Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Sugar Cookies with Strawberry Butter


Millions of people suffer from chai addiction. For them, it's chai before and after breakfast, for brunch, after lunch, in the late afternoon, even after dinner right before going to sleep. I'm not quite as addicted, but I'm on the downhill track.

Kidding!! But seriously Pakistanis drink too much chai and we should probably cut down or at least switch to green tea. In the mean time we will gladly drink our yummy Danedar or Tetley steeped boiling water with oodles of cream and sugar. And what better to have with chai than a delicious biscuit. And by biscuit I mean what Pakistanis call cookies. The sugar cookies I talked about in my last post are so incredibly delicious with chai. Since my cousin and her babies are in town, I decided to make a large batch of sugar cookie dough and freeze it, thawing a little chunk at time to bake and eat with chai. The first batch I baked were simple with sprinkles. Then I made strawberry filling for a cake, but it was a failure. I ended up with some weird strawberry mess. Then I had an idea. For the second batch of sugar cookies, I would use that strawberry mess to replicate those yummy Pepperidge Farm Verona cookies. They were so cute looking and yummy. I had to share :)

Sugar Cookies
Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla

Strawberry Butter
Ingredients:
1/2 cup strawberry jam
2 tablespoons butter, melted

Directions:
Whisk together flour and salt in a small bowl. In a separate large bowl, beat together butter and sugar with an electric mixer until pale and fluffy. Beat in egg and vanilla. Add flour mixture, mixing until just combined. Place dough in plastic bag and freeze for at least one hour.

Meanwhile, take out any old strawberry jam. Heat it in the microwave for about 30 seconds. Stir in melted butter. Let cool.

When ready to bake, preheat oven to  350°F. Let dough thaw enough to be able to mold into 1 inch round balls. Place balls on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet. With a finger, poke a small hole in the cookie ball then lightly press down/flatten surface of cookie (it should be about 2 inches round now). With a spoon, fill holes of cookies with ~1/2 teaspoon of strawberry butter.

Bake cookies, until edges are golden, 10 to 12 minutes, then transfer to racks to cool completely. 
Makes 20-30 cookies.



Just a little snapshot of the past week with the babes :)

Cookie recipe via Epicurious.

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