Cookies are everywhere right now. People are gathering for festive neighborhood cookie exchanges and boxes of carefully-curated homemade cookies are being left on doorsteps around the world.

There are a lot of cookie cookbooks available at bookstores now, too–The Great Minnesota Cookie Book, King Arthur Baking’s revised The Essential Cookie Companion, Dorie’s Cookies come to mind. Cookbooks make great gifts. Just sayin…

This recipe is from Sarah Kieffer’s wonderful cookbook 100 Cookies. It is a rich combination of traditional oatmeal cookie ingredients and some unexpected ones–white chocolate, apricots, and fresh rosemary. You read that right. Fresh rosemary!

You can, of course, find some great cookie recipes on Blue Cayenne, too.  Just type “cookies ” into the search button and you will find the likes of Peanut Butter Miso cookies, Rum-Raisin cookies, Sesame cookies, Shortbread cookies and a lot more.

With cookies on our minds, here’s a little history lesson. The concept of cookies is believed to have originated from the practice of baking a bit of cake batter in an oven to test the oven’s temperature. That’s right, cookies long ago were an ingenious substitute for the yet-to-be invented oven thermometer.  Another element in the story of the cookie’s origins, was, of course, the widespread cultivation of sugar.  Food historians believe that sugar was first cultivated somewhere in Southeast Asia with some leaning toward the lowlands of Bengal as the cultivated crop’s site of origin. Traders and invaders then (thankfully!!!) carried sugar west.

Here’s a great recipe. Be happy.

I gifted a few of these Rum-Raisin-Oatmeal Cookies to my neighbors. My neighbor confessed that her husband ate two of the cookies after breakfast as a “breakfast dessert.” 

No harm in that. Right? The cookies are oatmeal cookies, after all, and oatmeal is a respectable breakfast food.  The way I see it, most breakfast cereals are just deconstructed cookies anyway. (I rest my case! Eat a cookie.)

Whenever you eat them, these are very good Rum-Raisin Oatmeal cookies by any standard. The raisins, after a good soak in rum, are soft and taste almost caramelized in the baked cookie. This cookie recipe is adapted from one that appears in the cookie cookbook, 100 Cookies by Sarah Kieffer. The wafer-thin cookies are the result of Kieffer’s unique “pan banging method” of cookie baking: As the cookies bake in your oven, you lift the tray and let it crash onto the oven shelf several times. Sounds strange, but it works! Kinda cathartic, too!

You’ll be “happy as Larry,” as the old Australian idiom goes, to add this cookie to your repertoire. 

Make a resolution to eat more cookies in 2019.

These Swedish Shortbread Cookies would be a good place to start. They are crazy delicious. They are beautiful. They are easy to bake.

And…they passed a stringent taste test by my friends (and cookie aficionados) Carole and Maria–two tough cookie judges!

I found this recipe quite serendipitously. I tuned in to The Splendid Table Podcast and found Sally Swift interviewing Rick Nelson, one of the authors of The Great Minnesota Cookie Book. Here is a link to the Splendid Table interview: The Splendid Table.

It turns out that The Minneapolis Star Tribune has been hosting a holiday cookie contest each year for the last fifteen years, a contest that has attracted no fewer than 3500 entries. Now they have published a cookbook that features the best-of-the-best cookie recipes culled from those 3500 entries–from Grandma Eva’s Ginger Cream Cookies to Red Velvet Whoopie Pies to these Swedish Shortbread Cookies.

The recipe for these Swedish Shortbread Cookies was entered by Marsha Morrissette of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, in 2003. Morrissette told the newspaper that this cookie is so popular among her family and friends that it is the only cookie she bakes for the holidays, adding “They’re even good when you steal them straight out of the freezer. No defrosting necessary.”

Wow! Straight from the freezer? That’s my kind of cookie.

Here is the recipe:

Swedish Shortbread Cookies

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Ingredients

• 1 C. unsalted butter (room temperature)
• 1/2 C. plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
• 2 to 2 1/2 C. flour
• 1/3 C. raspberry jam
• 1 C. powdered sugar
• 1 t. almond extract
• 2 to 3 teaspoons water

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
To Make The Cookie Dough
2. Beat the room-temperature butter and the granulated sugar in the bowl of your stand mixer (using the paddle attachment) at medium-high speed until the butter and sugar turn creamy. This will take about 2 minutes. Lower the speed and gradually add the flour, mixing until the flower and butter mixture are just combined. Add enough flour to make a dough that is not sticky.
3. Turn the dough out onto your counter and divide the dough into six balls. Wrap them in plastic and chill in your refrigerator for 30 minutes.
4. After 30 minutes, remove the dough balls from the refrigerator and, working with one ball at a time, place the ball between two sheets of parchment paper. Use a rolling pin to roll the dough into a rectangle that is about 1/4-inch thick. The original recipe said to form the dough into 3 inch by 10 inch rectangles, but I found that I needed to make smaller rectangles to keep my dough at 1/4-inch thickness. I found that my cookies broke in the middle if they were rolled too thin. Once the dough is rolled out, peel away the top piece of parchment paper.
5. Next, make a shallow crease down the center of the dough rectangle and fill the crease with raspberry jam. I used my thumb to make the crease.
6. Repeat this process with the remaining dough.
7. Retaining the parchment paper, transfer the dough to a baking sheet. Place the baking sheet into your preheated oven and bake until the edges of the cookies become golden brown. Ovens vary, so you will need to keep an eye on your cookies. The original recipe said to cook for 10 to 12 minutes. I needed to cook my cookies a bit longer. I was not able to cook all the cookies at once and cooked them in batches.
8. Remove your cookies from the oven and let them cool for 2 minutes. After 2 minutes, cut across the short side of the rectangle at a slight angle. You will get about 6 cookies from each rectangle. Retaining the parchment bottom sheet, transfer the cookies to a wire rack to cool competely.
To Make the Glaze For The Cookies
9. Whisk the powdered sugar, almond extract and 2 to 3 teaspoons of water in a small bowl until the glaze is smooth. Using a spoon, drizzle the glaze onto the cooled cookies.

Nutrition

Calories

4342 cal

Fat

194 g

Carbs

490 g

Protein

43 g

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7.8.1.2

169

https://bluecayenne.com/happy-new-year-make-a-resolution-to-eat-swedish-shortbread-cookies

You can buy this book on Amazon here.