I toyed with the idea of blogging for years before I began and one of my regrets was that I didn’t start soon enough to join in with the first round of Tuesdays with Dorie, when they baked their way through Dorie Greenspan‘s Baking From My Home to Yours.

Happily, Laurie Woodward started French Fridays with Dorie right around the time I finally did start blogging, as well as rebooting Tuesdays with Dorie – first, with a bake-a-long through Baking with Julia and most recently, Baking Chez Moi. I worked through a number of the Baking with Julia recipes with my nieces, until their newly adult lives took them in other directions. I join in with the Baking Chez Moi schedule whenever I can.

Today, though, I’m going to sneak in a post about one of my favourite recipes from Baking From My Home to Yours. It’s not the flashiest recipe in the book, but it’s one of the most satisfying ones for me. I love having homemade goodies for guests or to bring as gifts when I visit friends, but I often find myself baking without much time to spare.

As long as you’ve got some room-temperature butter on hand (and if you don’t, The Kitchn‘s got you covered), you can have freshly made cookies on hand at even the shortest of notice. And if you have the sort of friends that drop in, you can invite them into the kitchen while you bake. Kitchen visits are the best, anyway.

Even better, it’s a great way to use up any of the jams you’ve been collecting in your fridge. Toast may have become its own food group, but jam can do so much more. Especially when it’s paired with ginger or another complementary spice.

I’ve used a number of different jams with this recipe and most pair with ginger really well. I’ve added a little black pepper when I’ve used strawberry jam and substituted ground cardamom when I used plum jam. It’s a very forgiving recipe, because the butter cookie base makes just about any flavour combination shine.

This time, I used some ginger peach jam that my neighbour gave me (I gave her some of the jam back in cookie form). I felt the cookies would have benefitted from a little heat – perhaps some black pepper, but maybe the tiniest bit of cayenne. Does that sound too out there? I think it would work.

I still have some of that jam left. These cookies are so easy that they invite experimentation. I may have to stock up on butter.

See what else the Tuesdays with Dorie crew has been catching up on: Rewind!.