Each December I spend a day with my grandma making Christmas cookies, it’s one of the best parts of the Christmas season! This weekend we made chocolate crinkle cookies, which I wrote an article about a while ago, and some delicious Bulgarian maslenki cookies! 

Maslenki are a traditional Bulgarian Christmas cookie, I’m not Bulgarian but I thought that it would be fun to try a cookie recipe from somewhere else in the world! I started by heating my oven to 375°. I then melted the butter and put it in the freezer to cool down while I put the eggs and sugar into my kitchen aid mixer and mixed on high for about five minutes. You should use the wire whip attachment to mix the eggs and sugar. The egg and sugar mixture should be light and foamy after five minutes. I then took the butter out of the freezer and added it along with the vanilla to the egg and sugar mixture. The mixer should be mixing constantly on low while the butter and vanilla are added. Once these were blended together, I mixed the flour and baking powder in a separate bowl. After that, I slowly added the flour mixture to the liquid ingredients until they were fully blended. You should use the flat paddle attachment once you add the flour, as this is the best for a cookie dough.

Once the dough was ready, I lightly dusted my pastry mat and rolling pin with flour. I broke the dough into four pieces and rolled the first one to be about ⅛ thick. You can use any shape cookie cutter you want, just make sure that you will be able to cut out the center of them for the top layer of the cookie. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and bake the cookies for eight minutes, they should be lightly browned around the edges. Make sure to let the cookies cool for a few minutes before you spread on the jelly. Once the cookies cool, you can spread on a thin layer of any jelly flavor that you would like on the cookie without the hole, I chose to use raspberry jelly because it’s my favorite! Lastly, stack the matching cookie with the hole on top and dust with powdered sugar! These cookies can be made ahead of time and frozen, which is ideal for Christmas!

RECIPE:

3 eggs

¾ cup sugar

1 cup butter

2 teaspoons vanilla

4 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder