Keep your hands busy in the kitchen this holiday season with Rachel Sundet’s thumbprint cookies recipe. For the dough, the pastry pro recommends coconut sugar for its earthiness, though you can substitute white or brown, depending on what’s in your pantry stores. Once they’re sugar-dipped and dented, the cookies are chilled before they’re ready for the quince paste filling (or jam, or preserve) and a turn in the oven. Read on for a recipe you’ll want to keep on-hand.
Quince Thumbprint Cookie
Details
Yields: 3 dozen
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter, at room temperature
- 3/4 cup coconut sugar
- 1 egg
- seeds from half a vanilla bean or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 3/4 cup quince paste
Directions
- With an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar until pale and fluffy (about 5 minutes). Beat in the egg and vanilla. In a separate bowl, combine the dry ingredients and fold them into the dough. Mix just enough to combine.
- Roll the dough into rounded teaspoons. Dip the dough balls into raw sugar and then make a deep indentation, using your thumb or finger.
- Chill the dough balls for at least 20 minutes in the fridge or freezer. They will hold in the freezer for several weeks.
- Once chilled, fill the indentation with quince paste (roughly a teaspoon of quince paste per cookie). Bake the cookies at 350ºF for roughly 12-14 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through the bake.
