Day 15: Jam Swirls

My neighbors' recently had a baby girl, so my mother asked me to bake something as a gift.

I decided to make these Jam Swirls from  The Art of the Cookie by Shelly Kaldunski, which is both simple yet refined, and also incorporated the color red.

The Sugar Cookie

The Ingredients

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ½ tsp salt
• 2 sticks butter, room temp.
• 1 ¼ cup sugar
• 1 egg
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tbsp whole milk

The recipe actually calls for a tablespoon of heavy cream, but heavy cream does not exist in my fridge. Since it was such a small amount, I figured that just using whole milk would work just fine. (I was right.)

I actually ended up doubling this recipe, as it says it freezes really well, and I have another recipe in mind that uses the sugar cookie again as a base. The ingredients shown above show the amounts for one batch, but my pictures show the amounts for two, so don't be thrown off!

The Process

Whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt.
Use an electric mixer, and beat the sugar and butter together until light and fluffy, like freshly fallen snow.
Switch the speed to low, and add the egg and vanilla. Mix until just combined.
Slowly add the flour mixture, then milk.
And scrape down dem sides as needed! And I assure you, it will be needed at least a couple of times. No skimpin' out on me now!

This is what your dough should look like.

Lay out some plastic wrap, and squish the dough into a rectangle on top. Cover the dough with the seran wrap and store it in the refrigerator until firm, at least an hour and up to overnight. The dough can also be frozen for up to a month.

The Filling

The Ingredients

I'm a little skeptical that it's actually this easy.

The Process

On a lightly floured surface, using a lightly floured heavy rolling pin, roll the dough into a 16"x12" rectangle. The dough should be about ¼ of an inch thick. My dough began to crack some; I used my hands to mend it
together.

Spread a layer of jam to just before the middle of the dough, leaving a half-inch border around the edges. Then tightly wind the dough up till you've covered all of the jam.
I did mine to the middle of the dough like the original recipe actually says to, and to roll it up I had to use a little more than half the actual dough to cover everything, which resulted in my jam swirls being a little uneven!

At this point the recipe says to carefully flip the dough over. My dough had become soft and was cracking, so to flip it would've been a disaster. I stuck it back int he fridge to firm up again.
Once firm again, I carefully flipped it over, then repeated the jam
spreading and dough rolling steps.

My dough had cracked a bit by this point, so I mended all the tears and then melded the two different rolls together more tightly. A wooden spoon helped greatly with this process; I essentially just smacked the dough with the back of it.

Put the dough back in the fridge to firm up again, at least ten minutes. I actually left mine in for a little over an hour because I had to go meet someone.
Preheat the oven to 350°F.
I decided to grease my baking sheets, even though the recipe said to use parchment paper. We'll return to this fact....

Use a sharp knife, and carefully create ½" thick slices. It was easier to cut down at an angle for me,
rather than just straight down. Just fiddle around with your approach until you get something that works smoothly for you.
Using the knife, I slid the cookie onto the baking sheet. You should space your cookies farther apart than I did, as they do expand a little more than I had expected; I'd suggest placing them 1-1½" apart.

Bake the cookies until lightly golden around the edges, 16-19 minutes.

This is the part where it got tricky for me. If I let the cookies cool slightly on the baking sheet, they stuck. However, if I got them off the sheet right as soon as they came out of the oven, they came off without a hitch. Weird.
Also, don't place them back onto the baking sheet to cool. Even if you shift them away from their original placement, the cookie will remeld back onto the baking sheet.

Cookie residue. Not pretty.

Or ya know. Just use parchment paper. Like the actual recipe said to.

The Final Product

Some Notes

This made 25 cookies. And the cookies are really pretty big, a few inches long and a couple wide.

Doubling the sugar cookie recipe was a lot of volume to deal with. Manageable with a standing mixer, but still a bit difficult to deal with. Definitely would not recommend if you only have a handheld mixer.

If I Could Do It Again....

I'd use jam instead of preserves. That way there wouldn't be actual chunks of fruit in the mix, so I could spread the jam more thinly across the dough, and hopefully wind the dough more tightly. But that might not actually help the tightness.

Maybe try using a different sugar cookie recipe? This one sure ripped a lot.

Definitely just use parchment paper. That would've been so much easier.

The Final Verdict

These cookies taste like you'd expect: sugar cookies with jam. Nothing super special flavor-wise.

Unfortunately, I couldn't even get these to look that great. Which was really frustrating. (Most of the cookies look quite more disheveled than the one picture above.)

In all, I think that this recipe takes too long for a mediocre taste and sight. Maybe if I weren't just a beginner, these could be super cool. But at my level, I couldn't execute them to look nice enough for my standards.

This would be a great recipe to return to after I've had a bit more experience.
But right now, I don't think I even want to give these to my neighbors.