Jelly-Topped Sugar Cookies

The week of the first proper cold snap, the temperature dropping into the single digits Tuesday night and not coming above twenty for the rest of the week. The woodstove went onto a steady twenty-four-hour rhythm — fed at six, ten, two, six, ten, with the small hours covered by the long-burning rounds that I lay across the coals at bedtime and that hold the house through dawn. This is the rhythm I learned from my father, who learned it from his father, who built the sugarhouse and the stove pad with his own hands a hundred years ago, and the rhythm is older than the house and older than the family memory and is the rhythm of every wood-heated dwelling in Vermont since the first one was built. There is no improvement on it. There is only the doing of it.

Made gingerbread Wednesday — the molasses cookies that Helen made every December, the recipe in her handwriting on a card that has the words "do not skimp on the molasses" underlined twice. I did not skimp. The dough is dark and sticky and difficult to roll, which is part of why people give up on real gingerbread and switch to easier dough, but the difficulty is the point — the molasses is what gives the cookies their depth, their bite, their unmistakable character, the thing that distinguishes a gingerbread cookie from a sugar cookie with cinnamon. I rolled the dough between sheets of waxed paper, cut the shapes with the same tin cutters Helen used (a star, a tree, a small Vermont in the shape of the state, which her aunt brought back from a tin shop in Stowe in 1972), and baked them on the lower rack at three-twenty-five for nine minutes, taking them out while the centers were still slightly soft. They will firm up as they cool. That is the trick — the underbake, the cool, the patience.

The cookies went into the tin Wednesday night and I ate two with milk and put the rest away for Christmas, and Frost watched me do it with the particular attention a dog gives to anything sweet that is being put out of his reach. He does not get gingerbread. He gets nothing chocolate, nothing raisin, nothing onion, nothing grape, nothing in the long list of things that a border collie cannot eat and that I have memorized over the cumulative twenty-eight years of border collies that have lived in this house. He gets bits of turkey skin and the occasional crust of brown bread and the bowl I rinse out from breakfast oatmeal, which he licks clean with the focus of a man at a job he loves.

The veterans' coffee at the Hinesburg American Legion Hall was Friday morning and I went, the way I go every other Friday, the way I have gone for about six years now, since Phil Donahue (no relation, named after the talk show host by parents who clearly enjoyed a joke) called me after Helen died and said, Walt, come down for coffee on Friday, and I went the next Friday and have kept going. The room is a half-dozen of us most weeks, all roughly my age, all having served in roughly the same era, and we do not talk about the service, ever, because that is the rule. We talk about ice fishing and grandchildren and the price of fuel oil and the news from town. The coffee is bad. The conversation is good. The room is heated by a forced-air furnace that I find inferior in every respect to a woodstove and that I have never mentioned, because Phil paid for the furnace replacement out of his own pocket and is proud of it.

Helen’s gingerbread goes into the tin and stays there until Christmas — that is the rule, and I keep it — but the tin cutter tradition is too good to observe only once a season. These jelly-topped sugar cookies use the same star and the same deliberate rolling and the same lesson about patience that the gingerbread teaches: you take them out before they look done, you let them cool on the rack, and you trust the process that generations of cold-weather bakers figured out long before you arrived. The jelly centers are what Frost watches most closely, which tells me they are worth making.

Prep Time: 25 min | Cook Time: 12 min | Total Time: 37 min | Servings: 36 cookies

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/3 cup fruit jelly or jam (strawberry, raspberry, or apricot)
Powdered sugar for dusting (optional)

Instructions

Make the dough. Beat softened butter and granulated sugar together in a large bowl until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the egg and vanilla extract and mix until fully combined.
Add dry ingredients. Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt in a separate bowl, then add to the butter mixture in two additions, stirring until a soft dough forms. Do not overmix.
Chill. Divide the dough in half, flatten each portion into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour or up to overnight. Cold dough rolls cleanly and holds its shape.
Preheat and prepare. Heat oven to 350°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
Roll and cut. Working with one disk at a time on a lightly floured surface (or between sheets of waxed paper), roll dough to 1/8-inch thickness. Cut into shapes with tin cutters. Transfer to prepared baking sheets, spacing 1 inch apart.
Add jelly centers. Using your thumb or the back of a small measuring spoon, press a shallow well into the center of each cookie. Spoon a scant 1/4 teaspoon of jelly into each well — do not overfill or it will run over the edges.
Bake. Bake 10–12 minutes, until the edges are just barely golden and the centers still look slightly underdone. They will firm up on the pan. Do not wait for them to look finished in the oven.
Cool. Let cookies rest on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely. Dust lightly with powdered sugar once cooled, if desired.

Nutrition (per serving)

Jelly-Topped Sugar Cookies — Cut-Out Cookies Worth the Patience