Christmas Baking, Part II
Busy weeks, and I find myself moving maybe a little too fast to do things correctly when time gets short to meet silly deadlines. ‘Silly’, because I set them for myself for my own projects on top of work and other things. Ah, well; at least with cookies, if the recipe is followed and things don’t burn, they still taste good! 🍪 🍰
I was able to finish the last of the planned Christmas cookies, at any rate, and the slight ‘fail’ we will address at the end.
The rum balls were baked for maybe 10 minutes and then rolled in powdered sugar while still warm.
Again, they can store for months and be just fine; they will not make it through two weeks!
This weekend, I needed to finish the final two items. The first is a recipe called ‘Blitz Cake’. Not really sure why it is called that, but it is a recipe that has been in the family for at least 60 or 70 years, and is one of those tastes that brings back an incredible nostalgia of Christmases and New Years’ past. Made with cake flour, eggs, vanilla, rum and unsalted butter, there are also red and green candied cherries for that Yuletide Touch.
Before baking:
After baking:
(Didn’t realize that came out blurry until just now. You see? Moving too fast…)
I generally slice it like a bread loaf and cut those slices in half so there is ‘more’ to go around.
The last thing I baked was done the day of this typing. It happens to be my favorite cookie of the Season and I try each year not to eat too many. 🤷♂️
Anise Cookies
Eggs, anise oil, powdered sugar, flour, lemon peel and baking powder. Eggs beat until thick and lemon-colored, add anise oil and then powdered sugar mixed in until the mixture it a sweet, thick batter. Then the flour, grated lemon peel baking powder and flour are mixed in (by hand, bigod!) until the dough is thick and almost non-malleable. Kneading softens it up after it chill in the fridge for a few hours. The dough is then kneaded until it can be rolled out into a half-inch thick sheet. Then a special roller called a springerle roller, looking like
is used to press patterns into the dough. The squares are cut and put on lightly greased cookie sheets with anise seeds sprinkled on them.
They are then covered and chilled in the fridge overnight, and then baked at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
This was where I was moving too fast, and instead of giving the cut squares a full 8 hours to chill (’overnight’), I put them in at 6 and a half. What the chilling does is forms a kind of shell around the whole cookie which then puffs up nice and uniformly due to the baking powder. Well, as they didn’t fully form th ‘shell’…
You can see they sort of ‘burst at the seams’! 😆 However, they do taste perfect!!
A Final Word and Reminisce:
I have mentioned that it has been a Christmas tradition to do such baking. There had been a generational item that has enhanced the whole process of Christmas baking. It is an item that used to be my mother’s mother and now has passed (mostly) to me. It is a mixing bowl:
Our estimate is that this bowl is some 80-90 years in use. My mother is 84 and does not remember a time where it wasn’t in the family. Some can be found on E-Bay to this day for very reasonable prices, but it’s worth to me is beyond just monetary reckoning. It, in part, keeps the magic of Christmas alive.
Be well and pax vobiscum!
