Kolacky Cookies

Kolacky Cookies

For Christmas, Jonah and I went to Salem (where his Grandma Patty lives) with his parents. It was my first real Christmas and Jonah’s family made it so wonderful. They pulled out all the stops, and even though we’re adults we still left cookies and milk for Santa and carrots for his reindeer. And it was all worth it because he left us a thank you note!

Anyway, the day before Christmas was full of baking: I made cookies (the chocolate peppermint cookies I made with Carmelle), Susan (Jonah’s mom) made pies, and she also made these wonderful cookies called Kolacky cookies. Pronounced ko-lach-key, these are Slovak cookies from Randy’s (Jonah’s dad) aunt. They’re yeast cookies, so they rise and get kind of flaky like bread, and are filled in the center with jam.

Kolacky Cookies

Ingredients

3 cups flour
2 sticks butter, room temperature
1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 package active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water
1 cup sour cream
1 egg
Jam (we used the homemade raspberry jam that Jonah and I had made Susan for Christmas)
Powdered sugar

Instructions

Mix butter with flour, sugar, and salt using a mixer (or pastry blender). In a small bowl, dissolve the yeast in the water. Add the yeast mixture, sour cream, and egg to the flour mixture, combine well. If the dough is too dry , add a little bit of milk. If it’s too wet, add a little bit of flour. Ball the dough up, wrap it in buttered or greased wax paper, and refrigerate for at least 3 hours or overnight.

After removing the dough from the fridge, roll it out on a floured surface until thin. Fold it in thirds and re-roll it. Then do that again (the “fold it in thirds and re-roll it” part). The last time you roll it out, you want to get it to be about 1/4-inch thick. Now cut it with cookie cutters into round/square/diamond shapes, just nothing too crazy. Imprint the cookies with your thumb and fill the imprint with about 1/2 – 1 teaspoon of jam. Now let them rise for 1 hour. (During this time you can preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Back them for 15 minutes. After removing from the oven, sprinkle with powdered sugar.

These cookies were a nice change from a lot of the goodies we’d been eating because they weren’t so sugary sweet. But I liked the touch of fruitiness from the jam and that the cookies were a little more scone or bread-like. And they were a big hit with the family, as you can see from the photo below.

Kolacky Cookies