Hi! I am Gwen Schoen food writer for The Sacramento Bee and in the kitchen this week, we are making holiday cookies. Every week between Thanksgiving and Christmas we thought we would feature one of our favorite holiday cookies and today we are baking Rum field thumbprints and there are basic butter cookie but with a nice fluffy rum filling in the middle. So we are going to start with creating the basic butter dough and what we are going do is add 2/3 cup softened butter should be at room temperature and use stick butter rather than whipped butter or low fat butter, because other types have a lot of water attitude and that your recipe would not turn out right.
So we start with 2/3 cups softened butter and half a cup of sugar and eight of a teaspoon of nutmeg and then we are going to turn the mixer on and blend that really well. It should be very well blended. Then we are going to add two egg yolks and a teaspoon of vanilla and mix that again, mix that together really well and until that is well blended. Then we will add the flour. And this dough is going to look really yellow that is because of the egg yolks and also the nutmeg. Okay now we are going to add a cup of a half of flour and blend that up again. And here is the tip too, if you do not have a splash shield on your mixer you can throw it a little dish over the top and you turn it on and that will keep the flour from spilling all over your kitchen counter. Let us strain into nice buttery dough.
Now what are going to do is take the dough out of the bowl and wrap it in wax paper and chill it for about an hour that will make a little easier to handle. Okay in about an hour, we will be ready for the next step. Okay the dough is been chilling for an hour and now it turned nice and firmed and what we are going to do is roll it into one inch balls and then dip it in egg white and you need to whipped up the egg white just a little bit with the whisk. But all it does is breakdown the egg white a little bit so they are all not stock all together. So just whipped that up a little bit with your whisk and then roll the bowl of cookie dough in the egg white then into the walnuts and I like to use parchment paper of my cookie sheets for one thing I do not like to wash cookie sheets and so the parchment paper really helps to clean up step. Plus it makes the cookies little easier to handle ones they come out with the oven.
So we are going to continue doing this with all the dough and you should have about 40 cookies from this one recipe. And you can place them pretty close together on a cookie sheet because this type of dough does not spread out a lot as it bakes. You can place them about an inch an a half or two inches apart on the cookie sheet. After you finished rolling all of the cookies out, you need to make a little thumbprint in the top. That is actually easier to do if you use the back up of wooden spoon rather than my thumb. And what we are doing is making a little impression on the top of the cookies and after they baked you will have a little well there when you can fill about with the rum filling.
So once we have rolled all the cookies out, and rolled them into the walnuts and cut a little, press a little indent in the top then we can bake them for ten minutes at 375 degrees. Once the cookies come out of the oven, you can put them on a cooling rack and while they are cooling make your filling. The filling is very simple, it is just a quarter cup of softened butter mix with a cup of sifted powdered sugar, and make sure that you sip the sugar otherwise you have lumps in the fillings. And add a teaspoon of rum or if you would rather, you can substitute a quarter teaspoon of rum extract. And add one to two teaspoons of milk or just to fill it down enough so that you can handle it easily.
We have this little indents left in the cookies were we made a little thumb prints with the end of the spoon and we are going to take about a teaspoon of filling and put that in the middle of this little indents. And this will hard enough a little bit as it sits so you will be able to put this on a cookie tray and stock them up without crushing your pretty little toppings. If you want to add a little bit of food coloring and make it look a little more festive. You can tint it green or red. Then once you filled all of the cookies, add a little sprinkling of nutmeg. It will taste just like eggnog. And there you have one rum field thumbprint cookies. Very simple hope you enjoy them.
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