Video:Linzer Cookies

SHARE ON                

Transcript:Linzer Cookies

Hi, Cliff Wildman with About.com Food. Today, I'm going to show you how to make Linzer cookies, a classic holiday treat. I hope you enjoy it.

Linzer Cookies Ingredients

We'll need 2 and 1/3 cups of flour; 3 quarters cup of sugar; a ½ cup of slivered almonds, ground; two and half sticks of butter - room temperature; 1 cup of red currant jelly, but you can also use seedless raspberry jam or apricot jam; a 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon and a 1/4 teaspoon of ground nutmeg. You're going to need a kitchen mixer with a paddle attachment, a rolling pin. You'll need two cookie cutters one an inch and a half to two inches wide, a smaller cookie cutter in a shape to fit in the middle there.

Mix Dry Ingredients

In a large bowl we're going to mix our flour, ground almonds, the cinnamon, the nutmeg, and we're going to mix that together and set it aside.

Whip Butter and Add Sugar

In the kitchen mixer, take your butter and whip that until fluffy, then add then start adding the sugar you want to mix those together well. It will be a nice fluffy mixture when it is ready to go. It does take about 5 minutes to get there and once you get there you want to take this off the mixer and begin mixing in the flour mixture we set aside earlier with a rubber spatula. Fold a little flour into the batter then add more flour in. Fold it in until you have the final product and it will look like this.

Roll Out Dough

You want to take that immediately and break it into thirds onto parchment paper with flour. Put two of the thirds stacked up into the fridge, and we'll take this third piece now and roll this out to an eighth of an inch thin piece. Once that dough is rolled out, repeat with the other pieces of dough we put in the refrigerator earlier and then when we're done stack the three up and chill for at least two hours or up to overnight. Here's what the chilled dough looks like.

Cut Out Tops and Bottoms

Go ahead an preheat your oven to 350 degrees now and take the larger cookie cutter and we're going to cut out the tops and the bottoms of the cookie. So for our first run here we're going to cut out 24 of these cookies, 12 tops and 12 bottoms. You want to take the scraps of the dough and roll that back up into a dough to make more cookies later.

On a floured surface take twelve of the cookies and we're going to use the smaller cookie cutter shape to make the tops of the cookies.

Bake Cookies for 12-15 Minutes

Once that is done we'll take two greased cookie sheets, or you can use non-stick cooking spray, we're going to lay out the 12 tops and bottoms onto the two cookie sheets and we want to bake those in the oven for 12-15 minutes until they start to brown.

Prepare the Jelly Filling

In a small saucepan take the cup of jelly of your choice and you want to heat that unit the consistency is even. You basically want to work all the lumps out. Once that is done, set it aside and let it cool down a little until the cookies are done. Once the cookies are done, let them cool for a few minutes.

Assemble the Linzer Cookies

Now you can start spooning on the jelly with a teaspoon, put about a quarter to half a teaspoon of jelly on each cookie and then put the top on. Repeat for the rest of the cookies and you're pretty much done. Now I'm going to use powdered sugar to give mine that extra holiday flair, but you can eat them plain. And that's the recipe.

I hope you enjoyed it. For more videos check out About.com