Apricot cream cheese butter cookies.

What could be sweeter than a juicy apricot?

...well, not much. But these cookies come pretty close!

Adapted from a completely different recipe for these cookies called "galaxies" that I found in an ancient pillsbury recipe book about five years ago.

You'll need-

1/2 cup butter
1 cup powdered sugar
2 tablespoons well pureed apricots (you can use organic baby food apricots!)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
a dash of salt
1 drop orange food colouring
1-3 tablespoons milk (as needed)

So first what you'll want to do, is mix together the powdered sugar and the butter. Once you've made yourself a nice paste with no lumps, add in the apricot puree, vanilla, food colour, and the dash of salt. Once you've got all of that mixed together, add in the flour, mixing slightly with a wooden spoon and then finishing the mixing with your hands. If the mixture is too crumbly, add a tablespoon of milk and try to gather the dough again. Do this until the dough is soft but not sticky, and you can fold the dough over (as if you were going to knead it) and it won't crumble.

Lightly flour a sanitized counter top or other sanitized area (I use a cutting board) and roll the dough out to about 1/2 an inch, maybe a little thicker. If you've ever seen Lorna Doone, or Walkers shortbread, you want it to be about that thick. (if you havent seen either of those, then just go with about 1/2 an inch)

Use your choice of cookie cutter. I used a small heart, and I would recommend going with smaller sized cookie cutters, probably nothing bigger than 2" diameter. I don't know how well the dough will cook in that sort of circumstance.

Anyways, for my small heart cookies, I got about 3 dozen. So you'll end up with somewhere between 2 and 4 dozen cookies, depending on how you cut 'em and how you roll out the dough and everything.

Once you've cut out your dough, place them on a lightly greased cookie sheet about an inch apart, and bake for 10-15 minutes at 350, or until the bottom edges are just starting to turn golden brown.

Allow the cookies to cool.

For the cream cheese icing, mix together a half cup softened cream cheese and a 1/4 cup powdered sugar. Spread thinly on cookies. Glaze tops with warmed apricot preserves. Let cookies set about 10 minutes before arranging on a plate. The tops will be slightly sticky.

If you want the cookies to be stackable, or you want to add a little extra something- Melt some white chocolate and drizzle it over the cookies. I didn't do this, but I can imagine they'd look and taste beautiful!

So go make some cookies!

-A.