Filled Sugar Cookies

It's Christmas time, and Christmas time means traditions, and, in my family, Christmas traditions include two things particularly--Christmas cookies and lefse making. What is lefse, you ask? Not the subject of this blog, so you'll just have to wait for the next one to find out about that delectable treat; today I'm talking about Christmas cookies.

When my two younger sisters and I had all finished college and gone our separate ways, we decided that we wanted to have periodic Sisters' Days just to get together and reconnect, as it were. Maybe we'd go to a movie together, maybe give each other mani/pedis; one time, we even took a pottery class together and each made a vase. (I still have mine on my dresser.) As my youngest sister and I both had children and everyone's work and family schedules got more complicated, it has become a lot more difficult to coincide our free time, but the one Sisters' Day we have held on to is making Christmas cookies together, and this year was no different.  It's even more fun now that the kids are all old enough to actually participate, so we have a great time together!

We like to do a cookie swap and each bring something to share with the others, then we make sugar cookies together and divide those spoils as well. It makes for a very yummy day!😋

First, we let the kids make their own sugar cookies. I have a ton of cookie cutters ('cause I just think they're cool!), and I always make a big batch of sugar cookie dough the day before so it's nice and chilled and ready to go the day of. If you've made sugar cookies from scratch before to roll out and cut, you know that it always works better if the dough is chilled; once the dough starts to warm up, it becomes very sticky and unmanageable.

I pulled out just enough dough for each kid to make their own cookies and allowed them each to pick two cookie cutters to start with, then the cookie cutting began. In case you're curious, this year we made hearts, stars, Christmas trees, snowmen, angels, reindeer, cats, music notes, and dinosaurs (yeah, that was Tater's pick)! We never use icing to decorate our cookies, partly because that's reaaallly messy, partly because my only mixing bowl had cookie dough in it and so couldn't be used for anything else, and partly because, for whatever reason, I also have a ton of sprinkles!

Once they had used up all their dough, they got to work on a huge blanket fort while my sisters and I cleaned up the prep area for the next kind of cookie--filled sugar cookies!

Filled sugar cookies are easily my favorite Christmas cookie, and they are definitely a Christmas tradition in our family. I believe they are Scandinavian in origin; I've never heard of anyone else but my maternal grandmother doing them, and she always made them for us every Christmas along with rice mush and lefse for Christmas breakfast and dinner respectively, and those are both Scandinavian dishes. Our great-grandfather was a Danish immigrant and our great-grandmother was 3rd-generation Norwegian-American, so these are all recipes that Gigi (as the kids call her) grew up with as a little girl in South Dakota. Making them is a way to keep our heritage alive and pass it on to our children.

Filled sugar cookies are really very simple. You take a basic sugar cookie recipe, roll it out and use a biscuit cutter or glass or whatever to cut out circle shapes.

 Then you choose your filling. Traditionally, the filling is a combination of dates and raisins cooked on the stove, but my sisters (and husband) prefer jam or jelly, so that's what we used this year. I had also brought a couple of my homemade jams--apple pie, strawberry and cranberry-pear--so we voted and ended up using the strawberry for our fillings.

                                                                                                                                                      

Put a small teaspoonful in the middle of each circle, then carefully place another circle on top and smoosh the edges together to seal it.

Using a fork, press around the edge of each cookie to further seal the seam, then carefully poke a few holes in the top for steam to vent.

Because the dough warms up as it sits, it can become more unmanageable as you work, so you have to work quickly. This really makes it a cookie that is best made when there is more than one person helping, so that you can have one person cutting out the circles and placing them and another putting the filling in, etc. You can see why they're only made once or twice a year! But in my mind, that just makes them more special because we don't get them very often.

Here's a picture of them ready for the oven:

And here's a picture of them fresh out of the oven:

Not a lot of difference, I know, but it's really important not to overcook them--I can't stand crunchy sugar cookies!--so I pull them out as soon as they start to show the least bit of brown. Trust me, it's worth it! You end up with a nice twist on the traditional sugar cookie (which, in my opinion, is a little bit bland), and experimenting with different fillings can yield some really delicious cookies! Which one will you like best?