Linzer Cookies

As a young girl, I lived in Germany for a few years when my Dad was stationed in Grafenwoer with the Army. While I have no specific memory of _eating_ Linzer cookies, I know that I fell in love with them during this time in my life. That lovely hole in the middle with a bit of jam peeking out and the powdered sugar? Oh yes ... they are amazing.

Despite my love for linzers, I'd never made them before. One day I thought, "I NEED to make Linzers." I scoured my resources for recipes. What was I looking for? A recipe that wasn't too finicky, used all butter and ideally whole eggs instead of just yolks. I wanted a recipe that called for nut flour (even though they originated with nut flour, a lot of modern recipes don't call for it) and I was looking for a recipe that would let you roll it out immediately. I don't like the chilling step for dough; not because I'm lazy, but because when you roll it out it starts out too cold and ends up too warm. It seems like it is only "just right" for a mere minute of the process.

The Linzer Cookie Recipe

I found a great recipe on American Heritage Cooking. It is adapted from Real Simple, November 2010. I made some further adaptations to the recipe, so I'm also sharing it with my changes later in this post.

Some observations about this recipe:

- It is very similar to my sugar cookie recipe with just a few minor changes

- The flour is cut to 2 1/2 cups from 3 cups and the half cup of flour is replaced with 2/3 cup of almond flour

- It has 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon, and of course a sugar cookie recipe doesn't call for this.

- It also uses only 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder versus the full teaspoon I use for traditional sugar cookies.

- Lastly, it calls for chilling the dough. I just tried rolling it straight away and it worked beautifully.

I knew I'd found a great recipe for Linzer cookies when I made the first test batch and my family loved them!