Nancy's Ice Cream Kolacky

This is an old-school Polish-American holiday cookie with a clever shortcut at its heart: vanilla ice cream stands in for the eggs, milk, sugar, and vanilla that a traditional kolacky dough would need. The melted cream and sugar in the ice cream rehydrate the flour and enrich the butter, giving you a remarkably tender, buttery pastry with only three ingredients.

The overnight chill is the critical step. The dough is soft and sticky when mixed, and it needs a full night in the fridge to firm up enough to roll out cleanly. Skip this and you’ll be dusting on endless flour just to get the dough off the counter, which makes the finished cookies tough.

Classic fillings are apricot, prune, poppy seed, raspberry, or sweet cheese, the same fillings you’d find in the old-country version. Just a half-teaspoon per thumbprint, any more and the filling boils over during baking.

Kitchen Tips

• Let the ice cream soften slightly before mixing, it needs to be workable but not fully melted. Right out of the freezer it won’t incorporate.
• Work in batches and keep the dough cold, soft dough is impossible to roll and produces misshapen cookies.
• Use a glass rim dipped in flour for perfect circles, as the recipe directs. Re-dip between each cut so the dough doesn’t stick.
• Don’t overfill the thumbprints, the filling will bubble and spread during baking. A half-teaspoon is the max.
• Dust with powdered sugar only after the cookies cool completely, warm cookies will absorb the sugar and leave no pretty white finish.

Variations

• Swap vanilla ice cream for strawberry, cherry, or chocolate for a subtly flavored dough.
• Use apricot preserves, lemon curd, Nutella, or dulce de leche as unconventional fillings.
• Fold dough over filling into little triangles or envelopes instead of thumbprints for a more traditional Polish shape.