In fact, my Eastern European grandmother (or Baba, as I called her) only made chocolate chip cookies for us as a concession to her grandchildren’s tastes. The rest of her baked goods were much more in line with her own upbringing.

A couple of times a year, my Baba would ship a huge box of her treats to us. She lived in New York and we lived in Indiana, so my brothers and I got super excited when those boxes arrived. Nestled in there were babkas, and rugelach, and cookies, and these. She called them yo-yos, and we loved them.

Yo-yos are a honey cookie, soft and cakey, sandwiched with jelly. You can pick your jelly flavor. I’ve used apricot in the past, but my favorite is raspberry. The jelly plays off the sweet cookie layers so well.

I always like to make these cookies around the Jewish new year, since they’re honey-based. The tradition is to eat sweet foods for an equally sweet year, and if that’s the requirement, I think my sugar addiction is ensuring a lifetime of happy years to come!

Yo-yos can be made in any size. These were fairly big, and I realized while following my grandmother’s sketchy baking directions that I was doing something wrong, because hers were always smaller. So if you’d like, disregard the recipe instructions and make the balls of dough smaller.

Either way, enjoy! Kids love these, and adults don’t turn their noses up at them either. My grandmother knew what she was doing!