This recipe makes approximately 40 cookies. Twenty cookies on two half sheet pans. It is the perfect amount, larger batches and you start to get hot, or tired, but two trays is a meditation. You can make the dough in five minutes, and then clean the kitchen, pay bills, or do workout video, while the dough chills for an hour. Here it is:
2 cups flour
1 cup softened butter
2/3 cup sugar (I like the color and flavor of unbleached organic sugar)
1/4 tsp finely grated lemon zest or almond extract (play with different extract or spices depending on the flavor of jam you use)
1/2-3/4 cup plum jam
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Beat butter and sugar with an electric mixer, add zest, and gradually beat in flour Shape into two discs, wrap in cellophane and refrigerate one hour. Sort junk mail, scrub the tub, or fold laundry, whatever. I always seem to accomplish more, with the structure baking provides.
Colder dough won’t spread as much in the oven, neither will stiffer dough. Very subtle differences will yield very different cookies, so play with this recipe until you get them just right.
Now roll the dough into one inch balls and place them one and a half inches apart on a coo
kie sheet. Use the round end of a wooden spoon, or your index finger, coming strait down, (not like you would make a real fingerprint) and move your finger, or the spoon in a small circular motion to create a well, with aneven wall of dough around and under it, then spoon in a heaping half teaspoon of jam. Bake at 350 degrees for seven minutes, turn the tray around and continue baking for six minutes. Let cool on a cooling rack a few minutes before lifting them off the tray, finish cleaning the kitchen, package up all but two of the completely cooled cookies, find a pretty little plate for your two cookies and pour yourself a glass of milk. Enjoy a little bad afternoon television before anyone comes home. I promise you’ll feel as good as you do after any yoga class or hot bath.
Baking I have found is the fastest easiest way for me to put my thoughts in order. Measure ingredients, mix dough, shape cookies, bake, cool, give some away, eat some; when I am done my mind is clear. I understand dough. All kinds, bread, cookie, pastry, if I could find a way to make a decent living baking that didn’t require getting out of bed at such an unholy hour, I’d still be a baker. ‘Decorate expensive cakes,’ friends will suggest. This is not a n option. I was an early morning doughnut fryer in a grocery store back in college, and people would come in on their way to work and ask me to write “Happy Birthday John” on a cake for them. “I really can’t,” I would tell them, “but someone will be here in just a few minutes who can help you.”
“I’m already late. Pleeeeease, it doesn’t have to be fancy,” they would plead.This happened often, and it always ended the 
same. I would give in, hoping maybe this time would be different. I had been practicing, so I’d write Happy Birthday John! and hand it to the customer, who would then say, “Oh wow… ummm… do I have to buy this?”
“Yes you do you !#%!*%!” I wanted to say.
Anyone however, can make thumbprint cookies, my favorite put-your-thoughts-in-order-recipe, look nice. Cookie doughs, like these thumbprints, and chocolate crackles, or gingersnaps, that are chilled and rolled into balls can be shaped and handled while still using a rich, buttery dough. And they look as if they have been individually tended to, without ever having to touch any decorating tools. I started experimenting with different recipes last summer when Angie and I canned a ton of plum jam. It is unwise for me to have an open jar of jam in the house, it calls out to me, “I bet there’s still fresh bread at the uptown bakery, and look, there’s soft butter on the counter, come on, you don’t want a salad. The bakery closes soon…. there you go, good girl… get the chewy, crusty kind!” And I do, for days at a time. Like with any addiction my body eventually starts to rebel. “I need protein, I need vegetables.” It cries, until I finally listen.
I needed a recipe that would convince me to stop opening jars of jam, and save them for Christmas cookies. Back when I lived in Great Falls, Montana I use to buy jam thumbprint cookies at the farmer’s market, from a family that had four young daughters. The sisters stood in a stair step arrangement and dressed in a style that made you think they might be Amish. Their parents however dressed normally, so maybe it was just some sort of shtick. Anyway, they sold perfect thumbprint cookies, hundreds of them. I imagined them getting their knuckles rapped for producing cookies that were slightly misshapen, or over or under-baked. I told myself I needed to buy from the girls to prevent them from enduring any further knuckle rapping, but in truth, I just needed my fix. I have tried several thumbprint recipes over the years, and finally have found one that rivals thumbprints the Amish looking girls made, and the homemade plum jam I do believe put these over the top. Once I was satisfied with a recipe, I resolved to save the rest of the jam for Christmas baking.