No matter whether they are glazed or dusted with sugar, these SIMPLE cookies are flaky, soft, and simply delightful. The result will be one of my family’s favorite cookies if you roll the dough out in half-batch sizes and keep it chilled. Add some ordinary or coarse sugar to the pastry.
| Prep Time: | 30 mins |
| Cook Time: | 10 mins |
| Additional Time: | 2 hrs 30 mins |
| Total Time: | 3 hrs 10 mins |
| Servings: | 18 |
| Yield: | 18 filled cookies |
Ingredients
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- ½ cup cold butter
- ½ (8 ounce) package cold cream cheese
- ⅛ teaspoon salt
- 1 beaten egg
- 6 tablespoons apricot preserves
- 2 tablespoons white sugar, for sprinkling
Instructions
- Preheat an oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Spray baking sheets with cooking spray, or line with parchment paper.
- Place the flour, butter, cream cheese, and salt in a bowl. Cut it together with 2 knives or a pastry cutter until the butter and cream cheese is the size of small peas. Shape the dough into a ball, wrap with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.
- Cut the dough in half and place half in the refrigerator to stay cold. Roll the other half between 2 pieces of wax paper or parchment into a sheet about 1/8 inch thick. Lift off the top sheet, and use a heart-shaped cookie cutter to cut 18 cookies. Before lifting the cutouts from the wax paper, put the dough onto a flat baking sheet and into the freezer for a few minutes to firm up the cookies. Set the 18 cookies aside. Repeat with the other half of the dough, also making 18 heart-shaped cookies.
- Place 18 cookies onto the prepared baking sheets so they don’t touch. Carefully brush a little beaten egg around the top of each cookie, and spoon about 1 teaspoon of preserves into the center of the cookie. Top each with another unfilled cookie, press together around the edges, and crimp the edges with a fork to seal in the filling and make a pretty edge. Brush the tops of the filled cookies with beaten egg, and sprinkle with sugar.
- Bake in the preheated oven until the cookies are a light golden brown, 10 to 12 minutes. Cool completely before placing in containers.
- This pastry dough can get too soft quickly, so make sure you roll out half the dough at a time, and work quickly.
- You can substitute raspberry preserves or other preserves of your choice.
- Because there is no sugar in the dough, instead of sprinkling with sugar, you can glaze the cookies with 1 cup powdered confectioners’ sugar mixed with 1 tablespoon water or milk.
- Depending on the size of your cookie cutter, the recipe may not make a lot, so you might want to double it, but do not triple it. This is because it will require the addition of too much flour. You may end up with tough greasy cookies if you triple the recipe. It is better to make it in separate batches.
Nutrition Facts
| Calories | 118 kcal |
| Carbohydrate | 11 g |
| Cholesterol | 31 mg |
| Dietary Fiber | 0 g |
| Protein | 2 g |
| Saturated Fat | 5 g |
| Sodium | 78 mg |
| Sugars | 4 g |
| Fat | 8 g |
| Unsaturated Fat | 0 g |
Reviews
I made these for the Allrecipes Allstars Canada Challenge #allweneedislove This dough or a variaiton of it is very common in European baking whether it be for Rugelachs or Kolaches, so I am familiar with how soft it is and how it cannot be manhandled or it will end up tough. I scaled to 23 servings as I only had 5 oz butter. I weigh my dry ingredients, after making the cookie dough it was so soft I had to add 8 tbsps of additional flour. I also added 2 tbsps sugar and 1 tsp vanilla. When I cut out the first tray of hearts I put them in the freezer with the dough scraps for about 10 minutes, then I rolled the second batch of hearts and placed them in the freezer while I was filling/crimping the first tray. I cooked down my homemade apricot jam the night before to thicken it, so it would not be so runny. I used my medium heart cutter which yielded 15 sandwiches that baked in 17 minutes on parchment lined sheets. I thought I had some coarse sugar but was mistaken, so I just made a fast vanilla glaze to smear over the tops once cool. The pastry was light and flaky, a favourite with my family!
These could not be more awful or time consuming to make. really dry at first glance and when baked oozed grease and completely tasteless. sorry i made these
This was not an easy recipe to make. I had calculator figure ingredients for 24 cookies. Had trouble figuring how many TBSP of butter equaled 2/3 cup. Finally settled on 12 TBSP. Measurement for cream cheese was a bit confusing. In original recipe of 18 cookies, ellenz used “1/2 (8 oz) pkg. Twenty-four cookies called for 2/3 (8 oz) pkg. I used 10 oz, which may have been more than called for. Had a lot of cream cheese and butter with 1-1/3 cups flour. Took a long time to work into pea size. Rolling dough was a good exercise workout, trust me. Was going to use 2-1/2 inch wide heart cutout but knew there would not be enough 1/8 inch thick dough so settled on 2 inch wide. Near impossible to put 1 tsp preserves on cookie so ended up using about 1/4 tsp. Dough was so small sealing cookie with fork almost destroyed heart-shapes. After brushing with beaten egg, I sprinkled 17 cookies with brown sugar/sugar mixture. Baked light brown after 13 minutes. Watching a video to make this recipe would be a deciding factor to try making these again. Without it, I will chalk this experience up as a challenge that didn’t work. Sorry I couldn’t rate this with a higher score.
Can’t wait to try this recipe but I’m gonna substitute date paste for the apricot filling. Sounds very similar to a recipe my high school Home Ec. teacher used to make for Christmas. I lost my copy and have been searching for AGES! I’m so excited to find this!