Gluten-Free Linzer Hearts #Recipe by @LibbyKlein #Valentine's Day

Libby Klein  And now one of my very favorite Valentine's Day Recipes. Raspberry Linzer Hearts. Linzer cookies are a twist on the Linzer torte - a recipe from Linz Austria (Where I have been!) A cake made from almonds or hazelnuts, jam, and spices. Nutmeg is one of my favorite spices so it's my go-to with this recipe. While you can use other jams or even Nutella, I love the raspberry. Something about raspberry just says fancy dessert to me. And those red windows are beautiful. Especially for Valentine's Day. Let me know in the comments what flavor jam you would use.

Gluten-Free Linzer Hearts

Makes 10 large and 5 bonus minis

INGREDIENTS:

2 cups gluten-free flour blend with xanthan gum
1 cup almond meal
1 teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
¾ cup granulated white sugar
1 vanilla bean, scraped or 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 large egg
powdered sugar, for dusting
Raspberry jam, for filling

DIRECTIONS:

Combine the flour, almond meal, salt, nutmeg, and xanthan gum (if necessary) in a medium mixing bowl. Whisk until combined. Set aside.

Add the butter and sugar to the bowl of a stand mixer and beat on medium-high speed for 2 minutes until the mixture is light and fluffy. Add the vanilla, egg, and lemon zest and beat on low until combined.

Add the dry ingredients to the mixer and beat on low speed for 1 minute or so until combined, pausing to scrape down the sides of the bowl at any point if needed.

Roll the dough between two sheets of parchment until you have about a ¼ inch thick rectangleish shape. You’re cutting out hearts so it isn’t crucial to have the dough any a particular shape to begin with. But it is very important to have an even thickness. Use rolling pin guards if you have them.

Chill the dough and refrigerate at least one hour until it is stiff. You can chill it overnight if you want to.

Preheat the oven to 350°F Pull off the top sheet of parchment, and cut out your shapes. If you are making hearts like mine, you’ll need two sizes of cutters. A larger heart for the top and bottom, and a smaller heart to cut out the window of the tops. I save all my smaller window cutouts and make sandwich cookies.

Using a spatula, move all of the cutouts to a cookie sheet lined with fresh parchment paper.

Bake the cookies for 11-13 minutes, or until the cookies are lightly golden around the edges. Different sizes/shapes of cookies may require different amounts of cooking time, so I recommend keeping a close eye on the cookies during the final minutes or baking to be sure that they do not overcook.

Remove the baking sheet from the oven and let the cookies cool on the baking sheet (unless they are overcooked in which case you’ll want to carefully remove them to a wire rack to cool completely to room temperature.)

Fill the cookies with jam, then make them into sandwiches. Either sandwiching the large hearts with the cut-out window top, or the smaller hearts together like you see in the photo.

Then using a fine mesh strainer, dust the cookies with powdered sugar. I like to place them on a pretty plate and give them a final dusting of powdered sugar before serving. You can dust right on the jam center. The jam will absorb the powdered sugar and leave that beautiful red center. The large cutouts are so beautiful and festive, but my favorites are the minis. Just the perfect size for a little snack.

Gluten-free baker Poppy McAllister and her aunt Ginny are looking forward to a quiet, homey Christmas at their B&B in Cape May, but unfortunately, death isn’t taking a holiday this year . . .

Ever since Thanksgiving, Poppy and her pals have been left with an unsolved mystery of the romantic kind. But at least this mystery isn’t the kind that involves murder. That all changes when the body of a fish supplier is discovered in the kitchen of her ex’s restaurant—and he’s frozen, not fresh.

For once, it’s not Poppy who tripped over the corpse, yet she can’t escape being drawn in since the victim has a note taped to him reading Get Poppy. Figures—an engagement ring isn't labeled, but the dead guy is addressed to her. Now, while Aunt Ginny plans a tree-trimming party and pressures Poppy to decode a mysterious old diary, the amateur sleuth is asked to “unofficially” go undercover at the restaurant to help the police. Until then, the only crime Poppy had been dealing with was Figaro’s repeated thefts of bird ornaments from the tree; now it looks like it’s going to be a murder-y Christmas after all . . .

 

Libby Klein grew up in Cape May, NJ where she attended high school in the '80s. Her

classes revolved mostly around the Culinary sciences and Drama, with one brilliant semester in Poly-Sci that may have been an accident. She loves to drink coffee, bake gluten-free goodies, collect fluffy cats, and translate sarcasm for people who are too serious. She writes from her Northern Virginia office where she serves a very naughty black smoke Persian named Sir Figaro Newton. You can keep up with her shenanigans by signing up for her Mischief and Mayhem Newsletter on her website. www.LibbyKleinBooks.com/Newsletter/

Linzer Cookies

Around here, Linzer cookies are among our very favorite Christmas treats. For years I've used the same recipe, but it was never quite right. So this year I experimented and made up my own recipe.

There are a lot of variables, starting with the nuts. People make them with hazelnuts, almonds or pecans. For some reason, I always associated them with hazelnuts, so that's what I went with. If you can't find them or you prefer other nuts, I'm sure they would work equally well.

As I perused recipes, I was amazed by the variety of ingredients people add. Some of the recipes didn't contain nuts at all! Others contained cocoa, baking powder, nutmeg or cloves.  I decided to keep it simple. The big flavor comes from the nuts and the jam, so why clutter it up?

Like a lot of Christmas cookies, this is a dough that needs to be refrigerated before you use it. You can make it ahead of time if you like, then bake the cookies a day or two later.

These cookies do come out of the oven looking a little bit pale, but that's okay. As you can see from the pictures, you really don't see much of them anyway.

Krista's Linzer Cookies

Makes approximately 24 2-inch cookies

3/4 cup butter, room temperature
2/3 cup sugar
2 egg yolks
1 teaspoon lemon
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup ground hazelnuts (about 7/8 cup whole hazelnuts)


6 ounces seedless raspberry jam
3/4 cup or so powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 400. Roast whole hazelnuts for about 5-6 minutes until fragrant.
Reduce oven heat to 350. Grind the hazelnuts until fine.
Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.

Cream the butter with the sugar. Beat in the egg yolks. Add the lemon and vanilla and beat. Combine the flour, salt and cinnamon. Stir with a fork and beat into the dough. Add the nuts and beat. The dough will be quite stiff.

Refrigerate the dough until it's easy to handle, or overnight.

Roll out the dough and cut with a cookie cutter. Use a smaller cookie cutter to cut out the centers of half of the cookies. Make sure you have the same amount of solid cookies as you do cut-out cookies. (Wise bakers might make a couple extra cut-out cookies in case one or two break.) Bake 8-10 minutes, until very lightly golden on the edges.

Cool on a rack. Place all the cut-out cookies on a rack over a piece of the used parchment paper. Sift powdered sugar over them.

Place a generous dab or two of raspberry jam on the solid cookies but not all the way to the edge. Top with cut-out cookies.

Store in the refrigerator with a sheet of waxed paper separating layers.

You won't need this many hazelnuts, but I went ahead and roasted more for other dishes.

Cut a couple extra for top cookies. They're fragile!

Sunny can't believe Santa Paws sneaked by her last year, 

so she's staked out a claim under the tree where she can't miss him!

From our house to yours, we wish you a very Merry Christmas

and a New Year full of joy, good health, good food, and good friends!