I don’t want to sound overconfident, but these Linzer cookies are simply the best. I have this recipe from my grandmother. She used to bake them every year and they have always been my favourite type of Christmas cookies.
Ingredients (for around 70 pcs)
Dough:
- 630 g all-purpose flour (“hladká” in Czech shops)
- 420 g softened butter
- 210 g powder sugar
- 3 egg yolks
- 1 pack vanilla sugar (approximately 12 g)
- lemon zest, I did not have any so I used juice from 1/2 of small lemon and it worked well (be careful not to add too much liquid)
Filling:
- It is very important to have a good jam. It should ideally have a smooth, jelly-like texture, without any pieces of fruit. Otherwise, the lumps could cause that the cookie dough will start breaking during assembling.
- You can use any jam, or even completely different type of filling (e.g. Nutella). In my view, sharpness of red current jam balances the buttery taste of Linzer cookies the best.
- Also, if you are preparing the cookies in advance (recommended so that they have time to soften), the jam should not be too liquid. The cookies might soak up liquid too much and become too soft.
Glaze (optional):
- Ready-made chocolate glaze
- Decorations like chocolate sprinkles etc.
Directions
Preheat oven to 170ºC (338ºF). You should have at least two baking trays, so that you can place the dough on one while the other one is already in the oven. No need to butter or place baking paper on it, the dough is buttery enough. You will also need cookie cutters and dough roller.
Make the dough
On a big (ideally wooden) desk, place the flour, add sugar and vanilla sugar. Create one big pile. Start mixing in the butter with your hands. Add egg yolks in the middle and lemon juice, mix everything together with your hands. Mixing everything with your hands needs quite some time and energy, but keep going until everything is perfectly blended together into a compact, quite solid, dough.
Wrap the dough with plastic foil and store in a fridge at least for one hour.
Cut out the cookies
Take the dough out of the fridge. Wait a while until the dough gets a bit warmer and softer. Cut off a piece, place it on a large work surface and roll a disc of dough. I prefer as thin pieces as possible. But a bit thicker pieces are easier to bake (not so prone to burning). When the dough is too sticky and difficult for rolling, place flour on the work surface (below the dough) as well as on the dough roller. Cut out cookies and place them on baking tray.
Bake the cookies
Once you have one tray full of cut-out cookies, place it in the oven. In the meantime continue with cutting out more cookies and placing them on the second tray etc. Bake for about 8 – 10 mins. Be carefull! At the end of the baking time, the cookies can get brown really quickly. Ideally, they should stay quite pale.
Assemble and decorate the cookies
Take two cookies of a same shape. Turn one cookie flat side up, place some jam into the center and spread it slightly with a knife. Top with the other cookie.
You can decorate the top with chocolate, use some chocolate sprinkles, sift sugar over the top or just leave the cookies as they are without any topping.
Storing
It is the best to bake the cookies at least several days in advance so that they have time to soak up some liquid from the jam and become nicely soft and delicious. But they should be very nice already one day after assembling.
Store them in cool and dry place (cellar should be ideal) in closed plastic or paper box.
BakinginPrague 
Hi BakinginPrague! I have recently made your cookies and they were quite yummy. I filled some with raspberry preserves, and the rest with red currant preserves.
I’d like to mention something for the sake of any of my fellow American readers of this post, who might wish to make your recipe. It’s about vanilla sugar. This is an ingredient that I was not very familiar with before marrying my Czech hubby, originally from Prague. In my family, we only ever used liquid vanilla extracts or on rare occasions, vanilla beans. Any cookies or confections my mother made that required confectioner’s sugar on them, did not include vanilla sugar. Obviously, some of my Czech mother-in-law’s cookies did.
In my area of New Jersey in the US, I happen to have two choices for vanilla sugar. A powdery product called Dr. Oetker vanilla sugar (in 9 g packs), and a more granular 30 g product I found at a Polish foods shop. After some research, my Czech husband told me that the Czech vanilla sugar is usually powdery, like Dr. Oetker vanilla sugar, and that 9 grams of Czech vanilla sugar is pretty much the same as 9 g of Dr. Oetker. Given this, I do not use the Polish product I bought for authentic Czech recipes. It is my assumption, that your posted “12 grams” would equal 12 grams of the Dr. Oetker vanilla sugar I buy. That would mean 1 1/3 packs, since the packs I buy are 9 g packs.
On the 9 gram pack of the Dr. Oetker vanilla sugar I buy, it states that one pack (pouch) is the equivalent to 1 to 2 tsp of liquid vanilla extract, the variance likely depending on the brand of extract. Given this, if a person in the USA wanted to make your full recipe with liquid vanilla extract instead of vanilla sugar, I would likely suggest using 2 to max 3 tsp of most American vanilla extracts (like a store brand or McCormick). I believe that vanilla sugar may not be available in some grocery stores in the USA, and that most people would not be quick to make it homemade.
LikeLike
Hi updownflight! Thank you for trying the recipe and I am really happy you like the result. For me, these have always been the ultimate Christmas cookies. Also, thank you so much for making me (and others) aware of this point re vanilla sugar and available solutions. Next time I am using it in my recipe I am sharing here, I’ll try to remember!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Veselé Vánoce!
LikeLiked by 1 person