Dorie Greenspan is one of my baking idols; her cookbooks have kept me occupied for many happy hours in the kitchen. Given the popularity of her occasional CookieBar pop-up stores in NYC, I thought it was great news when she finally opened two permanent brick and mortar stores, named Beurre & Sel, to sell her amazing cookies. I've always been a bit disappointed that I didn't have the recipe for her "Jammer" cookies -- which came to Dorie in a dream and have become a Beurre & Sel trademark. But then my December 2012 issue of Bon Appétit arrived, with a cover story on holiday cookies, and inside -- the elusive recipe from Dorie for her Jammer cookies!
Jammer cookies are essentially a sablé with jam and streusel on top. You make the cookie base by creaming room-temperature butter, adding sugar and salt, beating in egg yolks and vanilla, and mixing in flour just to combine. You roll the soft dough out between sheets of parchment and freeze the dough until firm.
After the dough is frozen, you cut it out into rounds. Dorie always bakes her cookies inside round molds, and the recipe suggests placing the cut rounds into muffin tins to achieve a similar effect. I own a lot of ring molds, and so I used 2.5-inch rings molds to cut the rounds and just left the dough in the molds for baking. You place a dollop of jam on top of each round of dough (I used four fruits preserves), sprinkle on a streusel (made from flour, sugar, salt, chilled butter, and vanilla) around the jam, and bake.
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I love the visual effect you get from baking the cookies inside a mold; you get a nice little hockey puck of buttery goodness. And these cookies are all buttery goodness -- the cookie base is rich and tender, and the jam and streusel simply gild the lily. I'm glad I used four fruits preserves because it wasn't too sweet.
I made the Jammers about a week after I made John Barricelli's Jam Tartlets, and I couldn't avoid making a comparison between the two. While the Jam Tartlets look fancier (because they actually look like a small tart, as opposed to the Jammers, which essentially look like a molded cookie), I think I preferred the Jammers. The streusel came out better in the Jammers (but then again, I think I might have screwed up the steusel in the Jam Tarlets, since my tartlets looked nothing like those pictured in the cookbook), and the sablé base of the Jammers melts in your mouth and is simply divine. The Jammers are also slightly less fuss since you can simply stamp out the rounds of dough and be done with it, instead of trying to carefully line a ring mold with crust up the sides. But both are decadent little delights.
Recipe: "Beurre and Sel Jammers" from Dorie Greenspan, published in December 2012 Bon Appétit.
Previous Post: "Sweet Little Mouthfuls: Jam Tartlets," December 4, 2012.
Jammer cookies are essentially a sablé with jam and streusel on top. You make the cookie base by creaming room-temperature butter, adding sugar and salt, beating in egg yolks and vanilla, and mixing in flour just to combine. You roll the soft dough out between sheets of parchment and freeze the dough until firm.
After the dough is frozen, you cut it out into rounds. Dorie always bakes her cookies inside round molds, and the recipe suggests placing the cut rounds into muffin tins to achieve a similar effect. I own a lot of ring molds, and so I used 2.5-inch rings molds to cut the rounds and just left the dough in the molds for baking. You place a dollop of jam on top of each round of dough (I used four fruits preserves), sprinkle on a streusel (made from flour, sugar, salt, chilled butter, and vanilla) around the jam, and bake.
.JPG)
I made the Jammers about a week after I made John Barricelli's Jam Tartlets, and I couldn't avoid making a comparison between the two. While the Jam Tartlets look fancier (because they actually look like a small tart, as opposed to the Jammers, which essentially look like a molded cookie), I think I preferred the Jammers. The streusel came out better in the Jammers (but then again, I think I might have screwed up the steusel in the Jam Tarlets, since my tartlets looked nothing like those pictured in the cookbook), and the sablé base of the Jammers melts in your mouth and is simply divine. The Jammers are also slightly less fuss since you can simply stamp out the rounds of dough and be done with it, instead of trying to carefully line a ring mold with crust up the sides. But both are decadent little delights.
Recipe: "Beurre and Sel Jammers" from Dorie Greenspan, published in December 2012 Bon Appétit.
Previous Post: "Sweet Little Mouthfuls: Jam Tartlets," December 4, 2012.
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