Thumbprint Cookies With Toasted Nuts and Whole Grains
- Total Time
- 1 hour
- Rating
- Comments
- Read comments
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Ingredients
- 1½cups pecans (6½ ounces)
- 1½cups dark rye flour (6½ ounces)
- ⅔cup granulated sugar (4½ ounces)
- ¼teaspoon fine sea salt
- 9tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into pieces and softened at room temperature
- Jam, marmalade or lemon curd, for filling
Preparation
- Step 1
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Spread pecans on a baking sheet and toast until golden, 8 to 10 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool completely. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper or nonstick baking mats.
- Step 2
In a food processor fitted with the metal blade, combine nuts, flour, sugar and salt and pulse until very finely ground, about 1 minute. Transfer to a large bowl and add butter by hand, a few pieces at a time, massaging butter into dry ingredients until it forms a shaggy dough. (If dough seems dry and is not coming together, work in water, 1 tablespoon at a time, until it does.)
- Step 3
Turn dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and bring it together with your hands. Have a bowl of warm water at hand nearby. Divide dough in half, dip your hands in water and roll each lump into a thin log, about 15 inches long and ½ inch across. Cut each log into ½-inch slices and roll each slice into a ball, dipping hands in water as needed to prevent dough from sticking. Transfer balls to prepared pans, spacing them about ½ inch apart.
- Step 4
Using your pinkie or the rounded end of a small wooden spoon, press into the top of each ball to make a well. As you press, use your other hand to hold the ball and shape it around the finger or handle into a small, flat-bottomed cup. The goal is to give the dough an even thickness throughout the cookie. Place pans in refrigerator and chill cookies for at least 30 minutes or up to 12 hours.
- Step 5
Bake cookies for 10 to 12 minutes, rotating baking sheets halfway through to ensure even browning, until cookies are golden around the edges.
- Step 6
Remove baking sheets from oven and let cookies cool completely. (The recipe can be made up to this point 3 days ahead and stored in an airtight container.) When ready to serve (up to 8 hours ahead of time), use a pastry bag or a small spoon to fill each well with jam, marmalade or preserves.
Private Notes
Comments
No need to make a log and cut it—just make little balls straight from the bowl. Made mine with toasted hazelnuts. Delicious.
Also made them again, using the same not/oat ingredients but this time filled with Nutella -- delicious addition to my holiday cookie platter.
Made these using oats ground in a Vitamix to make the flour and with toasted cashews. Filled with homemade concord grape jelly. A big hit!!
Made these exactly according to the ingredients. While the end product was delicious, there were many glaring, frustrating errors: 1) Splitting the dough in half and rolling out by hand yielded two logs that were over 20” long and over 1” thick — Nothing like the 15” x ½” described. 2) Cutting the extra thick logs into ½” slices yielded extremely small balls, making for cookies that were barely bite-sized. 3) The recipe calls for two cookie sheets, spacing the dough balls ½” apart. This instruction yielded one cookie sheet’s worth of dough balls. I ended up making slightly larger balls (¾” - ⅞” in diameter — about 60 balls), and spacing them evenly over the two cookie sheets (~1½” between balls). I made these into the little cups and chilled them for over an hour before baking at 350°F. 4) They took more like 18 minutes to get golden around the edges. 5) They came out of the oven completely flat, looking nothing like the photo. Like another commenter, I used a teaspoon to try to depress the center of the hot cookies, but this just made them super fragile. While delicious, with 9 Tbsp of butter in the recipe, my wife said they were too rich for her, and that she would never eat another. What a clinic in culinary frustration! REALLY appreciate the comments, especially the ideas to use much less butter, add an egg, more flour etc. This recipe would be vastly improved if all numbers were carefully reviewed & revised — and user improvements were added as notes!
I needed to add four tablespoons of water, one at a time, to bring the dough together. Loved the tip about using a round wooden spoon to form the indentation for the jam! I used a 1 T. cookie scoop to portion the dough and added jam before baking. Baking time for me was 18 minutes per tray, due to the added water and jam, I'm sure. I had to check the bottom of a cookie for light browning. Used Oregon hazelnuts and Marionberry jam. Yield was 48 cookies.
These are terrible! I made them per the recipe, with fresh-ground rye flour. They tasted good fresh out of the oven (if heavy), but once cool they tasted raw. The lovely flavor/fragrance of the toasted pecans got lost in all that cold butter.