Jammy Dodgers, but much much better

I love visiting people - it gives me a reason to bake - if I baked everything I wanted all of the time, Mr B and I would be clinically obese.  This weekend we are visiting Mr B's mum in Somerset, and I decided to make her some biscuits.  I saw a lot of jam filled heart biscuits on other blogs over Valentines and used this as my inspiration.  To the Americans out there, I made what you call a sugar cookies, I am not sure what the Brits (including myself!) call these apart from a plain, sweet biscuits!

I used a couple of recipes to get the idea for the quantities I needed which is fairly typical of my way of working!

There is a lot of butter in these, which means they turn out wonderfully, but they must also be very for you - but then so are most things that taste nice :-)

Jam Filled Biscuits (makes 16)
250g plain flour
225g softened butter
200g sugar
1 egg
1 tsp salt
drop vanilla extract
Jam for filling

1) Cream together the butter and sugar, then mix in the flour, salt, vanilla and egg.  You should end up with a smooth dough which forms a ball, and isn't sticky.
2) Wrap the dough in clingfilm and put in the fridge for around 45 minutes, or until firm
3) Preheat the oven to 190C
4) Divide the dough into two.  Roll half out on a floured surface and using a cookie cutter of whichever shape you like stamp out 16 bottoms.
5)  Using the other half of the dough, roll and stamp out 16 tops.  I used a small cutter to make holes in the top, but you coul just as easily use a knife and put in freestyle shapes!
6) Bake the biscuits on baking sheets for around 10 minutes until they are turning golden.  I needed to do this in batches.  Remove from the tray and cool.  The biscuits maybe slightly soft when you first take them off the tray but they go hard quickly.
7)  Once the biscuits have cooled, put a small teaspoon of jam on each bottom half and spread it across the biscuit.
8)  Dust the tops with icing sugar and then carefully sandwich the halves together.

A note on jam
I had strawberries in my fridge, so I made myself a small batch of jam just to use in these biscuits.  I just chopped up the strawberries (quite small as I knew the jam had to spread easily), and added a good shake of caster sugar to them in a small pan.  I boiled it for about 20 minutes until the mixture had thickened.  To test whether it would set, I dropped some of the jam into a glass of cold water where it immediately formed into small balls which stuck together.  I then removed the jam from the heat and tipped it into a tupperware box.  I made this yesterday, so today it was in the fridge and ready to go.  I wouldn't even think about using this recipe for large batches of jam which you want to preserve, it's not designed for that!