Hallongrottor (Swedish Raspberry Jam Cookies)

Swedes sure love their fika, which is a coffee break enjoyed with a sweet treat. While Swedish buns (like these cardamom buns) and cake (like silviakaka) are popular for fika, you’ll also see Swedish cookies served for fika as well. In fact apparently before fika became an established tradition in Sweden in the early 20th century, Swedes practiced kafferep, where women would gather, often to repair clothes, and enjoy seven types of cookies. Any more than seven cookies would be showing off, while fewer would be stingy. Norwegians also practice this tradition with their seven types of cookies for Christmas.

And one classic Swedish cookie is the hallongrotta, or hallongrottor plural. The name means raspberry cave, which is very fitting for these Swedish thumbprint cookies filled with raspberry jam.

These vanilla cookies are the perfect amount of buttery and crumbly, and the jam contrasts the cookie beautifully. They also happen to be incredibly easy to make! If you’re a fan of jam you might have all of the ingredients for these in your kitchen already.

You can also make the center heart shaped if you like!

I used this Swedish recipe for these hallongrottor, which I’ve translated into English in the recipe card below (I also included the US measurements in addition to the metric measurements so be sure to click “US Customary” at the top of the recipe to get those).

I brought these Swedish raspberry jam cookies to a movie night with my Norwegian friends and everyone loved them. One friend said they taste like Norwegian sandnøtter but even better with the jam filling. And my other friend said that these hallongrottor were even better than the ones her Swedish grandmother makes (maybe don’t tell any Swedish grandmothers she said that).

Be sure to use room temperature butter when making these, as cold butter won’t roll as well and the dough will seem extra dry.

Hallongrottor dough comes together best if you mix the ingredients with your hands. This ensures that the butter really is soft enough, as your hands will continue to soften the butter as you knead. This will help the cookies maintain their shape and not crack. If your butter is too cold, it might seem like the dough is too dry, but you should be able to squeeze it together with your hands.

I’ve seen both large and fairly small hallongrottor, so you can decide on the size of the cookies yourself. I like to make them on the bigger side because then the cookies are a little bit soft in the middle instead of entirely hard and crumbly.

Make each indentation in the cookie immediately after rolling it because then the cookie dough will still be soft from rolling and less likely to break when you make the indentation. If the dough does crack, simply press it back together with your hands.

These are thumbprint cookies so you can of course make the indents for the jam with your thumb. But if you want a cleaner look (or if you have long nails) you can use the back end of a serving spoon to make the indents. I use the back of my whisk because it has a nice round shape.

And then you can also decide how large to make the indentations. I wiggle the whisk around a bit to make a larger hole to fit more jam.

The cookies will spread a bit during baking. Because of this some people use muffin forms for their hallongrottor, but I find that they’re not necessary if you roll the cookies into balls and don’t flatten them before baking.

You can also make heart shaped hallongrottor by adding two indentations to the cookies. To make heart cookies, I use an oval back of a knife instead of round:

It’s easiest to use jam in a squirt bottle, but you can also spoon the jam onto each cookie. The jam sinks when the cookies are baked, so I like to fill the cookies until they’re almost overflowing.

Traditionally hallongrottor use raspberry jam, but you can experiment with different flavors of jam as well! I made these heart hallongrottor with strawberry jam and they were delicious.

The baking time will vary depending on your oven and the size of the cookies. I bake mine for 15 minutes, until the bottoms of the cookies are just starting to turn golden.

You can switch the recipe from US measurements to metric by clicking from “US Customary” to “Metric” under Ingredients.