Valentine Cookies – Jam Filled Hearts

January 31st, 2009

There is this great little grocery store just a few blocks from my apartment. Everytime I go there, I look at their amazing bakery and see these fabulous jam-filled heart cookies. But of course I never buy them, and if I did, they would probably be like 3 dollars a piece. So I decided in honor of valentines day, I would make some myself! They were so easy, and exceptionally good! You should definitely try them. 

I just moved and have barely any kitchen stuff, so baking presents quite the challenge. For these cookies you will need:

1. A Rolling Pin

2. 2 nesting heart-shapped cookie cutters (I found mine for $1 a piece)

3. Sugar cookie dough recipe + ingredients – or pre-made sugar cookie dough (I totally cheated!).

3b. Extra flour & powdered sugar

4. Red jam

5. Cookie Sheet

First step is to make the dough – or  pretend you made the dough. When I use pre-made dough, I always add just a little bit of flour so it doesn’t stick to everything. 

Next you’ll need to roll it out. I recommend 3/16″ (just a little less than a quarter of an inch) because you’ll be putting together two cookies in the end, so it gets a bit bulky. This also depends on how much your dough rises. 

Once you’ve rolled out your dough, go ahead and use the cookie cutters to cut the big hearts in the dough. At this point you’ll want to cut little hearts in HALF of the big hearts. 

I just made a few cookies because I didn’t want to eat a dozen or so. If you are going to make a lot of these, I would recommend making your own dough, that pre-made stuff is expensive.  But if you really need to save time, it only took me about 20 min from start to finish to make these awesome cookies. 

Next you’ll want to bake the cookies. Just follow the instructions on your recipe. The hardest part of this whole thing was transferring the dough to the baking sheet without ruining the shape. Here are the cookies after they were baked. I also baked the little inner hearts, but had to do it on a second sheet. 

I let the cookies cool for about a minute on the pan, then they are easy to move to a paper towel or cooling rack. The assembly of the final cookies is pretty easy. I had the cut-out hearts on one side and dusted them with powdered sugar. Then the whole hearts I covered with a thin layer of jam – a bit thicker towards the center.  

The final assembly consisted of placing the dusted hearts on the jammed hearts. Viola! Beautiful jam filled heart cookies! These were so so yummy, I’m going to make a big batch for Mr. Project to take to work on valentine’s day!

If you are wanting to make the dough from scratch, I found this super easy recipe online:
Raspberry Sandwich Heart Cookies

Happy Valentine Baking!