Coconut-Cream Cheese Pinwheels

My husband asked me to slow down with the cookie-making because we have had way too many sweets in the house, so it has been a few days since my last batch of cookies. I thought it was time to break out the baking gear, though and picked a doozie for today!

Martha's recipe for Coconut-Cream Cheese Pinwheels (page 61) is extremely labor-intensive, but as you can see from the picture, produces beautiful, impressive-looking cookies. While the recipe is certainly time-consuming, none of the tasks are difficult. This is a wonderful cookie for a party or a baby shower.

In her cookbook, Martha recommends using a fluted cookie cutter and pastry wheel, but since I don't own those tools, I simply used a square cookie cutter and a sharp knife and I still thought the cookies looked gorgeous.

Coconut is only used in the filling and is not an overpowering flavor in these cookies. In fact, if you don't like coconut, you could easily omit it and still have a delicious cookie. The amount of filling is well more than enough for the recipe - in fact, you could halve the amount and still have enough.

I used a baby spoon for doling out the filling and the jams and that worked beautifully. I used both strawberry and raspberry jams, but found that the raspberry was a better choice because it had more substance while the strawberry jam ran a little (but still tasted yummy!).