cimorene

Wax hasn't started making the cakes for Christmas eve dinner yet. These are not exactly part of her new cake-baking hobby, but the amount of French pastry chef youtube content we've both watched recently (that is, Korean and Japanese French-trained pastry chefs) have definitely affected our cookie execution.

Last weekend Wax made a batch of Ronneby Pepparkakor, her family's traditional recipe (but also quite popular and widely considered by many the best Swedish gingerbread recipe, easily googlable in Swedish), and it rested in the fridge all week because it's a dough that gets better with aging.

Ronneby pepparkakor (Swedish gingerbread)

100 g (3/4 cup) butter
150 ml (10 Tbsp) dark sugar syrup (can substitute molasses)
1 tsp powdered ginger
2 eggs
400 g (2 cups) granulated sugar
1 Tbsp cloves
1 tsp cinnamon
650 g (4½ cups) flour
1½ tsp baking soda

Melt butter, syrup, and spices over low heat on the stovetop. Mix eggs and sugar well, then add butter mixture and blend well. Mix the soda with a portion of the flour and blend into the batter. Then gradually add more flour until dough is very firm. Texture should be extremely thick and extremely sticky. Cover bowl and rfrigerate at least 24 hours, typically a couple of days. Roll out extremely thin, using as much flour as required to prevent sticking. Dough should be strong enough to roll out almost paper thin. Cut out and lift cookies carefully onto baking sheets with plenty of space between, as they expand during baking. Bake at 200°C/400° F about 4-6 min, until just starting to darken at the edges. Cool completely.

Then Friday evening we baked all of them (Wax does all the rolling and much of the cutting and I do a lot of the moving), filling up four tins, and I made a double batch of sugar cookies, which is about the same quantity of dough but not quite so many cookies because sugar cookies are not as thinly rolled out.

We did alter the recipe a little, actually. My mother's sugar cookie recipe, which I think she said she got from my Welsh-English paternal great-grandmother (the flapper), is called "No Fail Sugar Cookies" and is actually almost the same as the recipe I had decided to try out this year, Claire Saffitz's How to Make Sugar Cookies with Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person:

Claire Saffitz's sugar cookies, from the above video:

228 g butter at room temperature (2 sticks)
3/4 cup granulated sugar (180 ml)
1 lg egg
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp salt
3/8 tsp baking powder
2½ cups flour (600 ml)

Cream butter and sugar till smooth. Mix the vanilla into the egg, then add and blend. Mix flour and dry ingredients, then add all at once and mix just enough to combine evenly. Chill in the fridge at least 1 hour before cutting. Roll out with as little flour as possible and bake, depending on thickness, about 10-12 minutes, turning at 8, at 350° F (175° C).

In contrast, 'No Fail Sugar Cookies' call for 1 cup of sugar-, 1 tsp of vanilla, 1/2 tsp of baking powder, and 3 cups of flour for that quantity of butter and egg. In the video Claire explains that she has minimized sugar to make the cookies less sweet because she intends to put lots of royal icing on them, but we made painted sugar cookies instead, so I used 1 cup of sugar (a tiny bit less). Wax rolled them out thicker than the paper-thin Swedish gingerbread, but they still baked in about 5-6 minutes total (turning after 3 minutes).

Painted sugar cookies are painted before baking with a mixture of egg yolk, water, and food coloring, applied with small craft/watercolor brush. We baked (and hence also painted) all of them Saturday. Today we iced the gingerbread, and we decided to use the new piping tips and bags Wax has gotten for her new baking hobby and try out royal icing, which is made with egg white, instead of the plain sugar-lemon juice glaze we usually use, and try out techniques demonstrated by various pastry chefs and suggested in the above Claire Saffitz video (dipping and flooding, specifically). And we had a good time! I have a feeling we're going to regret leaving no uniced gingerbread though, because the quantity of sugar on a flooded or dipped cookie with sugar sprinkles on top is significantly more than the quantity on a piped or uniced cookie, which is... what we usually do with gingerbread.

Coming during this week: lingonberry mousse cake with Russian caramel and mocha amaretto cake; marshmallow walnut fudge and chocolate pretzel sticks.