Tag Archives: Christmas cookies

Christmas Peppernuts

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The last time I ate our family’s version of peppernuts, it was in a February that seems very long ago now. Mr. Glad and I were at Pippin’s when she pulled a slab of dough out of the freezer, left over from her Christmas baking. My hands weren’t sticky so it was easy to take pictures that I saved to put with the recipe “someday.” Trying to post every day this month along with Pom Pom has prodded me to make good on promises I’ve made in this regard.

This cookie is a version I cobbled together from the assortment that fill the pages of Peppernuts, Plain and Fancy, given to me at least 20 years ago by my Dutch homeschooler friend Anita.  I just now found my little copy, about 5×6″, on a remote shelf and browsed through it for only the second time. When I first received the book, I was looking for the likeliest of the 26 varied recipes to try, but after traveling from front to back and from Paraguay to Russia and back to Kansas, I decided to take ideas and ingredients from several of them.

I had forgotten until tonight that not all of the varieties in the book are even spicy, like true pfeffernusse are. I found a couple of recipes for White Peppernuts, and ingredients as different as ammonia and lemon, peppermint and fresh coconut. As you can seen from the few pages I have shared, these are true Family Recipes, some of which have unusual sources and have been passed down through many generations.

“Original peppernut recipes probably were copied from the Germans, Dutch and West Prussians when Mennonite families moved about Europe in search of religious freedom. Then, when our grandparents left the Ukraine for America in 1874, they brought this lovely tradition with them, baking peppernuts in their ‘grasshopper ovens’ those early Christmases on the Kansas prairies.”

Some years it can be hard to find fruit-flavored jelly candies in the stores; they are a version of gumdrops, not gummy candies, and aren’t spicy, and it seems their availability is subject to trends. I don’t want to use spice drops because there is already plenty of spice in my recipe. The easiest way to dice the candies is to dust frequently with arrowroot or cornstarch. In the photo down below that is what makes the pieces white.

One year I had a much larger batch of dough than this recipe makes, and I was using it from the freezer for many months after. I didn’t always have time to make “nuts,” so I cut bar-shaped cookies and they were good, too!

CHRISTMAS PEPPERNUTS

½ stick butter, 2 oz.
½ c. honey
1 c. sugar
2 eggs
¼ c. milk
½ T. soda in ½ T. hot water
1 tsp. lemon zest
4 c. white flour
6 oz. diced, fruit-flavored jelly candies
2 c. toasted almonds, chopped
2 tsp. ground star anise
½ tsp. cinnamon
2/3 tsp. ground black pepper
¼ tsp. nutmeg

Mix all, form dough into large “pancakes,” and freeze. While still firm, cut into “nuts” or bars. Bake at 350 degrees 8-10 minutes on greased foil on insulated cookie sheets.
Should be golden brown if you don’t want them cake-y.

Be careful now! Remember that “Old German maxim” quoted on the page above:

That which really tastes
oft us trouble makes.

These do really taste. 🙂

Bizcochitos

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Last week we got our Christmas tree and I made two kinds of cookies. I packed them into the freezer before I thought about taking pictures, so the images here are from previous years. These are bizcochitos, the official state cookie of New Mexico. The recipe has been developed over the centuries starting from the first Spanish colonists in the area before it became a state in the Union.

cookies-bizcochitos

Does your state have a designated cookie? Not many do. New Mexico was the first state to choose one, in 1989, to encourage traditional home cooking. You can check out this Wikipedia page that lists the official foods of some states.

I first found a recipelard happy family in Sunset Magazine but have since done my own customization. Most recipes for this cookie call for lard, which I would be happy to use if I could easily find some homemade that hasn’t been hydrogenated and preserved with chemicals. I had a friend who made her own and stored it in the freezer, and I might have bought some from her if she hadn’t moved away. Lacking natural lard, I tried last year to substitute coconut oil. Much as I love coconut, the oil left a disagreeable aftertaste in my cookies (as it did in some shortbread I also tried with coconut oil one time), so from now on I’m sticking with butter.

It’s a little odd to be writing on this subject when we Orthodox are in the middle of our Nativity fast (Advent), trying to abstain from most animal products until Christmas Day. But I must not be the only Orthodox woman who has to be cooking and preparing ahead of time, and if I wait until the feast to write about cookies it will be somewhat anticlimactic.

