Tuesdays with Dorie: Buttery Jam Cookies

Heather of Randomosity and the Girl chose this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie selection: Buttery Jam Cookies. This is a fairly simple butter cookie that has jam added to the dough. It only uses ¼ cup of jam, so the flavors are very subtle (nor not, keep reading…)

The original recipe calls for apricot jam and has ginger added as an extra flavor. I wanted to try something different, so I ended up using cranberry raspberry curd for the jam. I know that curd isn’t the same as jam, but I thought that it would work. I wanted to try something Christmas-y, and cranberries fit the bill. The cranberry raspberry curd turned the dough a perfect shade of pink. It really looked like pink frosting!

I baked the first batch without flattening the dough at all and the cookies came out of the oven looking very similar to when they went in. They didn’t spread or flatten at all. I flattened the rest of the cookies with a glass dipped in sugar before baking and I think they turned out better. The flavor of these cookies is so slight; the only flavor that I could honestly pick up was the ginger.

They’re a good basic cookie, but the flavors were so subtle. My husband suggested making these with some Red Bell Pepper and Ancho Chili Jam that we had. I thought that would be interesting so I made the recipe again using the pepper jam. I decided to leave out the ginger and the vanilla, since I wasn’t sure those flavors would mesh with the pepper jam.

The ones made with pepper jam were quite good. No subtle flavors here! They almost taste like a savory scone or biscuit. They are still a little sweet and have just a bit of kick to them. I could see you serving them with a hearty soup or chili. It’s a little weird putting pepper jam in a cookie, but it worked out well.

I don’t know if I will make these again, as I like my flavors a little stronger than what this recipe produces. They do remind me of a Christmas cookie that I used to make that uses powdered flavored Jell-O as the flavoring for a cookie. That recipe also had many variations. I’ll have to find the recipe for those again!