Vegan Linzer Cookie (This Vintage Holiday Baking Moment Is Brought to You by My Mother's Recipe Box)

Well, we finally had snow. A dusting. But just enough of a dusting to ignite a bit of that holiday thing everyone else on god's green planet seems to have. I headed back to my favorite home store for Christmas lights, deciding this year, it's LED lights outside for us. (Especially since the makers of these lights got smart and realized NEON white is not really appealing to the average Christmas light home decorator, and that the warmer glow is much preferable.) Purchasing these new LEDs nearly required me to take out a small loan. I let out a gasp when I signed my receipt, but we'll still be able to put food on the table. Besides, as I explained to Dr. Thyme (after telling him of our new "holiday decoration investment")--they'll last 25,000 hours and use eighty percent less power! We'll just need to be sure to put in our will who is to inherit them when we're gone. Besides, I refuse to "celebrate" and be all festive while our local utility company is "laughing all the way. . . to the bank". I simply cannot live in the dark during the bleakest time of the year.

It's the little things.

Like Christmas lights.

And these amazing cookies.

The linzer cookie has a ton of iterations. You have your linzer pie, your linzer squares, your linzer layer bars. Linzer this and linzer that. You get my point. But once, long, long ago, I somehow came to own a linzer cookie recipe for which the origin of has completely left me. The black and white copied text has been in my cookie recipe collection for years. Years. And it's usually the first cookie I make for Christmas. (And eat myself!) The page is all stained and has a tear in one corner. There are illustrations for shaping, dusting them with powdered sugar and for filling with raspberry jam that has been lightly flavored with lemon zest, then ever-so-delicately placing in each cookie three slivered almonds. The cookie is to me the epitome of Christmas: a powdered sugar, jammy-filled, almond-y bite of yum. The recipe makes just enough cookies for two trays--twelve cookies per tray--fourteen if you roll the balls just to a bit over an inch in diameter. For some reason I have no patience for more than two trays of any one cookie recipe during any single baking session. I must move on and begin another cookie pronto. 

I find something very soothing about making this cookie. It's a multi-step, very hands-on sort of cookie. But most of my favorite Christmas cookies all require a small cardio blitz and terrific hand/eye coordination.  

The snow.

Then something else happened. I found myself flipping through my mother's recipe box for cookies she may have made during Christmas. I do this every year. Always there was the cut outs dusted in either red or green sugar or those addictive multi-colored dots. I loved her sugar cookies. I recall them being on the kitchen counter most often, along with her Mexican Wedding Cake cookies.

As I was shuffling through the index cards (the holiday recipes all stamped with a red Happy Santa Face)--I stopped cold when my eye wandered over the top of one card where she had written, "Chickie". What?! 

Chickie would be my dear Aunt Chickie. The essence of class. She was my grandmother's sister-in-law. A widow, too. She influenced me greatly. And by greatly I mean she had this sense of properness and manner that has been unmatched by anyone else I've encountered in my life. She grew violets. Her apartment was covered in them. She always smelled like roses. She had the most beautiful white hair I had ever seen. And her skin was radiant. She almost glowed. She was always dressed to the nines. Always. She schooled me on how to care for my skin. Why I remember this one tidbit is still a mystery to me. But I can see my young self (seven, eight or nine?) sitting on her velvet chair in her living room and her explaining to me how very important it was for ladies to take care of their skin. She then proceeds to bring out her rose scented jar of cream and shows me how to keep my elbows, knees and hands wrinkle-free. 

My grandmother (on the right) and Aunt Chick in pink.

Then that got me sifting through some other old photos and clippings. Mom was a scrapbooker before scrapbooking went mainstream. I so am NOT a scrapbooker. That gene must have skipped me. Anyway. . .

