When I was a girl, my Mom made these clever cookies (more of a tart, really) out of pie dough and jam. To this day I can't remember if she had leftover scraps from a pie, or made the dough expressly for these tarts. All I remember is how pretty they were, and how good they tasted.
Recently I had pie dough scraps left over from making two apple pies for my father-in-law's 90th birthday. If ever there was a chance to make these tarts, this was it!
I had no recipe, but I was undeterred.
First I cut out circles of dough. Then I cut out another set of circles, and then cut a hole in the center of those circles. This part did not go so well, because I didn't have the proper size of cutter-- a doughnut hole size would have been nice. What I ended up doing was a haphazard combination of cutting and hand-forming a little "ring" of dough, placing each ring on top of a circle, so as to create a little holder for the jam preserves. It looked like this after they were filled:
I used rasberry jam, but you could use any of your favorite fruit preserves or I suppose even bits of chocolate.
Then I baked the tarts. I started them at 350 degrees for ten minutes, but saw that they were not browning, so I turned up the heat to 425 and they browned nicely with the jam bubbling hot in another ten minutes. Next time I would try it at 450 for ten minutes or so, as if I were blind baking a pie crust.
Warning! These come out of the oven blisteringly hot because of the jam, so fight the urge to bite one right away--let it cool! Yes, the aroma will tantalize you.
These are so good, I think it might be worth it to make a batch of dough just for these tarts. You can try several jams at once-- rasberry, strawberry, apricot, orange marmelade-- and enjoy their many jeweled colors while they last-- which won't be long!
Pretty! I might try this and sprinkle some turbinado sugar on the edges. It's my new "thing" :)
Posted by: Amy | March 29, 2008 at 05:10 PM