So while Brooke and I were in Freiburg we happened upon a little market in front of the cathedral. One of the vendors was selling hand-carved wooden molds (as in for cookies or bread), and Brooke wanted to check them out. She has been trying to find some ever since she saw some really cool ones being used as decoration store in Brugge, but the store-owners refused to sell them to her. This stall-owner was really friendly, and explained that the different depths of mold were used for different types of cookies. He even gave us free samples of the two different types of cookies (good marketing technique).
I ended up buying a small-ish mold with a swan carved into it. The depth of my mold was for making Springele, a biscuit-like cookie flavored with anis seeds. The stall vendor gave me a recipe card along with the mold, so I could make them myself. Although I had the intention of making the cookies much sooner, I just got around to doing it last Wednesday/Thursday (the recipe called for letting the cookies dry overnight, which made the timing a little tricky).
The process took a lot longer than I expected, and the later cookies turned out a lot prettier than the first ones -- this kind of dough required lots of kneading and I'm used to the dough for scones and banana bread, which you're supposed to touch as little as possible. But once I figured out that a liberal amount of flour and lots of rolling and rerolling made the dough more workable, the swans came out clearer. And the mold made quite large cookies!
Here was the result:
The backdrop is a watercolor Mom did for me -- I thought it was an appropriate setting for the swans:
The recipe made 39 cookies, and I took most of them to École Bourgogne on Monday to share with the other teachers during the récré (recess, in this case the afternoon one at 3pm). The teachers take turns bringing some kind of cookies or biscuits to go with the coffee, tea, or hot chocolate most of them drink during the pause. The cookies were gone very quickly, so I think the teachers enjoyed them as much as I did. I plan to make them again in the future.
Here's the recipe, in case you're interested:
Ingredients
- 500g flour
- 500g super-fine sugar (or 'SUPA fine,' if your name is Peter Dayton)
- 4 eggs
- grated lemon rind (the recipe doesn't specify, I used half a lemon's worth)
- 1 knife-tip baking soda (after extensive internet searching, I found no definitive translation for '1 knife-tip,' so I used about half of a teaspoon, which seemed to work)
- 1 tablespoon rum
- Anis seed, for decoration
Preheat oven to 200 degrees Celcius / 375 degrees Fahrenheit (this wasn't listed on the recipe, so I sort of winged it). Whisk the eggs and sugar until foamy, mix the rum and baking soda and add with lemon rind to the egg mixture. Fold in the sieved flour and knead until the dough is smooth. Now cover with a towel and leave the dough to stand for an hour. Then cut small pieces of dough and roll them out to about 1cm thick (the dough is easier to work with if you roll it and reroll it multiple times, adding flour generously when needed). Dust the mold with flour and then press the rolled dough into the mold; turn the mold over and carefully remove the dough. Separate the shapes and cover and leave to dry overnight. Cover a greased baking sheet with anis seed and place the biscuits on it. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until just golden. If necessary prevent browning by covering with aluminum foil.
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