Giant pain in the neck jam cookie

I'll say upfront that this giant jam cookie is delicious. And also that the biscuit dough is easy to whiz up in the food processor. But, other than that, it's just a big pain in the neck to make. 

I think the problem stems mainly from the fact that, when it comes to roll out the biscuit dough, it goes from fridge cold to a warm glue-like substance in the blink of an eye. Although I also have to mention the other significant challenge in this recipe, which is that the instructions have multiple descriptions of inverting dough onto trays and then re-inverting on to other trays and so on. Eventually I lost sense of whether we were left to bake two rounds of dough or two trays stuck together. 

This is not the recipe for the impatient, intolerant and generally irritable baker, but it will definitely suit those bakers who like nothing better than fiddling around with decorating biscuits or little cakes. And good luck to them.

For the most part I ignored the instructions and just tried to cut out two biscuit dough rounds and stick them together. Unfortunately the extremely sticky dough made it a less straightforward enterprise than I had hoped. The 'round' pictured below stuck unmercifully to the bowl I used to cut out the shape. Even a couple of sojourns in the freezer couldn't loosen the dough from its death grip on the bowl edge and eventually I had to scrape it off and stick it back together. 

I was a bit cannier when cutting out the second round and left the gladwrap on the top of the dough when I cut the shape. 

I could not have been more surprised when, after many trips to and from the freezer, I managed to get the two rounds stuck together and the little star shapes cut out and stuck on in the right place.

The biscuit dough was a very simple mix and not very sweet. I wasn't sure how it would taste but combined with the reduced berry jam it was just like a little jam tart (a sweet pastry with a jam filling). It's a really great combination of flavours and I'm wondering if you could make this into little tarts. It might be easier than struggling with the rounds. I was a bit impressed with the final product though... and that, my fellow bakers, is how you get sucked in.

Next week the Alpha Bakers are making the Araxi Lemon Cream Tart.

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Bless you!

Sounding a bit like a sneeze (in my mind), these Hamantaschen from The Baking Bible were the Alpha Bakers task for this week. They're biscuits traditionally made for the Jewish celebration of Purim. I found them easy to make (apart from some difficulties with shaping the dough) and very tasty. 

I'm tossing up just how much blame I can apportion to the climate (100%?) and how much I'll have to shoulder myself. My heart does sink slightly when approaching the baking of biscuits because of the problems I have dealing with the humidity and also with my tendency to roll the dough out too thinly.

Unfortunately they didn't turn out as prettily as I had hoped. In an effort to combat the humidity, I refrigerated the dough for longer than stated in the recipe and also in between cutting and filling the circles but still, when I came to shape them, the dough broke at the corners, so they look raggedy. I tend to blame the humidity but I can see Alpha Baker Faithy, who is baking in tropical Singapore, didn't have the same problem... 

If you were to rate pastry by its deliciousness when in dough form (and I've considered starting such a rating system) this pastry would be well towards the top of the scale. Right behind Rose's recipe for Rugelach, the dough of which tastes a lot like cheesecake to me because of the cream cheese.

It's pretty easy to put together. No ingredient photo today since I just grabbed the few things I needed out of the fridge. You blend the butter with sugar (it was meant to be turbinado but I'm still working my way through a large bag of raw caster sugar so I used that) then add the flour and salt, and pulse. Then you add some cream, eggs and vanilla and pulse again until you have pea sized lumps.

Peas at last!

Rose suggests her plastic bag method to bring the dough together but once again, too lazy to do this, I just squished the dough in a piece of gladwrap until it came together.

I made it into two flat disks and put it in the fridge to rest for an hour or so.

I like the neat circles photo below because it belies the mangled and patched heaps of dough that come next. Rose suggests rolling them out on a floured board but I chose to roll them out between gladwrap because that has been successful for me in combating sticky dough in the past.

I looked at the different possible fillings for these biscuits (and there's a lot of suggestions out there) but I really wanted to make something in keeping with the Baking Bible recipe so I chose the prune lekvar and also apricot jam. With the not so traditional addition of a few bits of dark chocolate.

These ugly ducklings looked marginally better when cooked.

But they didn't turn into beautiful swans. I got out a pretty blue plate to distract your eye. Isn't it nice? What a lovely shade of blue. And I think they don't look too bad...on the whole...the ones I selected for the photo...

Next week: mmmmm buns! And caramel buns at that. Definitely up there with chocolate + cake in the list of things that are good by definition.