Severed Finger Cookies!!

The October issue of Every Day with Rachael Ray magazine featured some really neat Halloween recipes.  For whatever reason, I could not resist the severed finger cookies.  They seemed simple enough, they sounded tasty, and they looked, well... pretty cool.  With Halloween right around the corner, these cookies are the perfect thing to bring to a Halloween party - for both adults and children. 

I was getting together with my girlfriends recently, and said I'd bring a dessert.  Since I wanted to make these cookies so bad, I determined that girls' night was the perfect occasion. 

Perfect?  Really?  Yeah, okay.  So a small group of 30-something women are probably not going to go crazy over a cookie clearly designed for a child or a Halloween party.  But I wasn't going to let that deter me.  (And as a last minute bonus... I did learn that my friend's 5 year old son was going to join us, so this dessert turned out to be thoughtful, and even a little genius.)

Here's the recipe...

Ingredients

·        1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature

·        1 cup confectioners sugar

·        1 egg

·        1 t pure vanilla extract

·        2 3/4 cups flour

·        1 t baking powder

·        1 t salt

·        1/2 cup sliced almonds

·        Raspberry jam

Method

·        In a large bowl, beat the butter until creamy.  Mix in the sugar, egg and vanilla, then mix in the flour, baking powder and salt.  Cover the dough with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

·        Preheat the oven to 325°.  Using your hands and working quickly, roll a heaping tablespoon of dough into a finger shape.  Place the fingers about 3 inches apart on an ungreased cookie sheet.  If the dough gets sticky and hard to work with, re-chill it in the refrigerator.

·        Stick a sliced almond on 1 end of each for the fingernails.  Use a table knife to make three crosswise knuckle marks in the middle of each cookie.  Bake until lightly golden, 20 to 25 minutes.  Transfer to a rack to cool.

·        Meanwhile, in a saucepan, cook the jam over low heat until it reaches a saucy consistency.  Once liquefied, remove from the heat pour into a small bowl; dip the "severed" end of each cookie into the sauce. 

Here's a photo of Rach's cookies (on the left), along with one of mine (duh, on the right).

A couple of comments... Clearly, the folks at Every Day with Rachael Ray have a better photographer than I do (me).  And I blame my iPhone.  My screen is all messed up, and it's hard to see if the pictures come out good or not.  (I gotta get that fixed.)  Aside from that, I'm pretty impressed with mine.  My fingers are definitely severed from a person who was probably a little more chubby and stocky, but they still look good.  My only complaint is that the cookies were a little dry - even though they were a little bigger than they should have been.  I baked them the full 25 minutes because they weren't getting lightly golden.  If you try these yourself, I would recommend making them smaller, and watching them carefully to avoid over cooking.  Fortunately, they are good dipping cookies, so all was not lost. 

As luck would have it, my girls' night got canceled because poor little Jack was sick, but all was not lost.  I managed to eat about half of the cookies myself before I brought the rest to my parents house (to get them away from me!!).  Watching my ten month old niece eat a severed finger was priceless.