holiday cookie time!

well, here it is. yahooyipyipyiphooorayyy. christmas cookie time! here are the first ones of the season. i just love making a huge mess in the kitchen while baking.
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flour flour everywhere. i make two recipes, and one of them has you beat the eggs for 15 to 20 minutes before adding the dry ingredients. then you add 6 cups (!) of powdered sugar, which poofs everywhere. damn i like baking. i make a huge mess, and wife doesn't complain!

here are a couple of the molds i use to make my springerle cookies. one is a carved rolling pin my friend Karin gave me. her mother gave it to her, but since making these cookies is such a pain in the backside, I inherited the roller, because Karin knows i make goooooooood springerle and she just never bothered. it's a really good roller, with the patterns cut deeply, as you would expect from an old springerle roller from germany. the new ones you find in the stores and on the web suck. the impressions are cut very shallow, and don't leave the pattern on the cookie worth a damn. a couple of other molds i use come from an on-line shop called House on the Hill. they sell a wide variety of springerle and speculaas cookie molds and presses. i bought several a couple of years ago. some of the patterns are centuries old, and that's pretty cool. they've been able to resurrect these old patterns and save them from slipping away. Father Christmas and the 6-in-one press make spectacular cookies. the one i like the best though is the diamond gems press that makes cookies about 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 inch diamond shaped cookiesthe actual press is about 12 inches tall and 8 or 9 inches across. it's rounded just a little, which makes pressing and removing easier.
they have some really good roller pins too, with BIG impressions. too big for me, but they would make killer cookies. i like the very old carved roller Karin gave me, if for no other reason than it's from Karin.

don't tell anyone, but i ordered this pin for some of next year's batchesjust because.

and here's what springerle looks like after they coolWHAT? they look like ziplok bags? well, to tell the truth, these cookies suck bigtime fresh. to really get the full effect, you have to seal them up tightly for at least a week or more.

what is a springerle cookie? it's a hard biscuit type of cookie flavored with anise and lemon peel. are they good? i've been making springerle for years, and typically the 12 or 14 dozen i make don't last two days after they've been set out for consumption. i've been told my cookies are at least as good as "momma's" from germany. works for me. these hard as hardtack cookies just melt in your mouth after a dunking in a cup of deep dark roasted coffee. i can hardly wait.

these cookies take at least two days to make, and require many square feet of space while drying prior to baking. if you really want the recipes i use, email me, and i'll send them along.

all this post was really about was how big a mess you can make while baking, but it got out of hand!