Jam-Jams

Since I haven’t been baking as much, I figured I’d have my friend Jennifer do a guest post. She recently made some Jam-Jams and had beautiful pictures, so I think you’ll appreciate this.

This is an old family recipe, which I'm pretty sure I got from this cookbook, although I'm sure my mom has a hand-written copy from my paternal grandmother somewhere. It's one of those old-fashioned recipes where they write "soda" for baking soda and don't actually give a precise measurement for the flour, a recipe just like your grandmother would make. I ended up adding closer to 4 cups of flour, but start with 2 and go from there. The directions to add enough until it pulls away from the side of the bowl do give an accurate indication of what needs to be happening; since you are going to be rolling the dough out, you don't want it to be too sticky. I used corn syrup, but if you were against that sort of thing I suppose molasses could be substituted. I used raspberry jam, but strawberry is also nice. Other flavors are less traditional, and I suppose you could fill it with anything if you wanted to (but then they wouldn't be called Jam-Jams). You don't want to overfill the cookies; mine were quite large and a teaspoon of jam was more than enough. It should just cover the cookie and not drip out the sides when you eat it.

1 cup butter or margarine
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
6 Tbsp. corn syrup
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. vanilla
flour, approximately 2-3 cups
jam, for insides

Cream margarine and sugar. Add corn syrup and eggs and beat to combine. Add vanilla and baking soda. Add flour until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl and is capable of being rolled out. Roll out the dough and cut into circles. Bake at 350 °F for 12-15 min. While warm, put together with jam.

YIELD: 3 ½ dozen 2-inch cookies (18 Jam-Jams)