Saturday, February 14, 2009

Linzer Heart Cookies

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!  I've had my "heart" set on making these cookies for quite a while now and they are perfect for Valentine's Day.  They come from my Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook and they are just adorable in the picture.  (This is not exactly the same recipe I used, but it's very close)

The dough sounded incredibly interesting.  It contained the usual suspects of butter, sugar, flour, eggs, vanilla, baking powder, and salt, but the interesting parts were lemon zest (not too strange,) cinnamon, and a cup of ground hazelnuts (I did the grinding in my mini-food processor.)  I opted to use my stand mixer for making the dough, but I didn't quite lock the bowl in place so when I turned on the mixer the bowl jumped out.  Nothing spilled though and I was able to turn it off pretty quickly.

The dough chilled in the fridge for a few hours so when it was time to roll it out it was good and HARD!  I managed to muscle it flat and then chose to ignore the direction of putting it in the freezer before cutting out the cookies.  I don't think it mattered.  I cut out plain hearts first and then the top heart window pieces.  I did let them freeze for a few minutes before going into the oven (per the directions) and it actually made them much easier to transfer to a cookie sheet.  Brett was the assistant and helped mostly with the more delicate heart windows.  

Once they were cooled, I couldn't wait to assemble one for immediate consumption.  We set up a little powdered sugar station and a jelly station.  The recipe called for raspberry jelly, but we already had strawberry so we went with that.  Aren't they cute?!  They were also very tasty.  The hazelnuts give it an interesting flavor that I've never had in a cookie.  They are also the kind of cookie where one is enough, not because they aren't delicious, but because they are so big and filling.  YUM!

2 comments:

Roger said...

Dang those look like they belong in a bakery's window display. Nice!

Kim in the Kitchen said...

Thanks Roger! I think they look like they belong in my tummy! They were delicious.