These were thumbprint cookies with INNA jam.
I am a jam lover. My usual jam is
American Spoon's. My recent love was
Wilkin and Sons. My latest jam love affair is INNA jam. I learned INNA jam from a brilliant post on Serious Eats, titled as The Best Jams and Preserves in the USA. INNA jam was one of the "best." All jam brands on the post were unknown for me and sounded lovely, so it was tough to pick one. How did I choose it? Serious Eats team said INNA jam's Blenheim Apricot was their favorite of all the apricot jams they tried, which was "fantastically tangy and concentrated, capturing the platonic ideal of apricot," so they have finished their jam "straight up spoon-to-mouth." Wow, it might be a little bit exaggerated, or the team have a real sweet tooth? Apricot jam is one of my favorite flavors and I wanted to find out if it was true by myself. Just mail-ordering one jar with the California company didn't make sense, right? So, I added other flavors in my shopping cart - Polka raspberry, Seascape strawberry, and Fantasia nectarine.
Shipping was fast! The jars were so adorable. Look at the bright fruit color and a lot of fruit fresh inside of each jar! Absolutely beautiful.
Actually I had a plan to use those jam before ordering them. It was called the thumbprint cookie project. I wanted to create thumbprint cookies with excellent jam that would become my friend's birthday gift and J's snack. I have never made thumbprint cookies, but fruity jam loaded buttery cookies sounded lovely for a tea time in sprint afternoon rather than heavy chocolate and/or nuts cookies. I partially adapted a
recipe of Raspberry Almond Thumbprint Cookies that I found on a cute blog, sally's baking addiction, which originally from
Better Homes and Gardens. I reduced some sugar, skipped almond extract and added lemon zest from a medium lemon. I also added two egg yolks, so my dough was like French Sablés cookies more than British traditional shortbread. I chilled the dough overnight. When I shaped the cookies, I didn't use thumb. I think thumbprint would be too big! I used a bottom of a chopstick and my pointer finger. Because the dough was completely chilled, it was easy to shape into a little bowl to fill with a little jam.
I baked the cookies until their bottoms got slightly brown. Do Not bake too much is a rule of Sablés. Here are four batches of the cookies I created!
These cookies were fantastic! Very tender, melt-in-mouth, buttery lemony cookies with a bright fruity pocket! I believe the high quality of the jam made a significant difference here. All of the four flavors were so wonderful that I felt I would be able to eat them simply by a spoon. Seriously. I was glad to bake these cookies before I do so.
