Valentine’s Cookies: one dough 3 ways

This recipe was my mom’s go-to for everything– so I called it the Every Season Cookie. It rolls out beautifully and depending on the cookie cutter and the way you ice it- makes it great for a busy mom who needs to send her daughter off to school with a tin of cookies to celebrate her birthday, or contribute to the class’ Halloween Party… I have also used it as a base for butter tarts. At Christmas in Denmark, it is a popular cookie dabbed on the top with an egg wash to hold the cinnamon and sugar on top. There isn’t much sugar in the cookie itself so adding the sugar on the top still doesn’t make it sweet, if you know what I mean.

Last week, as I was scrolling IG, a reel came up that I thought looked fun to make. I re-posted it in my stories in case someone else wanted to try. Yesterday I tried making them. As the reel suggests, you colour two small balls of dough, in this case red and pink. Then you roll them out and use a “valentine’s cookie cutter”. I happened to have the X and O. ( I couldn’t find my small heart – it must be with my other Lost Cookie Cutters!) When you have rolled out your main dough, you place the X’s and O’s ( and hearts if you had them) on top, put a piece of waxed paper to hold them in place and then roll them out. I did this twice and found better results without the waxed paper. I found that the X’s and O’s made a nice relief, but they didn’t stick inside the dough when I used the wax paper, but they did without the waxed paper. I reviewed the reel again and it looks like the dough was a stickier dough – if you have a stickier dough recipe you may want to use that. In the reel they had a square cookie cutter, I don’t have one, so I used my pastry cutter thinking that I wanted to have an envelope shape with those fun squiggly edges.

After I played with this new technique, I made some of mom’s ‘regular’ heart shaped cookies, which I iced later with just icing sugar, water and 2 drops of red food colouring.

I had some left over so I thought I would try to make a pinwheel. I rolled each of the coloured doughs out, placing them on the larger plain rolled out dough, rolled them up into a sausage, then sliced pieces, and rolled them out so they were roughly the same thickness. I was happy with these little swirls and it was a good way to use up the dough- I would do that again.

Here is the recipe:

Elisabeth’s Every Season Cookies

80 grams (1/2 cup) sugar (I was out of sugar but I had some vanilla sugar- so I used that- I would do that again)

(vanilla sugar: jar with “leftover” vanilla beans -pop in the plain sugar, shake, leave= vanilla sugar)

250 grams of room temperature butter ( I use unsalted)

Mix

Add 2 eggs

Mix

500 grams (3 1/2 cups) flour – I reserve about a 1/3 a cup which I used when rolling out the dough

Mom’s recipe calls for 1/2 hour in the fridge (yesterday I didn’t do that)

Preheat Oven 300’F – 350′ F oven ( I use a 350’F oven for almost all my baking including this)

Roll out, Cut, Bake

Bake until light brown

This recipe made what you see here plus a few others… It’s easy to double the recipe and helpful if you are baking with children and you want a lot to cut into all the shapes.. Have fun..

I’m happy that I tried this; it was fun.

I first published this recipe in my book Greenhouse Hygge – the house of my growing dreams.

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