Empire Cookies
Makes about 2 dozen sandwich cookies
Ingredients
- Dough:
- ½ cup + 2 Tbsp unsalted butter, room temperature
- ½ cup + 2 Tbsp icing sugar, sifted
- 1 hard-boiled large eggs yolk
- 1 large egg yolk
- ½ tsp vanilla extract
- 1 ¾ cups cake & pastry flour, sifted
- ¼ tsp salt
- Icing and Assembly:
- 1/3 cup raspberry jam
- 1 cup icing sugar, sifted
- 1-2 Tbsp warm water
- ¼ tsp almond or vanilla extract
- 6-8 glacée (candied) cherries, each chopped into 6 bits
Method
- Beat the butter and icing sugar together until smooth.
- Push the hard-boiled egg yolk through a sieve and stir the raw egg yolk and vanilla into it. Add this to the butter mixture and stir until blended.
- Add the flour and salt to the butter mixture and stir until blended. Shape the dough into a disc (it will be very soft), wrap in plastic and chill until firm, about 2 hours.
- Preheat the oven to 325 °F and line 2 baking trays with parchment paper.
- On a lightly floured work surface, gently knead the dough just to soften it slightly.
- Roll out the dough to about ¼-inch thick and cut out cookies using a 2-inch fluted cookie cutter, placing the cookies on the baking trays, leaving ½-inch between them.
- Bake the cookies for 10-12 minutes, until just lightly browned around the edges. Let the cookies cool completely on the baking trays before assembling.
- Stir the raspberry jam to soften and spread a little on a cookie bottom and sandwich a second cookie on top, pressing gently to secure. Repeat with the remaining cookies.
- For the icing, stir the whisk the icing sugar with 1 Tbsp of water and the almond or vanilla extract, add the remaining water if needed, until it is a thin icing consistency. Set aside.
- Spread a thin layer of icing on top of each cookie, top with a piece of glacée cherry and set on a rack to dry. Let the cookies dry for about 3 hours before storing in an airtight container.
- The cookies will keep, stored in an airtight container, for up to 3 days.