The Blizzard of '67. I was. . . well, I was young. This is from my hometown newspaper, The Gary Post-Tribune. (Now the cat's out of the bag!) I was born and raised in Gary, Indiana, 'kay? About as Yankee as you can get. Steel mill town. Made famous in Music Man. Home of Micheal Jackson and the Jackson Five. A really rough place. But by all accounts has more to do with my sass than any other place I've lived. Boy they don't make typed headlines like that anymore.

Mom and grandma in Hawaii. With. . .  "pool boy?" (You see, after grandma was widowed at a much-too-young age--she took it upon herself to travel the country and world! And I do mean the world! I still have her passports.) This was the trip in which my mother shared with us that Harry Belafonte had attempted to offer my mom a ride back to her hotel after spotting her on the streets of Hawaii. She never, ever got tired of telling us this story. She thought he was one of the best looking men of her time. You can see how she may have turned a few heads. 

Okay, a shot of mom and grandma--not abroad, but in Florida. I love the dress my grandmother's sporting! And my mom. . . so young and vibrant!

Okay. I think grandma may have had regrets about going on a hike in her dress, lugging that camera around her neck and all. Okay, back to cookie time.

Action shot: Decorating Aunt Chickie's sugar cookies.

Note: Uh. Aunt Chickie's cookies were. . . different. Crisp. Very crisp. And buttery. But in a vegan way. Which may mean I need to cut back a bit on the margerine I used and up the flour. **UPDATE 12/10/2011: We have deemed these cookies outrageously delish after fully cooled! They are KEEPERS! If you scroll back up to my mom's hand-written recipe, sub the egg using Ener-G Egg Replacer (1 1/2 teaspoons mixed with 2 tablespoons water)--follow the rest of her directions as is. Preheat oven to 375 and bake for 7-8 minutes. Be sure to roll the dough fairly thin. They are very edible and would make a great gift. I can't stop eating them. That's four hours of baking right there! (Not counting the dough resting over night in the fridge.)

Well. Here's the best Christmas cookie ever in my opinion: for the almond lover in all of us!

Vegan Linzer Cookies

*Makes about two dozen cookies, give or take

*Bake these on a "flat "cookie sheet--no parchment paper is needed. If you don't have a cookie sheet without a rim, just flip your regular cookie baking sheet over. The heat will bake the cookies more evenly.

1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1/2 cup ground almonds or almond flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

3/4 cup unsalted vegetable margerine

3/4 cup Florida Crystals sugar

3 teaspoons Ener-G Egg Replacer mixed with 2 tablespoon water

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 teaspoon almond extract

Filling:

1/3 cup raspberry jam

zest of half a lemon

*powdered sugar for dusting

**sliced almonds for the top

Preheat oven to 300. Sift the flours, baking powder, salt and cinnamon together in a bowl. In a mixing bowl, add the margerine and sugar. Mix well until creamy. Add the egg replacer to this and mix well. Next, add the extracts. Slowly add about a third of the dry mixture to the sugar mixture. Only mix a wee bit--just until the first addition of flour is incorporated. A bit of flour clump is okay. Proceed to add the remainder of the flour mixture to the bowl, only slightly mixing until all the flour has been incorporated. Remove the dough from the bowl and shape into a ball. Wrap tightly with plastic wrap and place in the fridge for at least thirty minutes to firm it up. (Overnight is better.) Shape the dough into 1 1/2" balls and place evenly spaced out on cookie sheet. About twelve cookies per sheet. Poke a hole with the end of a spoon handle or your finger in the middle of the cookies. Bake for 22-25 minutes, just until the bottoms of the cookies begin to turn a bit golden. Meanwhile, make your raspberry filling. Remove the cookies from oven and allow to cool completely on the cookie tray. After the cookies have cooled, place on parchment paper or any other flat surface and dust the cookies with powdered sugar. Drop about a half teaspoon of raspberry jam into the center of each cookie and then place three sliced almonds atop each center. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for about a week. Be careful with layering the cookies on top of each other--the jammy-y part will be messy otherwise.