Already in the oven, nice and hot

[gwyn]

My house is redolent of anise and molasses and sugar and all the good spices from baking cookies all day. I have this ancient recipe from my mom's side of the family for these anise cookies that almost no one likes, and I used to make them with Dad all the time but I find it intimidating at the best of times, and these days aren't exactly the best. But I had to type it up a few years ago for someone on metafilter, and so I decided to try my hand at them on my own with a little help from mlyn, and while it didn't go great, it also wasn't a total disaster, so I figured I'd try again this year because I've missed them. There's just really nothing else out there like them, and much as I like pfefferneuse, it's not nearly close enough, though that's really the only thing in the spice/uncommon-in-America flavor profile cookie I know of. Also since I never really know if I'm going to be around in a year, I wanted to enjoy them while I could.

Back a few years ago when I made them, I asked musesfool, baker extraordinaire, for some advice on the recipe, because baking is just a mystery to me and I'm quite bad at it. She had some really good advice, but did I go look at it to refresh my memory before I began starting on the dough? No, I did not. So I made a lot of mistakes. Dad and I found it was best to let the dough sit in the fridge overnight, and the baked cookies are better when they sit for a day or two before icing, so it's kind of like a three-day extravaganza, and with my fatigue issues, I also have to constantly sit down. I am just fucking exhausted now and I still have more to do!

It makes so many cookies (and that was after my dad cut the recipe down three times!) that you're just baking and baking and baking. I had to shut the oven off and go sit for a while, in between big batches. But now they are baked and I will try to ice them all tomorrow, or at least as many as I can handle, so I can share them with the only people who wouldn't hate them. They don't taste terrible for all that I fucked up, but I can really tell I messed up mixing the early ingredients, and wish I'd read the instructions and musesfool's advice before I started. What a dumbass. Also, it's really a lie that turbinado sugar or succanat can substitute for white sugar. I didn't want to go out just to get sugar, which I thought I had enough of, but it does not turn out the same without white sugar and they are liars.

I bought myself some stuff to make a little Christmas dinner for one, but my stomach was roiling today for most of the day, and ended up just eating a bagel and some of the cookies that caught and were too burned to give away to anyone.

Now that I am so exhausted and the house smells so good, I think I'm going to head to bed early--I stayed up too late last night anyway, because it's my tradition to always watch It's a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve and then I was poking around in the Yuletide archive for far too long. I was so shocked that it opened in the middle of the day yesterday! I didn't see a whole lot that looked intriguing, since I'm so out of the loop on fandoms these days, but there's definitely some stuff to read and I was really thrilled to see that Rose Lerner's book True Pretenses had a fic written for it this year! So I had to read that one immediately.

Anyway, I hope you had a great holiday if you celebrate, and a very nice Thursday if you don't, and I will respond to all your kind comments on my last post soon, I promise.

Comments

[dine]

I'm sorry it wore you out, but how nice to have a house that smells so deliciously! I know recipients will appreciate your efforts!

hopefully you'll get some energy back so you can finish up, and enjoy a few days of good holiday-ish times

[ratcreature]

Wait, in the US anise is not a typical Christmas spice? I'm not very fond of anise cookies, because anise is too liquorice adjacent for me to enjoy as highlight rather than note, but they are a classic Christmas cookie? The ones I'm familiar with are pretty simple cookies though and not iced, basically just piped blobs (egg, sugar & flour plus a ton anise, no fat), dried overnight on the trays then baked the next day.

[gwyn]

No, definitely not! It's uncommon generally--star anise, which is different, is pretty popular especially in Thai food, but regular anise from aniseed, and licorice, are unpopular here. I know people who will say they love absinthe (probably because it's cool and goth to them) but say they hate anything in that flavor profile--anise, fennel, black licorice, etc. We usually refer to red licorice as just licorice, which is weird, and it isn't licorice but used to often come packaged with the black kind, but I've only occasionally met people who like the black kind, although salted licorice is becoming a lot more popular lately.

The cookies I make are a heavy dough, not like what you described--but those sound really good to me! Mine uses anise oil, which is hard to find--you can sometimes find extract in better stores, but it's rare, and this uses oil because extract isn't strong enough, so you really, really have to look for it in specialty places. Even cut down, it uses half a pound of lard (about 227 grams, I think?) and about 2 pounds of flour (I think over 900 grams), so you can imagine how strong it would need to be. Lots of molasses and sugars and the good spices--nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cinnamon.

It was handed down to my mom from her grandmother via her aunt--my mom was born in 1924 and her parents in the late 1800s, and her grandparents were all German. So it's very much a kind of old world recipe, and some of the originals that I used to put together one comprehensive, easy to read recipe, the paper was falling apart, foxed and stained and the ink was fading. It was pretty cool.

[gwyn]

That is such a cute icon! Makes me want to steal it!

[dine]

misbegotten made it years ago - if you credit her, you're welcome to steal it :D

[ratcreature]

Sounds tasty. My family didn't hand down any recipes. The "family" ones were more the type collected from the backs of mid-20th century early convenience food products.

I suppose very old recipes would come from before modern small ovens, so doing huge batches at once for also larger families makes sense. The anise cookies recipes I know are generally for one cup of flour & powdered sugar each with three eggs and just use only a teaspoon ground aniseed. If you like anise you should try a modern German recipe for comparison. The only tricky bit of them is that for their shape from raising and baking they need to stick to the baking tray during the process but still come off when finished so you can't use baking sheet paper but have to butter and flour the tray and do the overnight dry out rest, but otherwise it's just creaming the yolks with sugar, beat the whites stiff, mix, fold in the flour mixed with the anise and pinch of salt carefully, then pipe on the trays and let them dry over night before baking. So if you see a recipe that goes like that, it's the modern German standard "Anisplätzchen".