Peanut Butter and Jelly Linzer Hearts
Valentine’s Day is this Sunday, and whether you’re of the cheesy holiday-loving persuasion or the my heart bleeds the darkest blood sort, I’ve got something for you: peanut butter and jelly linzer hearts! This grown-up twist on the classic pairing of PB&J is perfect for those of you who are kids at heart… and for those of you who would just rather eat some kid’s heart. Whatevs.
Okay, so the truth is that I was getting ready to move out of my apartment and realized I still had about 15 jars of jam in the refrigerator. I obviously wasn’t about to throw them out, but a dozen half-empty jars of jam doth not a fresh start make. And in my pantry, I had a couple of pounds of aging peanuts which I was not exactly inclined to bring with me. So I adjusted the recipe I used to make drei Augen last year and came up with these.
This variation on linzer hearts makes for a sweet gift for your sweetheart. While you’re at it, you might as well make a card that says something like “we go together like peanut butter and jelly” or something equally corny and horrible.
And if you don’t have someone to give these to, make them anyway, and eat them yourself. Just think of all the hearts you’ll be breaking… with your teeth. Thanks, I’m here all night!
Peanut Butter and Jelly Linzer Hearts
2½ c unsifted all-purpose flour
½ c peanuts, finely ground
¼ tsp salt
½ c creamy unsweetened peanut butter
1 c soy margarine, softened
2/3 cup granulated sugar
powdered sugar
jam of your choice
parchment paper
In a small mixing bowl, mix together flour, ground peanuts, and salt. In a large mixing bowl, cream together peanut butter, margarine and sugar. Add flour mixture and mix well. Divide dough into three balls. Place each ball of dough between two sheets of parchment paper and roll to 1/8″ thickness. Refrigerate 1-2 hours, until firm.
Preheat oven to 350°. Remove one sheet of dough from fridge, leaving the rest to chill. Using a heart-shaped cookie cutter, stamp out all the cookies you can.
With a smaller heart-shaped cookie cutter*, stamp out hearts in half of the cookies; these will be the tops. (Keep the small hearts, too — you can bake them and then dust them with powdered sugar or make mini heart-shaped sandwiches.)
Bake a single sheet at a time with cookies ~1″ apart on the second-to-top rack in your oven and bake for 6-7 minutes, or until tops have just turned golden. Be careful not to burn them! Continue with the rest of the sheets of dough until all the dough has been used up.
Cool cookies fully and dust the tops (the ones with cut-outs) with powdered sugar. In a small saucepan on low heat, bring 1 c jam to a boil for 2 minutes, stirring so it doesn’t burn. Remove from burner and cool slightly. Spread a thin layer of jam on a solid cookie. Place one of the powdered cookies on top, and press gently until jam fills the center. Take care not to press down hard; these cookies are fragile and will break with too much pressure.
Set cookies aside to cool. Best eaten fresh and chilled.
*I didn’t have a small heart-shaped cookie cutter, so I made one real quick. You can, too!
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These look delicious! Do you think that natural crunchy peanut butter would work well to replace the ground peanuts? Or would it be too sticky?
thanks!
It’d be too sticky. The nuts should just be ground to a meal; any longer and the oils will separate and you’ll have nut butter, which would make the dough really hard to work with.
If that’s all you’ve got, though, check out my recipe for peanut butter cookies and sandwich them together with some jelly in between!
Mmmm, now I wish I had both jam and peanut butter in my fridge. Thos sook amazing.
Fuck yeah, more hardcore in the posts!
This I can do!
Haha, great post! Those cookies look amazing.
YAY PB&J!!
Those are adorable! And you can never go wrong with pb&j!
Oh my word, these look great! I shall be making them tomorrow I think. Thank you x
Those cookies look like a ton of fun! What a great idea for a Valentines Day cookie!
Your blog is amazing.
Your photographs are beautiful and these veganized dishes all look great. I’m so glad I found this blog!
Literally just made these! Super yummy, peanut buttery and delicious and pretty.
You forgot to add when to add the 1/2 cup of peanut butter in the recipe so I was a little confused. I just creamed it into the earth balance sugar mixture. I hope that was right. I added a bit of water to the dough because it became a bit too crumbly and dry.
The cookies were super fragile and are a little crumbly to eat. It took some practice to cut them out and not break them! This is coming from an experienced vegan cook but an inexperienced vegan baker.
All in all this was a great recipe and I’m excited to try more of the dishes on your blog!
Oops, I totally did. Thanks for pointing that out! You did it exactly right.
Though adding water is a great quick fix, I might have just added a bit more peanut butter to moisten the batter instead. Since nut butters are often of different consistencies and varying oil contents, that probably would explain why your dough was too dry.
As these cookies are so rich — and need to be rolled so thin — they are indeed very delicate, as I noted in the recipe.
Thanks for the feedback, Stella, and I’m glad you liked them!