Little Red Hearts: 45-Min Recipe

Heart-shaped cookies are cutely romantic and are little bites of buttery, jammy yumminess. Bhavya Sharma creates jam-filled cookies via a not too complicated technique.

Ingredients

• 2 cups maida or all-purpose flour + extra for dusting
• ¼ tsp salt
• 1 cup butter, preferably unsalted

Ingredients, continued

• ¾ cup icing sugar + extra for decoration
• 2 tsp vanilla essence
• Parchment paper
• Wax paper

Ingredients, continued

• ½ cup seedless strawberry jam or a jam of your choice
• Heart-shaped cookie cutters (3-inch and 1½-inch)

Method

• In a bowl, combine the flour, salt.
  Keep aside.
• In another bowl, beat the butter and the icing sugar until very smooth.
  Gently beat in the vanilla.
  Very gently, beat in the flour mixture until you have a smooth dough.

Method, continued

• Preheat an oven to 300° F.
• Line two large cookie sheets with parchment paper.
  Keep aside.
• Between two large sheets of floured wax paper, on a flat surface, roll out all the dough into a very large 1/8-inch thick slab or disc.
  With a floured 3-inch heart-shaped cookie cutter, cut out the cookies.

Method, continued

• Cut out the centres of half of the cookies with the smaller floured 1½-inch heart-shaped cookie cutter.
  Slide the cut-out cookies to another large cookie sheet and refrigerate about 15 minutes, or until firm.
• Place the cookies on the 2 prepared parchment paper-lined baking sheets, 1 inch apart.
• Bake 13-15 minutes, or until edges are lightly golden.

Method, continued

• Cool on the parchment paper over wire racks.
• Spread 1 tsp jam on each of the cookies without the cut-out centres. 
  Place the cookies with cut-out centres on top to make a sandwich of the both, revealing a bright red heart-shaped centre.
• Dab jam and dust icing sugar on top for that extra touch; makes about 30.

Tips
You will be left with a bunch of smaller hearts, when you cut-out the larger cookies.
Bake those separately for 12-15 minutes and dip in icing or simply powder with sugar.
Use the icing recipe found here.
Else decorate with sprinkles, fondant or using frosting pens/icing tubes.