Les Dames Blanches

Well my first roll out and cut cookie of my life. I have never had the desire to tackle a sugar cookie with a cookie cutter. This cookie was actually a lot of fun to do. I am sure it helped that I had an expert on hand at my disposal. I asked my girlfriends if they minded my mom coming over and helping me. My mom however said she would only do this if the other girls were allowed to use her expertise also. My mom has always believed you don't do for one and not the other. So there you go girls she is now fair game. I truly believe this would have been torture if not for her help. There are not a lot of ingredients in this cookie, but there are odd things I did not have on hand. Almond flour, cake flour, and raspberry jam. Surprisingly I had a vanilla bean or two because my client Linda went on vacation and brought me some back as a souvenir. The problem was I stored it as per the Internet and it dried out and was unusable. So halfway through mixing our ingredients off to Meijer we went for fresh vanilla beans. Imagine my surprise when they turned out to be $12.00 for two beans. We think the reason for the fresh bean is for the little black specks in the cookie, but as you can see between the powdered sugar and jam you can't see them. If I make this again I will skip the fresh $12.00 beans and use extract. Funny side story when we got home we finished mixing the batter and I was sure I put the flour in before we left. Again thanks for the expert because I did not add the flour yet. she says they would have been so sticky I could not possibly have rolled it. Thanks again mom.

As the picture shows my mom has these awesome cookie cutters so you don't have to try to measure out the center of the heart. At first I was struggling with my dough sticking to my mat and rolling pin. Once I figured out to use smaller balls of dough for rolling and sprinkling it liberally with flour (the dough, the mat, the rolling pin, myself) it went super easy and quick.

The rest was just time intensive waiting for the cookies to cool, sprinkling the tops with powdered sugar, spreading the jam. Just for the record I love raspberry jam so I used almost a whole jar rather than the 1/2 cup called for. While we were waiting for the dough to chill we hopped back in the car so I could do some shopping for packaging my cookies. These are to pretty for sandwich bags. I found the cute buckets and lace doilies and am now ready for delivery. One thing I forgot to mention is my mom bought these very cool bands you put on each end of your rolling pin and they are colored coded. When you roll out your dough it makes it the exact width you need. Very cool. highly recommend this so no rulers needed.

Danielle G.