Twelve Weeks of Christmas Cookies—Ischeler Tortelettes

Week 4 of the Twelve Weeks of Christmas Cookies.  It’s going to be here before you know it.  Do YOU know what goodies will be on your Christmas baking list?  Check out all the ideas at the links on the bottom of this post!

(You can also see my latest post for FFWD below this one.)

Last week while at the check out at a grocery store, I noticed some of the new holiday issues of some of my favorite magazines.  One that caught my eye was the Woman’s Day Special, Best Ideas for Christmas.  It caught my eye because there are nine great looking cookies on the front cover that were selected cookies for the magazine through the last nine decades.  I’ve had fun looking through the magazine and reading about cookies past.

For this week’s cookie, I actually chose to make one of the nine cookies featured in Woman’s Day, December 1961 issue.  I feel a little bad that for the second week in the row, I have chosen to make a cookie with such a difficult name.  Last week I made Pfeffernussen Cookies and now I am sharing with you Ischeler Tortelettes.  Never heard of them?  Me, either.  But I liked the look of the cookies and the fact that they were a delicate, crispy almond shortbread, sandwiched with apricot preserves and glaze with chocolate on top.  They sounded good to me!  And they look nice.  I do think they would make a nice addition to your Christmas cookie tray or even a cookie swap.

The cookies are simple to make.  First the dough is made and then left to sit in the refrigerator overnight.  Then the dough is rolled out and cut into 1 1/2 inch circles.  The recipe says to bake the cookies for eight minutes, but mine took 15!  Were ovens different back in the 60’s? ;)

After all the little round cookies have baked and cooled, a small amount of apricot preserves  it set on top of half the cookies and a top cookie is placed on the preserves.  Then each top cookie is glazed with chocolate and set with a few sliced almonds.  I do have one thing I thought was a little funny, I guess.  This recipe from 1961 says to melt the chocolate in the microwave.  Did they HAVE microwaves back then?  I know, the recipe was probably updated to make it more simple for today’s woman. ;)

In doing a small amount of searching on the internet, Ischler Cookies are a Dutch cookie and there are a number of recipes for them which are all similar, but I didn’t see any that were exactly the same.  These have ground almonds in them, but I didn’t see any of the other recipes I looked at with ground almonds.  I have a bag of almond meal, so I also wanted to use some of it up.  I also thought these cookies would be great with raspberry jam as I love raspberry and chocolate together, but I didn’t have any to try it.

Here's a link to the recipe from the Woman’s Day website which I followed exactly, except that my cookies took about 15 minutes to bake and the recipe suggests just eight minutes.  Start checking them after eight minutes and bake them until they are starting to turn golden.

Week four, let’s see, that means that Christmas is just over eight weeks away.  Better get your bake on. ;)