Mr. Glad usually votes for Russian tea cakes for Christmas, but this year he told me that bizcochitos are the cookie that he most wants to have on the platter for the holiday. That means I get to have the fun of saying “bees-coh-chee’-toes” a lot. I just ran across this video http://vimeo.com/33763745 of a New Mexican woman who mixes and kneads the dough with her hands the way her grandmother taught her. She adds extra anise seed — hard to go wrong there — and some other flavorful ingredients that I might try next time.

Half of this year’s dough still waits in the freezer, and if I get to it before Christmas I’m planning to cut holes in the cookies before baking so that when they are cool I can attach ribbons and hang some on the tree.

BIZCOCHITOS

1/2 pound (2 sticks) salted butter13 bizcochito tree cutter
3/4 cup sugar
1 large egg
1 tablespoon grated orange peel
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tablespoons anise seeds, crushed
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 cup sugar

Beat butter and 3/4 c. sugar until smooth. Add egg and orange peel and beat until just combined.

In a medium bowl mix the flour, anise seeds, baking powder, and salt. Add to the butter mixture and beat until well blended. Divide dough in half and flatten each half into a disk. Wrap each piece tightly in plastic wrap and freeze until firm, about 30 minutes.13 bizcochito coconut oil

Unwrap dough, one disk at a time. On lightly floured surface, with a floured rolling pin, roll to about 1/8″ thick. With floured cookie cutters, cut into shapes and place about 1″ apart on buttered baking sheets. Gather excess into a ball, reroll, and cut out remaining cookies.

In a small bowl mix remaining 1/4 cup sugar with the cinnamon. Sprinkle about 1/8 teaspoon of the mixture over each cookie; save any remaining cinnamon sugar for other uses.

Bake cookies at 350° just until edges are golden, 10-15 minutes. Let cool on sheets for 5 minutes before transferring to racks to cool completely.

A cookie might be a little seedy bun cake.

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By the time I came into my husband’s family, Seedy Buns were only a memory in the minds of the older generations. My father-in-law said they were cookies featuring caraway seeds and a treat eaten at Christmas, but perhaps he got them mixed up with Seedy Biscuits? Because a bun is bread, we all know that, whereas a biscuit can be a cookie if it is in the British Isles. But what if you take a bun and sweeten and shorten it up? Might it be like a little cake?

I never thought of a cookie as being a little cake until I read The Little Book to my children very long ago. “A cookie is a little cake,” it says right there. I know that type of cookie, and I don’t really care for them. I like mine chewy or crispy, but not cake-y.

In my joyful Christmas cookie project, which is my art at this time of year, I had the idea to make a modern Seedy Bun that would hearken back to the ancestors who brought their Cornish traditions to California.

Once a cousin had taken a box of sugar cookie mix and thrown in a can of caraway seeds to create a simple reenactment, and I scoured the Internet to see what else might be out there as inspiration.

 

 

A fascinating collection of recipes from newspapers dating 1891 to 1981 gave a hint as to the possibilities, and included two poems mentioning a grandma or an aunt making caraway cookies. Here’s one of the recipes that even claims to make a crisp cookie:

It was published in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1919, and I think is interesting for its use of the word “butterine,” which I’d never seen before.

Early American cooks also used seeds liberally in their cookies, often coriander or caraway, and I liked the looks of a glazed cookie based on one from the first American cookbook published in 1796.

Cooks are like folk-singers, changing and adapting their material freely, and it’s not as though I am looking for The Original Seedy Bun recipe to cook myself, but it would be nice to know what those cookies were like, that my husband’s grandma made.

In the meantime I decided to try this recipe for lemony cookies, calling for ground caraway seeds which I didn’t have. I tried grinding some in the blender, but they only burned from the heat, so I used whole seeds.

Some of the baked cookies were a little skimpy on seeds, like the one I picture below. I’ll have to see how everyone receives them before I decide whether to make these the same way another time. If I make a different Seedy Bun, I might bake these again as well, without the caraway, because I agree with their creator about their appealing “depth and intensity” from the lemon juice and zest.


After my Seedy Lemon Biscuits were put away in the freezer, I heard from an older grandchild of my husband’s grandmother who, I was so happy to hear, had made a collection of Grandma’s recipes, and the first cookie in the collection was indeed called Seedy Buns.

Grandma’s Recipes

COOKIES:

Seedie Buns – 5 doz. These are similar to sugar cookies.

Sift and set aside: 3 C flour, 1 t baking powder, 1/4 tsp t salt

Cream in bowl: 1 1/4 C butter

Beat in until fluffy: 1 1/4 C sugar

Add: 3 eggs one at a time, beat well after each.

Blend in: 1 t grated orange peel, 1 t vanilla, 2 T caraway seeds

Chill several hours.

To form cookies take about 1 T dough and roll into ball.

Place on lightly greased baking sheet

Flatten to 1/4″ with bottom of a glass dipped in sugar.

Bake at 375 degrees for 8-10 min., or until lightly browned.

If any of my readers have favorite seedy cookie recipes, I’d love to hear about them. It’s not too early to start brainstorming for next year!

Christmas Cookies for Show-and-Eat

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The new favorite cookie this year was Salted Toffee. This was a happy accident sort of thing. We had come by a bag of mini Heath Bars, not something we normally would buy, and I didn’t want to end up eating them one-by-one, so after we ate a few I thought I would make cookies with the rest.

 

 

I’d seen recipes online for Heath Bar cookies, and I used one of them that didn’t have nuts. My version had a little less Heath ingredient, since we had snacked it down. The specialness I added was to combine some large-crystal sugar (Demerara) and coarse sea salt and roll the tops of the cookie-dough balls in that before baking.

Everyone loved these cookies. If that bird were real, he would have eaten the whole cookie by now. But he is painted on a pretty tray that May gave me for Christmas.

Soldier’s Joy brought the darlingest delicious thumbprint cookies that were filled with strawberry and rhubarb, and some chocolate-dipped dried apricots that combined to add to the visual appeal of the cookie platters.

Those bright-white round cookies are our only store-bought item, Pffernusse from Trader Joe’s that Mr. Glad wanted to try in memory of the cookies his German grandmother used to make.

The coconut-y balls are Date Delights, for which I’ll give you the recipe here. They are another chewy toffee-ish experience we have been creating ever since my grandma gave our family a tin full of them one Christmas past.

Date Delights

1 cube butter
1 cup cut-up pitted dates
1 beaten egg
1 cup sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 cup chopped walnuts
2 cups Rice Crispies
sweetened coconut flakes, about 7 oz.

In a 9×12 baking pan mix the walnuts and Rice Crispies. Set aside. In another bowl put the coconut flakes. 

In a saucepan melt the butter, and add the dates, egg and sugar. Stir all together in the saucepan and boil over medium heat for 5 minutes, stirring constantly.
Remove from heat and beat in the vanilla, and immediately pour the candy mixture over the walnuts and cereal. Stir well. As soon as the mixture is cool enough to handle, form into balls and roll them in the coconut flakes. Cool.

The red squares in the foreground are Cranberry Jellies. I adapted a recipe from a past Sunset Magazine to make a treat that Pippin and I especially like. It’s refreshingly lacking in any fat except for walnuts, and is a nice chewy way to get your cranberry fix and add color to the display.

Cranberry Jellies

3 cups Trader Joe’s Cranberry-Orange Relish (2-16 oz. tubs)
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups water
13 envelopes plain gelatin
3 cups chopped walnuts

Combine the first three ingredients in a bowl (I used a stand mixer) and while the paddle is turning, gradually add the gelatin. When thoroughly mixed transfer to a saucepan and heat just until the gelatin is dissolved. Stir in the walnuts and pour the mixture into a 9×12 pan. Refrigerate until firm. Cut into small pieces and dust lightly with cornstarch. I don’t refrigerate them after this point.

Many times I’ve told myself that I must make fewer cookies at Christmas, but this year I realized that it’s one of my favorite things to do. I have so much fun thinking of the collage of different flavors and forms of the little sweets that I don’t even feel the need to eat them. It was long after Christmas Day that I even tried one of the new Peppermint Cream Cheese cookies I made this year.

But now by what is the Seventh Day of Christmas, as I finish up this post, and also New Year’s Eve, I’ve expanded the festive feelings by eating lots of cookies, too! They all taste as good as they look, or better. The last red plateful will go out of here this evening — I wish I could bring one to your house when I say Happy New Year!