Oh oh – can you say Scrumptiliumptious?  I’m starting to think the image of a pufferfish might be too dainty for me if I can’t stop baking and indulging in luscious treats warm from the oven. Perhaps I should paste a photo of a big, bloated multi chinned manatee in the kitchen?

For those of you not in the know, I signed up for the Twelve Weeks of Christmas Cookies blog hop where some fabulous food bloggers are posting positively scrumptiliumptious cookie recipes right up until mid December.  Luckily no one had to commit to posting in all 12 weeks or the fact that I don’t have the requisite will power to deny myself tasty treats when the aromas of said treats baking perfume the entire house would demand an entirely upsized wardrobe prior to the holiday season. You can tell I’m not trying to be the next Food Network Star – food writers don’t open their posts with big “Warning”, “Might be too luscious”, large ugly animal photos. But I feel it is only right to alert you to the fact that these cookies are addictive.

There’s no such word as scrumptiliumptious you say?  Well, first try this MAHVELOUS cookieand then tell me there’s no such word.

Short break for a history lesson. Once upon a time there was no internet for home users (gasp, horror, but t’is true). Surfing for recipes wasn’t an option.  Manufacturers of all sorts of food and beverages would make offers – send us a letter and we’ll send you a recipe book. As a munchkin, I liked to help out in the kitchen and I loved getting my own mail. Off these offers for little treasures would go.  I still have some, plus assorted cookware, tourist and other recipe pamphlets. That Seafood one you can see is even from a Boston bank. Been browsing the stash for recipes others may not be posting and found this one.  It’s a keeper.

This week’s recipe is brought to you by Pillsbury, Holiday Classics.

I made only 2 minor changes to the recipe.  I replaced the cherry pie filling with seedless red raspberry jam (I like jam cookies) and, as this sharing was with only other adults not wanting to do the pufferfish/manatee thing (the neighbor munchkins had rampant success in Halloween candy gathering) omitted the icing.  You can see from Pillsbury’s photo above, the icing does make them look just a tad more festive.

The jam was placed in a pan of boiling water and removed from the burner to warm and become more easily spreadable over the dough.  Modern mixer conveniences make creaming the butter, sugar and vanilla until light a simple process.

The resulting dough is a bit stiff and should hold its shape. I wet my hand to more easily press the dough into the pan – you can see my fingerprints, but that’s ok as it will be covered. I had considered making a half recipe, but had a few adults to share with and just went “whole pan”.  It would be very easy to halve this recipe and cook in a 9X9 pan.

I used an offset icing spatula to spread the jam – added a bit more after this photo but not so much that you’d get pockets that would drip on unsuspecting souls. Wet my hands again and pulled bits of dough to drop over the top, then tapped down a bit once I was done.

The kitchen was filled with the heady fragrance of raspberry plus cookie dough.  The cookies were screaming their presence before they were even out of the oven.

These are faster than jam thumbprints and the dough is moist with a wonderful texture.  Next time I might try half the pan jam and half lemon pie filling – two cookies from one baking effort. Recipients of this batch have let me know they’ll happily assist with the dispersal of future batches 🙂 .

I’d like to give a special call out to Barbara of Barbara Bakes, who, in addition to posting scrumptiliumptious recipes herself, lends a helpful hand to many of us in maneuvering the blog hop.  I’ve mentioned before that for security reasons, WordPress doesn’t allow the script/Javascript commands that allow these to work (and that’s ok with me). 

Special thanks to Krystal over at http://recipesofacheapskate.blogspot.com/ for highlighting this post on her blog. 🙂

This post is also participating in the linky parties noted below.