P365, Day 165 - Mmm, cookies...

[grundyscribbling]

Continuing yesterday's theme of be prepared, I've been looking up the cookie recipes in the hopes of actually making cookies this year. (There's a list. There may at some point be a schedule.)

P365 masterpost

Comments

[ysilme]

Heh. ^^ What are your favourites?
I'm not making many, as they always vanish lightning-fast and we both don't really need additional encouragement to eat sweet stuff. *coughs* My mother used to make a lot to disperse to the kids, but since my father isn't supposed to eat sugar she only makes a few, as we all find it unfair if he can't have them. But I'm going to make Elisenlebkuchen at least. I haven't done them often yet, as you get good store-made ones if you don't have food intolerances, so we used to buy them. But since I need to avoid wheat we found the spelt ones aren't really good and more than doubly the price, so I tried them myself. Not really difficult, but so very messy that I don't have the energy every year. *g*
We also have a family speciality, a variety of the Ausstecherle, cutter cookies?, made of Linzertorte dough. Linzertorte is a biggie in my home region, every family has their own traditional recipe (and sometimes every branch of the family as well), but while it's the same principle as the Austrian original the end result varies somewhat. The dought is dryer and contains more chocolate, and we always use red or dark jam, not yellow/apricot. In my family, you can't have a birthday or other important celebration without one. ^^ When I was small, my mother always made it after her mother's recipe. But her mother still used her own mother's large family recipe for larger baking tins, and my mother always forgot to convert the recipe to the smaller tin, so as a result the leftover dough was made into cookies cut out with the molds, inspired by the fact that my mother also didn't cover the tarte with the typical grid, but with cut out shapes. Everybody loved these cookies so much that over time, they became an item of their own, both single layer (without any glaze) or double-layer stuck together with jam. But my mother's still making these, so we'll have them in any case!

[grundyscribbling]

Aside from simple sugar cookies, my favorites are jam thumbprints (I love the delicious laziness of them), vanillekipferl, spekulatius, and heidesand. Oh, and lebkuchen - I generally end up buying that because it's hard to find the oblaten around here, but there's a health food store that was originally run by Germans and still does a lot of German imports. (Prices are high, but for lebkuchen I'll pay. Speku I brought back with me in September - it was only just out in the stores, and I got some odd looks from the clerk at the supermarket checkout until I explained. 'I'm American, this same package if I buy it at home will cost $5! So I'm buying it now and hoarding it until Christmas!')

Sadly, no family varieties here - mom's side didn't really do cookies, and dad's side lost any German recipes long ago, they're all generic American sugar cookies, chocolate chip, or chocolate kisses.