My friend Laura has some Estonian heritage and makes Piparkoogid (Estonian spice cookies) with her family during the holiday season. This year, she decided to share her recipe and make Piparkoogid with me!
Laura's recipe comes from a recipe book that her grandmother put together, which features not only recipes, but also helpful tips, drawings, and some of her favorite sayings. It was really fun to look though it.
The dough is flavored with a spice syrup, which you make by warming golden syrup with cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and cardamom. Laura informed us that the dough tastes even better than the baked cookies, so we ate a lot of dough before we started baking. The flavor of the dough and eventually the cookies was very good--a very complex warmth from the spices and butter.
Piparkoogid are decorated before baking, by applying colored sugar and almonds to the dough which has been made slightly sticky with a brushing of beaten egg. I think they are typically cut into Chrismas shapes (gingerbread persons, stars, and trees) but we didn't have any Christmas cookie cutters, so we had to make do.We didn't end up doing a very elegant job of decorating the cookies, as you can probably see from looking at the rather sad Christmas tree to the right. As we found out, it is really hard to sprinkle colored sugar precisely!
We ended up making kind of a joke out of it, and most of the cookies ended up looking totally bizarre. We took them to work and everyone ate them though!
The same day, Laura was gracious enough to drive us to get a Christmas tree so we wouldn't have to convince some cab or bus driver to let us take it in their vehicle. We ended up getting the most beautiful, symmetrical, densely-needled Christmas tree I think I've ever had!
1 comment:
i love your cookies, even though they are a little freakish looking. the recipe sounds delicious!
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