I keep dried apricots on hand purely for baking projects (as opposed to snacking), so when I decided to make Shauna Sever's kolacky with homemade apricot lekvar, I already had all of the ingredients I needed.
The lekvar is pretty straightforward, but it's technically "Apriot and Orange Blossom Lekvar" and I strongly dislike the floral flavor of orange blossom water. While I think orange blossom water smells pleasant enough, whenever it's in a dessert I feel like I'm eating perfume. So I left it out. You make the lekvar by cooking dried apricots with sugar, lemon juice, and salt until the fruit is softened and the excess liquid evaporates. Then I used an immersion blender to smooth it out and added vanilla. I made the lekvar a day in advance and stored it in the fridge.
The dough for the cookies is made from cream cheese, butter, sugar, orange zest, vanilla, almond extract, salt, and flour. I chilled the dough overnight before rolling it out to 1/16-inch thick and cutting it into 2-inch squares. I hit the expected yield right on the nose. The recipe says it produces about four dozen cookies and I got 97 cookies from a double batch. The dough was quite soft (even after a day of chilling) and sticky; I had to use a substantial amount of flour when I rolled it out. I put a small amount of apricot lekvar in the middle of each square of dough, folded over two opposite corners of dough to partially enclose the fruit filling, and did my best to pinch the overlapping pieces of dough together to seal. The dough didn't stay pinched together while the cookies were in the oven. In most cases I ended up with cookies like you see below, where the folded over corners of dough were at least touching, if not overlapping a little.
For some reason when I saw the cookies after baking I kept thinking that they looked like peanuts wrapped in little blankets. I sprinkled them with powdered sugar before serving. I liked these cookies a lot. They were dainty and quite small, but the apricot butter delivered bright fruit flavor that was slightly tart. The dough was golden brown on the bottom and the cookie texture was slightly soft. All in all, these cookies were delightful fruity bites.
When my husband ate a cookie, he thought for a moment while he chewed and then gave me his assessment: "These taste like Christmas." I was surprised he said that, because while kolacky are often served at the holidays (and this recipe does appear in the "Winter Holidays" chapter of Midwest Made), I don't personally connect these cookies to Christmas. There is nothing about them that I would inherently associate with the holidays, like the flavors of ginger or spice or peppermint. But that is one of the really neat things about food -- how it can transport you to a specific time or place, or evoke a particular season. And we enjoyed our Christmas in April!
Recipe: "Apricot and Orange Blossom Kolacky" from Midwest Made by Shauna Sever,
The lekvar is pretty straightforward, but it's technically "Apriot and Orange Blossom Lekvar" and I strongly dislike the floral flavor of orange blossom water. While I think orange blossom water smells pleasant enough, whenever it's in a dessert I feel like I'm eating perfume. So I left it out. You make the lekvar by cooking dried apricots with sugar, lemon juice, and salt until the fruit is softened and the excess liquid evaporates. Then I used an immersion blender to smooth it out and added vanilla. I made the lekvar a day in advance and stored it in the fridge.
The dough for the cookies is made from cream cheese, butter, sugar, orange zest, vanilla, almond extract, salt, and flour. I chilled the dough overnight before rolling it out to 1/16-inch thick and cutting it into 2-inch squares. I hit the expected yield right on the nose. The recipe says it produces about four dozen cookies and I got 97 cookies from a double batch. The dough was quite soft (even after a day of chilling) and sticky; I had to use a substantial amount of flour when I rolled it out. I put a small amount of apricot lekvar in the middle of each square of dough, folded over two opposite corners of dough to partially enclose the fruit filling, and did my best to pinch the overlapping pieces of dough together to seal. The dough didn't stay pinched together while the cookies were in the oven. In most cases I ended up with cookies like you see below, where the folded over corners of dough were at least touching, if not overlapping a little.
When my husband ate a cookie, he thought for a moment while he chewed and then gave me his assessment: "These taste like Christmas." I was surprised he said that, because while kolacky are often served at the holidays (and this recipe does appear in the "Winter Holidays" chapter of Midwest Made), I don't personally connect these cookies to Christmas. There is nothing about them that I would inherently associate with the holidays, like the flavors of ginger or spice or peppermint. But that is one of the really neat things about food -- how it can transport you to a specific time or place, or evoke a particular season. And we enjoyed our Christmas in April!
Recipe: "Apricot and Orange Blossom Kolacky" from Midwest Made by Shauna Sever,
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