A Digression - Springerle!

For the next cookie recipe I decided to do something a little different. I was heading out to visit my parents in the Midwest in a week and I had gotten the idea to make a cookie I used to see my dad have when we visited his parents called Springerle. A traditional German cookie flavored with anise.

This wasn’t in the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook, so I used this one off of allrecipes.com: Springerle I

I had never made these cookies before, but wanted to surprise my dad with them when I came to visit. As it turns out I already had the needed rolling pin for them, I had dragged this thing around for years, but never had used it before. The cookies take 2 days to do, so I planned to roll them out on Saturday and then bake them on Sunday.

The recipe is pretty simple, beating the 4 eggs, then mixing in the sugar and butter. Then the usual flour and baking but makes a stiff dough, so once I had added most of the flour to the mixture of eggs, sugar and butter I turned it out onto the counter to knead the rest of the flour in. What was neat when you added the dry ingredients was the ¼ cup of anise seed that gets incorporated into the mix.

So once I kneaded it all together, adding extra flour as needed, I rolled it out to ½ inch thick and then used the Springerle rolling pin. I definitely need some practice with this, I was very inconsistent with how much pressure I applied, so some of the dough had a good impression, but some did not.

Next was how to cut the cookies out along the design, I realized a pizza cutter would be the perfect solution and I repeated the process several times rolling out the dough, pressing in the design with the carved rolling pin, and then cutting out more cookies. I moved them all to the anise seed covered tea towel.

Next was the easy part, you let them dry for a day.

Springerle cookies drying on a tea towel covered with anise seeds

A day later and I heated the over up to 325 and proceeded to bake the cookies for 15 minutes. I figured this was mainly to dry them out more, but when I checked them after 15 minutes they were puffed up from the bottom, and I was worried I had done something wrong.

Then when I took them out, most of the kind of lost the puffiness, sort of collapsed back to their original size. I assumed this was what was supposed to happen. So I had enough to bring 3 dozen to my dad and bring a few extra to work on Monday.

When I brought them in I sent an e-mail out to explain these cookies. As it turns out I should have read the wikipedia articlel myself before I embarked on making these because it explained a lot, and it let me know what I’d done wrong the first time! You can read about Springerle here on wikipedia.

So the drying of the cookies for a day was to prevent the design from being distorted when they rise, and the puffing up was supposed to happen, and not only that, it should have stayed puffed up so they have a ‘foot.’ So I realized I had to try it again and did so during the week.

This time I baked them 20 minutes instead of the recommended 15 and it did the trick as you can see in this picture. People had liked the original ones I made, but this second batch was superior. I let them dry on the cooling racks the next few days and then packed them into a couple of tins to bring to the midwest.



Springerle cooling after baking

'Foot' at bottom of cookie



Another example of the 'foot'

Lessons learned:

For very traditional cookies it’s worth reading the history to understand better what’s going on with the cookie.

Need to practice getting consistent pressure when rolling out the designs.

These cookies would probably be perfect for cookie stamps. May try that next time!