone!

So this blog post was actually unplanned, but I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately for some reason and in my awakened state I realized that I have all the necessary ingredients for raspberry thumbprint cookies, and that baking will probably be more therapeutic than lying in bed wondering why I am not off in La-La-Land with Channing Tatum and all his hot, shirtless friends. So I climbed out of bed, brewed my last cup of Tazo Calm tea, and got out my favorite cookie sheets.

Also, my stepmom and dad came down to see a show that I directed this weekend and who better to bake for than family? I mean, what better way to say “thank you,” than a batch of cookies you made while half-asleep?

Anyway, these cookies utilize one of my favorite things, raspberry jam, and they are SUPER, DUPER easy to make! I adapted the recipe from www.tastykitchen.com and now it can be all yours!

Enjoy!

RASPBERRY THUMBPRINT COOKIES

INGREDIENTS

•                        1 stick Unsalted Butter

•                        ⅓ cups Sugar

•                        ½ teaspoons Vanilla Extract

•                        ¼ teaspoons Salt

•                        1 whole Egg Yolk*

•                        1 cup All-purpose Flour

•                        ¼ cups Raspberry Preserves

DIRECTIONS:

1. In a large bowl, cream together butter and sugar with a mixer until well blended. Add the vanilla, salt, and egg yolk, and beat until fluffy.

2. Add flour and mix until it forms a stiff dough. Scrape dough onto a large sheet of wax paper and roll it back and forth to make a long rope about 3/4 inch in diameter and 12 inches long. Roll it up tightly in the wax paper and refrigerate until firm, about 30 minutes. (QUICK INTERJECTION FROM DANI: this was literally the simplest prep ever! Once the dough was in the fridge I was able to clean up everything, including actually washing the dishes, in about 5 minutes, and still had time to watch Family Guy J) The dough can be prepared to this point up to 3 days in advance. Remove from the fridge and let it rest for 10 minutes at room temperature before proceeding.

3. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. Unwrap and slice chilled dough into 1/2-inch-thick pieces. Roll them into ball shapes and space them 1 inch apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Make a small indentation in the center of each one by pressing down on it with your thumb. Fill each hollow with 1/4 teaspoon of preserves.

4. Bake, rotating pan once, until very lightly browned, 18 to 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to rest for at least 5 minutes on the baking sheet before transferring to wire racks to cool. Careful: the jam is very hot!

So the cookies have been in the oven a little over 10 minutes (the pan has been rotated) and the apartment smells like Christmas! All that butter and sugar and the sweetness of the thick, raspberry jelly! It’s awesome, but not overpowering, which is good considering that in an apartment complex, if someone cooks anything with any sort of scent, everyone else in the entire complex will smell it. The cookies looked quite charming, like they should be served with a cup of steaming chamomile at high tea! I am literally watching the minutes tick by on my oven-timer because I cannot wait to see the finished product!

CUT TO AFTER GIVING THE COOKIES TO MY STEPMOM & DAD!

These cookies were awesome! First, they were adorable! Little thumbprints filled with jam? What’s cuter than that? And giving them to your parents who helped give you your thumbs? So sweet! And second, they were totally tasty! And oddly enough, because I have kittens I have to keep my cooling racks in an empty cupboard so the kitties won’t touch them, which ends up keeping the cookies really warm as they cool (which makes absolutely no sense at all, but whatever) so, by putting the cookies straight into Tupperware from the cooling racks, my parents were able to enjoy them while they were still gooey and warm!

Anyway, these cookies were simple, sweet, delicate and lovely! And I recommend using this recipe whether you are running on 2 hours of sleep or just out of hibernation!

Til next time,

D

*A note on separating the yolk from the white: sometimes it can seem totally difficult to manage getting these two to come apart in a not completely awful way (i.e. the yolk breaking and then you can’t tell which part is which) I happened to love the following little youtube video that helped me learn how to keep it an amicable separation. http://www.chow.com/food-news/54957/how-to-separate-the-egg-yolk-from-the-white/