Striped Icebox Cookies

The recipe that I made today was Striped Icebox Cookies (page 227). These are a beautiful shortbread tea cookie with stripes of jam running through them. We get a weekly bag of fresh, locally produced goodies from our farmer's market, and this was a chance to use some of those wonderful organic ingredients from local vendors. The dried cherries, cherry jam and yellow cornmeal were all products that I got from the Greener Grocer at the North Market in Columbus.

Making this cookie involves several steps: preparing the jam filling on the stovetop, mixing the dough, freezing the dough, assembling the cookie layers and freezing again, then baking in the oven. Each step was fairly quick, however, and it did not seem like an overwhelming or labor-intensive process.

I will say, though, that working with shortbread dough is quite difficult. I thought maybe it was just the last recipe that I did, but now I'm starting to think it's just the nature of shortbread dough. It is very sticky and hard to roll out. I think in the future, I would refrigerate the dough before I began rolling it out to see if that helps. Rolling it between two sheets of parchment paper was helpful as well.

When baking this recipe, I was able to use my silpat mat for the first time (pictured above). This is a specialized baking mat that fits on a typical baking sheet (they come in different sizes) and is the best non-stick surface available. It worked perfectly - nothing stuck to it at all. The cookies were fairly delicate when they came out of the oven. I let them cool off for a full minute before removing them from the pan, which I did very gently with a long offset spatula.

The cookies are delicious - the sweet/sour taste of the jam filling balances nicely with the crunch from the cornmeal shortbread. Plus, they look interesting which is always good too. They would be a great treat to bring to a party.