Austrian Linzer cookies are typically made with a pair of almond shortbread cookies sandwiched together with a layer of jam. A cutout in the top cookie reveals the jam beneath. For my miniature Linzer cookies, I used the same polymer clay mix as my curabiè cookies: Fimo vanilla, Premo ecru, white, and translucent. Linzer cookies are often cut out using a round, scalloped cutter, but since I couldn’t find a scalloped cutter that small, I ended up cutting round circles of clay and making indentations around the edges to give the impression of a scalloped shape. I used a toothbrush for texture and shaded the cookies with soft pastels for a golden-brown baked effect. For the top cookies, I cut out a circle from the center and also used white soft pastels for the appearance of powdered sugar.
After baking the cookies, I sealed the pastels with Helmar Crystal Kote Matte spray varnish. This has become my go-to sealer when I need a truly matte finish. Once the cookies were all done, I sandwiched them with “jam” in three flavors: apricot, raspberry, and blackberry. For this, I used Fimo Liquid colored with various shades of soft pastels. To give the jam a bit of texture, I mixed in some finely grated Premo translucent that I had baked into a log, as well as some craft sand in black (for the blackberry) and red (for the raspberry). Once baked, I needed to touch up the jam in the centers a bit, and that gave me a chance to adjust the colors slightly. While doing so, instead of my log of translucent, I used clay left over from my apricot and mixed berry gelato flavors, which I formed into similar small logs, baked, and grated.
The final step was a little glossy varnish on the jam. As with previous projects, I filled some boxes, glued on ribbons, and attached the sticker labels.
Here are the cookies displayed in the bakery.
