One teaspoon of marmalade per cookie, 24 cookies, 12–15 minutes at 350°F. Those are the numbers for classic jam thumbprint cookies with marmalade in the well instead, adapted from Saveur's almond marmalade thumbprints. The dough is a buttery almond shortbread, and the peel in the filling adds a faint bitterness that raspberry jam never brings.
A thumbprint cookie is a ball of rich dough with a dent pressed in the middle and something sweet spooned into it. Jam is the usual choice. King Arthur Baking's version suggests icing, jam, soft caramel or melted chocolate for the same well. Saveur's recipe commits to marmalade and pairs it with Marcona almonds in the dough. The cookies it describes are salty-sweet and crumbly, with a hint of bitterness from the orange, which cuts the butter and sugar in the dough. Prefer jam? Use the same amount.
Marmalade thumbprint cookies recipe
Makes about 24 · Hands-on 25 minutes · Chilling 30 minutes · Baking 12–15 minutes, plus cooling
Ingredients
- 1¼ cups (150 g) all-purpose flour
- 1 cup (95 g) almond flour or finely ground blanched almonds
- ½ tsp kosher salt
- 8 tbsp (113 g) unsalted butter, softened
- ⅓ cup (65 g) granulated sugar
- 2 large egg yolks
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- ½ tsp almond extract (optional)
- ½ cup (120 ml) marmalade, such as our Mandarin Marmalade
Steps
Notes
- Make ahead: Saveur keeps the dough in the fridge for up to 7 days before baking.
- Storage: the baked cookies keep in an airtight container for up to 5 days, per Saveur.
- More orange: Saveur suggests a second small spoonful of marmalade on top once the cookies have baked.
- Stiff marmalade: warm it for a few seconds so it spoons neatly. BBC Good Food melts its jelly before filling for the same reason.
- Marcona almonds: to follow Saveur exactly, use 1 cup of raw, unsalted Marcona almonds ground fine in place of the almond flour. With salted almonds, Saveur halves the kosher salt.
Should you fill thumbprint cookies before or after baking?
Either works. Saveur and BBC Good Food spoon the filling into raw dough and bake it in. King Arthur bakes its cookies for 8 minutes, presses the thumbprint into the half-baked dough, bakes them 4–6 minutes more, and adds about ½ teaspoon of filling only after they've cooled.
Filling before baking cooks the marmalade down in the oven, so it sets firmer in the well. Filling afterward leaves it exactly as it came from the jar, and lets you fill a tray with two or three different marmalades at the last minute. If you want to try the King Arthur timing with this dough, bake the unfilled balls for 8 minutes, press the wells, finish baking, and fill once cool.
Choosing a marmalade for thumbprints
For baking, we point people toward the gentler jars. Mandarin Marmalade is the one we pair with shortbread thumbprints in our holiday marmalade guide, for its delicate sweetness and soft set. It's also our most aromatic jar. Meyer Lemon Marmalade is the other good choice. It's floral and softly acidic, and the fruit's mandarin ancestry shows up as a subtle mandarin finish.
Saveur goes the other way and calls for "a proper English marmalade." If you want the bitterness front and center, our Duncan Grapefruit, bold and lightly tannic, gets you there. Every variety is in the marmalade collection; the recipe takes any of them in the same amount.
Photo by David Fartek on Unsplash.
