Chocolate Thumbprints

I made these simple little Chocolate Thumbprints for Shabbat last week after my chocolate madeleines failed. A nice alternative to their jammy counterparts, these bite sized cookies are cute and really easy to make. I made half a recipe which yielded about two dozen cookies. What's great about this recipe is that the cookie dough flattens into a nice round cookie instead of spreading all over the cookie sheet as per my previous thumbprint failure experiment. Should you decide that you must have the jam, just swap any flavor out for the chocolate filling. No harm done.

Chocolate Thumbprints
from Martha Stewart's Cookies

Cookie:
1 cup margarine
1 cup powdered sugar
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp vanilla
2 1/2 cups flour

Filling:
6 tbsp margarine
6 ounces bittersweet chocolate, broken into pieces
2 tsp corn syrup

Preheat the oven to 350. Line a baking sheet with parchment.
Place the margarine, sugar, salt and vanilla into a bowl,

and beat until creamy.

Add the flour and beat until it's all incorporated.

Here's my finished dough. Grab a two teaspoons worth of dough in your hand and roll it into a ball. Repeat with remaining dough.

Place them on the prepared baking sheet, with about an inch and a half between each ball.

Bake for ten minutes. Remove from the oven and carefully make an indentation with the back of a spoon or the handle of an offset spatula. That worked nicely for me. The book recommends dipping your thumb into ice water, but that's too much of a hassle. Return to the oven and continue baking until golden, 7-9 minutes more.

Meanwhile, melt the filling ingredients together and allow to cool briefly. When the cookies come out of the oven, reinforce the indentation if necessary. Allow to cool completely before filling. Fill with the chocolate mixture and allow to firm up.

To store, layer cookies with pieces of parchment in a container. I like to use the parchment the cookies were baked to avoid waste.