Remnants

During December everything seemed to happen at once. I had an additional job working at the Christmas market, suddenly the lecturers at the university decided that we needed to complete everything we hadn't done in the past months in a few days and yet it was the month of Christmas parties and having to be social when all you want to do is sleep for eternity.

I spent the 24-26 at my friend's mother's place in Göttingen where we played boardgames, ate too many cookies and sweet things and hung out by the Christmas tree. As a present I had gotten a very cool cookie cutter, so when my friends came to Flensburg for New Years I had to bake some cookies.

The recipe was for Jamie Dodgers, which I found attached to some Jamie Oliver cookie cutters I had bought earlier:

- 250g softened butter
- 140g icing sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 1 egg yolk
- 375g flour
- 30g caster sugar (for sprinkling the cookies when they come out of the oven)
 - 170g jam (I used watermelon-strawberry jam that I had made in the summer)

1. Mix the butter and sugar until it is fluff. Add the vanilla and the egg and beat well. Then sift in the flour and work the dough into a ball with your hands. This took a little while because the dough is rather dry. Then cover the dough ball in clingfilm and put it in the fridge for an hour. I left it there overnight and had to let it soften quite a while before it could be rolled out.
2. Turn your oven to 190°C. Prepare 2 baking trays with greaseproof paper or spray 'n cook.
3. Roll out the dough on a floured surface until it is about 3mm thick.
4. Here I multitasked: I used the 'eat-me' cookie cutter to just cut out some plain cookies, and used the other round cookie cutters for the Jamie Dondgers. You need to cut out an even amount of cookies and then Jamie uses a mini cookie cutter to cut a shape in the middle. Since I did not have a mini cutter I just used a knife and attempted to shape little hearts. It worked fine.
5. Bake the cookies for 10-12 minutes until they are pale gold, not golden brown.
6. Sprinkle them with the caster sugar and wait for them to cool.
7. Once they have cooled, use the jam to sandwich together the cookies.

And now for the bad news: I had to throw ALLLLLL the cookies away, because I used 'Dinkelmehl' (Spelt flour) and the brown pieces which I had thought to be the actual spelt turned out to be... little insects. So ja. In the end my friends saw the cookies, and then they were quickly dumped in the trash. NOOOOOOO.