TWD: Linzer Sables

For your consideration: Linzer Sables from Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, pages 134-135 featured this week on Tuesdays with Dorie which is actually Wednesday With Dorie this week.

Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. More nuts this week with Dorie. I scanned thru the upcoming recipes and there are no nuts coming up next week or the week after. Phew. I was worried. I really didn’t want to make this recipe because of all the pricey nuts involved. Maybe I’m hoarding for the winter, but I didn’t want to spend any more of my frozen cache on a recipe that may or may not turn out. I did hear on NPR the other day that there’s a nut shortage in some parts of the country. Ok people, it was squirrels and acorns, but I’m trying to make a point here! What if people nuts are next?! Oh stop! Nutty people will always be in plentiful supply, but I'm talking about the actual nuts themselves! I’m driving myself nuts crazy thinking about it.

I keep all my nuts in the basement freezer and in surveying my loot I have 8 jars of macadamias (on super sale at CVS last week - score!), 5 cans of salted peanuts, 4 cans of honey roasted peanuts (Kroger on sale and BOGO), 1 ½ bags of pine nuts, 2 cans of cashews, a small bag of pre-shelled pistachios, smallish boxes of walnuts, almonds (whole and sliced) and a plethora of pecans. I have a huge bag and a half that I bought from Sam’s for last week’s Twofer Pie. Like I said, I was having nut-spending phobia BUT the Ghost of Linzers kept showing up. Everywhere I kept running into these Linzer Sables. Everywhere! Then to top it off, sitting in my inbox was yesterday’s "Day 2" Food Network 12 Days of Cookies recipe. Yes, it was… Pistachio Linzertorte Cookies from Paula Deen. AAAAAH! Guilt, guilt, guilt, it’s written all over your face. I knew I must make these or I would be haunted forever.

I used the pecans, I figured that I could sacrifice those to the Linzer Sable gods and ground them up in my Magic Bullet and turned them into dust. The cookies went together fairly straightforward – no major surprises, although the dough does need to be really cold/almost frozen in order to get the cutouts out of the dough. It is somewhat labor intensive, but not hard so this is something that needs to be preplanned or split into two sessions, the dough half and the cookie making half.


Contemplating the jam. Alas, I think I have a problem here as well.

I’ve discovered that I have a jam, jelly, preserve fetish, but I can create a diversion proudly say that Nancy at The Dogs Eat the Crumbs has a bigger and more impressive stockpile, and I won’t even go into the Pam cooking spray collection that Cathy of The Tortefeasor has. We can go for intervention together. Nuts, jam and Pam. I’ll find a recipe for those three and get back to you.

Anyway, I chose the traditional seedless raspberry jam for the pretty cutout cookies, and filled the leftover thumbprint cookies with some of that as well as Peach preserves and Sweet Potato Butter. I had the Nutella out, but there again, I have a spending problem. I didn’t want to cash it in on these cookies. I swear, it’s a nut thing. Plus, I easily justified it by the fact that the Nutella flavor overrode the pecan flavor and that would have cancelled it out. (Hmm. I need to buy some hazelnuts.) Recipe made, conscience cleared.

The verdict? These were surprisingly good – I haven’t tasted the pretty ones yet since I’m taking them to a friend’s house tonight for her birthday, but the baker’s sample was really good.

Thanks to Dennis of Living the Life for choosing this recipe. To see what all the other TWDers did with it, check out the blogroll here. If you'd like to try making Dorie’s Linzer Sables for yourself, you can find the recipe on our host’s blog, or in Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours.