Linzer Hearts Cookie for Valentine’s Day

Valentines Day is just around the corner.

Are you making plans of buying sweet cookies or chocolates for your love ones?

How about making your very own homemade Linzer Heart Cookies for him (or her) instead of forking out money for this special holiday.

As you know on Valentine’s Day, majority of the gift shops, florist, bakery shops and chocolate shops are hiking up the prices in order to earn huge profits for Valentine’s Day.

You don’t have to be a professional baker to make some homemade heart cookies for your dear ones.

Even a novice homemaker like me who often had encountered many failures in baking cookies had improved my skills over the time.

Linzer Heart cookies is one of my favorite jam cookies where you can choose raspberry or strawberry jam of your choice.

Cookies are easy to bake because as long as you follow the measurement for each of the ingredients, you will definitely not go wrong with producing lovely, fragrant cookies.

Almond essence is required to enhance the almond fragrance for the batter, where you can buy a small bottle of almond essence for $1 at any supermarket under the bakery department.

As for the flour, you can choose either wheatflour, plain flour or self raising flour wherever is available in hand.

However, do remember to add in another 1tsp of baking powder if you are planning to use plain flour for your cookies.

Self raising flour need not to because it has the baking powder in the content itself.

The most difficult and troublesome part is stamping out the smaller heart shape for the cookies.

Firstly, you need to stamp 40 pieces of large heart shape cookie dough.

Set 20 pieces aside.

Then for the other 20 pieces , use a smaller heart shape cookie cutter to stamp out of a smaller heart.

This smaller heart form an outline of the previous 20 pieces of heart cookies, as you can see in the picture.

That is the only troublesome task.

Linzer Hearts Recipe

Ingredients:

• 4oz unsalted butter
• 2 oz castor white sugar
• 1egg beaten
• 1 tsp almond essence
• 7oz self raising flour
• 1oz corn flour
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 6 tbsp raspberry or strawberry jam
• Icing sugar for sifting

Method of baking:

• In a bowl, beat butter and sugar together until creamy.
• Gradually, beat in egg and then beat in the almond essence.
• Sift in the plain flour, cornflour and baking powder into the same bowl.
• Stir the ingredients together with a stainless spoon.
• Then work by hand by kneading into a soft dough.
• Cover the bowl with a plastic wrap. Chill in the fridge for 30min.
• Preheat oven to 180C.
• Line a baking sheet onto the baking tray.
• Grease a little butter over the baking sheet.
• Now, remove the chilled dough from the fridge.
• Sprinkle some flour over a flat surface ( chopping board).
• Roll out the dough to 1/2 inch thickness.
• Use a large stamp cookie cutter to stamp out the heart cookies.
• Then, use a smaller cookie cutter to stamp out smaller hearts from the centre.
• Hence you will have the outline of the heart for the cookies.
• Place the smaller outline heart on top of the large heart cookie.
• Re knead and roll again the remainder trimmings.
• Then, stamp out more smaller hearts for the rest of the large heart cookies.
• Transfer all the ready heart cookies to the baking sheet.
• Bake in the oven for 20min until golden brown and crisp.
• Spoon some raspberry or strawberry jam into the hole of the heart cookies.
• Then, dust the icing sugar over the outline of the hearts.
• Leave the jam to set before storing into the airtight container.

Makes around 20-30 hearts depending on the size.

Written by peachpurple

Photo taken by pixabay

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