The Dorie's Cookies group recipes for December are Mulled Wine Jammers (pages 362-364) and Hot-and-Spicy Togarashi Meringues (pages 400-402). This week I chose to make the Mulled Wine Jammers, jury is still out whether I’m going to make the hot and spicy meringues as there are only two of us here, neither of which are excited about those, so unless I can get some interest from Matt when he is home over the holidays, I might just do a rewind that week.
Ingredients list: butter, sugar, powdered sugar, salt, egg yolks, vanilla, flour, cornmeal, brown sugar, cinnamon, star anise, cloves, fruity wine, honey, orange peel, dried cherries, dried cranberries, raisins, and cherry jam.
This is a long list of ingredients for sure…can’t think there were many things in my baking pantry that I did not pull out and use. The cookie takes awhile to make. I did it in two days actually. I made the cookie dough, the streusel, and the jam one day…two of them needed time to cool off in the frig anyway. The next day I cut out the dough, filled it with the jam, topped it with the streusel, and baked them. The dough, streusel, and jam were all easy to make, came together as she said, and the only thing I noticed a difference in was the amount of time it took for me to reduce the jam (probably a difference in pans and the amount of heat on the simmer). It was fun assembling them, they look very cute all lined up with the jam peeking out of the streusel topping.
Delicious…I couldn't resist, I had one straight out of the oven. Mark liked them as well and we both agreed on two things: first, the jam was wonderful with a little hint of wine in the fruit and second, that most of these (recipe makes 24 cookies) need to go into the freezer to be brought out at Christmas when there are many others to help eat them all. Definitely worth all the work, definitely worthy of a repeat, definitely Christmas-forward with that Wassail-like filling.
The Tuesdays with Dorie group is baking from Dorie Greenspan's book, Dorie's Cookies. The posts are the first and third Tuesdays of the month and can be linked at the main Tuesdays with Dorie website here. You can also find the information on joining in and/or see the posts from those in the group baking along at this location. I don’t publish copyrighted recipes, so if you’d like to bake along, buy the book, it’s well worth it.