Welcome Spring!

The past five months have been brutally cold, keeping us holed up indoors. But, tomorrow would change everything. It's the first day of Spring! Here on, we'd be able to step out and smell the fresh air and the pretty flowers and wake up to the cheerful sounds of the birds! At last we could shed the winter coats and the thermals and the hats and the mittens. Ah, life will be sweet! The girls suggested that we make flower-shaped cookies to celebrate. So we spent the evening baking and even decided we wouldn't touch a single cookie till the next day! (Little girl SS was an exception.....she was not going to give up a fresh cookie for all this spring nonsense !) That night we went to bed wishing it would be morning soon! (Not something we'd wish on a normal weekday!).

The next morning I'm woken up by Big Girl RM's loud shriek. I rushed over to the girls' room to check what was wrong, when I saw her standing by the window with a look of disappointment. "Its the first day of spring and its snowing, mommy! I think Mother Nature's gone cuckoo! " I looked out to see that everything was covered with a good dose of powdering and we were in for more. What happened to the sun and the birds and the flowers and all? The great expectations we had for this day! And now I'm left with the task of convincing a little girl who had decided she was going to wear a sweater and tights to school today to put put her winter garb back on.

A sudden flash of enlightenment! A few of those delicious flower cookies with her morning cup of milk should do the trick. It did! I guess RM's happy now that Mother Nature went cuckoo, she got her early morning overdose of sugar!

1 cup butter

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

2 tsp. vanilla extract

3 1/2 cups flour

2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

Strawberry jam

Sift all the dry ingredients together.

Cream the butter and sugar together till light.

Add the eggs and the vanilla extract and mix till combined.

Slowly add the dry ingredients and knead into a soft dough. Cover in plastic wrap and refrigerate for an hour or two.

Pre-heat the oven to 35o F.

Roll out the chilled dough to 1/4" thickness. Cut out cookies using cookie cutters. I used Linzer cookie cutters. If you dont have Linzer cookie cutters, use any flower-shaped cookie cutter. Use a small round cutter to take out centers of the flowers of half the total number of flowers. These are the top cookies.

Bake for 10 minutes. The cookies should just begin to turn brown around the edges.

Cool the cookies completely.

To assemble:

Take a whole flower cookie. Spoon some jam in the center. Make sure not to put too much as it may overflow. Now place a flower cookie with the center cut out (top cookies) on top of the jam and slightly push it in so that some of the jam comes through the center hole.

Make any day a Spring day!

Mita.