Because we had such a small Thanksgiving, pandemic-diminished, held on Black Friday as is our tradition, I got to use even more of Thanksgiving Day for cookies.
I started by making the lebkuchen, since that’s one of cookie kinds that’s supposed to age a bit before eating. I’ve been making these forever, and tried lots of different recipes. There are actually a lot of varieties of lebkuchen – some are mostly honey and fruits and nuts, like the first version I tried in Rose’s Christmas Cookies – delicious but impossible to bake. I never could get them off the pan without them crumpling up. The real Nuremburg Lebkuchen that our AFS student who was from there brought us was big round chewy cookies with a chocolate glaze. The Joy of Cooking version that I’ve used the most is a bar cookie that doesn’t have eggs, and there’s also Basler Läckerli, the Swiss version, chewier, with eggs, and I have recipes for that from Gourmet and Food52. Joy suggests a lemon glaze but more traditional versions have a sugar syrup glaze that your pour on and brush until it turns white – which can be tricky, more on that in a minute.
My newest Joy, the 2019 version, has a version with eggs and the lemon glaze, that sounded good, so I decided to do that. Back in 2015, I recipe tested the Food52 recipe, and decided I liked the sugar glaze better than the lemon. But since I only do this once a year, like Rach says, it’s only natural that you forget stuff – and I forgot that if you make the glaze too long before the cookies come out, it turns into a hard lump, either in the pan, if you’re smart and don’t even try to put it on the cookies, or on the cookies if you’re dumb like me and pour it on and try vainly to spread it out.
The pics below show the raw batter, then the lumpy sugar glaze, then my save the next day. I un-molded the lumpy glaze pan, cut off the glaze, flipped them over and glazed the bottoms with the lemon. I cut up the good pan, and in the last picture, the saved ones are cut and in with the others, and I think they blend in fairly well.
Then I made the jam cookies, square again this year.
[portfolio_slideshow pagerpos=disabled]
Cabbage leaf observed while I was making the coleslaw for our Primanti Bros. sandwiches, our traditional Thursday meal
It’s Tuesday, and so far, besides the lebkuchen and jam cookies, I’ve made the pine nut macaroons.
Baby fruitcakes, fruit nut balls, and a new non-cookie sweet – chocolate-espresso-Cointreau balls, ground up chocolate wafers, hazelnuts, powered sugar, stuck together with Cointreau, with espresso power dissolved in it, and corn syrup. Rolled into balls and dredged in sugar – kind of like a rum ball.
Oh yea, and the Biberli, marzipan-stuffed gingerbread wedges that are vegan but not annoyingly so.
I also have the Christmas Country Cake from Laurie Colwin’s More Home Cooking aging out in the vestibule. It looked a little too dark when I got it out of the oven, but I brushed it with bourbon, and sherry today, and I think it’ll taste pretty good by Christmas, especially when I stick a layer of marzipan on the top. Maybe it’ll be like Caribbean Black Cake, that has burnt sugar syrup in it, that Colwin also wrote about.
I’ve also made the dough logs for the slice & bakes, cranberry pistachio, ginger, and World Peace.
Tonight I made one kind of chocolate crinkles – these hazelnut ones. I also have a recipe with walnuts & Sambucca. I like both, and I have also had both types fail spectacularly, like when I forgot the baking soda, or the melted chocolate seized … so this year I decided to make smaller batches of each, around 5 dozen each, instead of a giant batch of one type.
So far so good. Better light shot coming in the morning. When I will also try to roll the springerle.
Chocolate hazelnut crinkles. Tonight I’ll do the Sambucca ones, and we can compare
And the cookie fundraiser is going great – thanks everyone, for your orders!
And look who showed up on my walk:
