Here are some pix of the pimiento cheese cookies I was raving about yesterday; today I baked them.
After chilling the dough thoroughly (I let it chill overnight), remove it from the fridge and let it soften up a bit. Then roll it out pretty thin (bearing in mind that you will be eating two thicknesses of dough with each bite, so you want the dough pretty thin lest you get a mouthful of chewy cooked flour as you tuck in) and cut it into rounds. You could vary this technique of making tops and bottoms of cookies by making larger rounds, putting the jelly down the middle, and folding the dough over on itself, like a taco or a pierogi, but the tops-and-bottoms method is probably easier for the casual baker, and is the method advocated in the original Southern Living recipe. The cookies do not spread when baking, so you can place them pretty close together on the cookie sheet. Put as many rounds on the cookie sheet as you want to bake in a single batch.
Next, using a teaspoon, put a tiny amount of strawberry jam dead in the middle of each round. The jam will spread as the cookies are baked, and you don't want it leaking out the sides of the cookies, so just use a tiny bit for each one.
Roll and cut out the rounds for the cookie tops, and place one round on top of the strawberry-covered bottoms, pushing lightly around the edges as you put the tops on the cookies.
Crimp the edges to seal. I use the tines of a dinner fork to do this. Try to be sure when crimping that you are piercing both the top and bottom cookie layers, so that the two layers will adhere and make a nice little pocket for the jam.
Bake until golden. Let the cookies rest on the sheet for about 10 minutes to cool before removing them to drying racks to finish. This allows the cheese to reset and the jam to calm down, making it less likely that the cookies will break when transferred to the drying racks.
Let the cookies cool on drying racks until they are at room temp to the touch, and there is no visible sign of greasiness on the bottom of the cookies.
Absolutely delicious, the cookies are the perfect marriage of sweet and savory. Each bite yields butter, pimiento cheese, strawberry jam, and ground pecans. The perfect thing for a tailgate, a Super Bowl party, or any time when pigging out is the order of the day.
You can find the recipe here.
