Cookie of the Week: Lebkuchen

Over the last few weeks I’ve had an uneasy feeling of familiarity with lockdown, and have not quite been able to put my finger on it. Then it struck me – it’s a little bit like that time between Christmas and New Year. The normal routine is out the window, many people are at home and it can be a bit of a struggle to bring much structure to the day. Well, except for the fact that I am still working, or at least trying my best to do so. It reminds me of a radio comedy I heard years ago where an evil genius how somehow managed to trap the whole of Britain in the Christmas limbo period and it lasted well into summer, but people were so lost and listless they didn’t realise.

Anyway, that gave me the idea to make something festive for my cookie of the week. So here are some German Lebkuchen.

And boy, could my timing have been much better? The glorious sunny weather we had been enjoying in London for the past few weeks decided to take a break and we’ve had the best part of a week of dark skies and some really lashing rain. My cats hated it, truth be told I didn’t really mind it, and the plants loved it. But it did feel very autumnal, even wintery at times, and I was quite pleased that morning coffee was accompanied by a sweet spiced lebkuchen coated in chocolate

This is what I’m ambitiously calling an “easy” recipe for Lebkuchen. Many traditional German recipes will call for a high nut content, leaving the dough to rest overnight, and you might find yourself hunting down unusual leavening ingredients like potash or baker’s ammonia. However this recipe uses thing you’ve probably got the baking cupboard, and the only tricky bit is when you coat one side in dark chocolate. If you’re preparing them to take pictures (as I was!) then you want to temper the chocolate so it is smooth and glossy, but if you’re making them to inhale with your morning coffee or afternoon cup of tea, you can just melt, coat and leave them like that. They’ll taste just as good.

The one thing I did struggle with was getting candied peel. I have not been near a big supermarket in nearly three months, and the places I have been clearly don’t see this as a “must stock” item. But I did have a few oranges, some sugar and way too much time, so I made the candied peel myself. It isn’t that hard, and I’ll probably do a post on it in the near future as it is also delicious if you then dunk the bits of sweet orange peel into dark chocolate. I know in some other areas flour has been in short supply, but I have not found that to be a problem. The moment you step away from supermarkets and check out smaller stores and delis, it’s right there. Even our local coffee place is in the act with a range of pasta and Italian “00” flour for sale.

The one fiddly bit that it’s worth knowing beforehand is that you want to make the glaze just before the cookies come out of the oven. You make it with icing sugar and hot water, so that it sets quickly on the hot cookies, and it taken on a sort of frosted appearance as it dries. I’ve found that if you leave the cookies to cool while you make the glaze, or you make it with cold water, you don’t get the same effect. It doesn’t add to the flavour, but it does look nice!

So there we have it – the essence of Christmas, in the middle of June. I might be one of the few people out there who is grateful for that temporary chilly spell in our weather so I could enjoy them!

To make Lebkuchen (makes 12):

For the dough

• 40g butter
• 75g soft brown sugar
• 50ml runny honey
• 1 medium egg
• 40ml milk
• 2 teaspoons mixed spice
• large pinch salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 tablespoon cocoa powder
• 100g plain flour
• 35g ground almonds
• 80g chopped nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts)
• 40g chopped candied orange peel

For the glaze

• 150g icing sugar
• hot water

To finish

• 200g dark chocolate

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C (355°F) and prepare two baking sheet with greaseproof paper.

2. Put the butter, sugar, honey, eggs, milk, spices and salt in a bowl. Beat until the mixture is well combined. Add the flour, ground almonds, baking powder, baking soda and cocoa powder and mix well. Finally fold in the chopped nuts and chopped candied peel. The mixture will be soft and sticky, but should not be runny.

3. Divide the dough into 12 portions – take tablespoons of the dough and place on the greaseproof paper – 6 cookies per sheet. Use damp fingers to press the dough to a circle of around 1/2 cm thickness.

4. Bake the cookies for around 15 minutes – they should puff up slightly and look dry, but should not start to darken at the edges.

5. Just before the cookies come out of the oven, make the glaze. Put the icing sugar in a bowl, and add enough hot water to make a glaze – you should be able to brush it onto the cookies, but don’t make it too runny or watery. Remove the cookies from the oven and immediately brush each with the warm glaze. As they cool, they should take on a “frosted” appearance, which will keep forming overnight as the sugar crystallises.

6. Once all the cookies are baked and the glaze is dry, temper the chocolate, then coat the flat side of each cookie and make any sort of whimsical pattern than you like. Leave to set, and enjoy!

To temper chocolate: follow this guide from the BBC using a thermometer!

Cake of the Week: Tiger Cake

I realised that so much of my lockdown baking has featured almonds and nuts, so today I’ve opted for something different. Good old marble cake, or as I’ve also seen it called, the more exciting-sounding tiger cake. Since this cake is being made with the assistance of a five year-old, we’re going with tiger. Raaaaaar!

I have always think that a tiger cake is a very German sort of cake, something that you have with afternoon coffee when you’re not able to get hold of something richer and laiden with cream from a Konditorei. Or perhaps for when you’ve had too much whipped cream and want something simpler. I don’t know that it is particularly German, but that’s just the way I think of it. However a quick check on Wikipedia suggests that this is indeed where it hails from, originating in the 19th century.

What I love about this cake is that there is an element of magic to it – you mix up the batter, then there is a little bit of creativity in how you put it into the pan. Once it has baked, you have to hope that you have a nice marbled pattern inside and that you didn’t mix the two colours too much before it went into the oven.

The trick to master is getting the right sort of patter inside. I do this using two spoons of the plain mixture, and then a spoonful of the chocolate batter, and keep going until you’ve put everything in the pan. Then I take a clean knife, insert it gently into the batter, and drag it carefully to get a bit more definition without mixing it up too much. But you can equally dump it all in and mix it up a bit with a spoon, or get super-fussy and put the batter into piping bags, and then squeeze out thin ribbons to get really detailed patterns. My son definitely enjoyed the spooning of the batter most, apart from the eventual eating of the cake…

When I make this, I always add vanilla, but sometimes I add a tiny amount of almond extract. Not so much that it is a dominant flavour, but it can add a little extra something to a cake that will be otherwise unadorned.

This is also a great cake to make ahead of time, and I think it tastes better the day after making. If you wanted to make it fancier, by all means add some sort of glaze, but I think it is fine as is, or with a simple dusting of icing sugar.

There you have it – tiger cake! This recipe is adapted from recipe of the fabulous Nordic Bakery in central London, albeit I’ve reduced the quantities so you don’t end up with a massive cake. There are just three of us in the house during lockdown, so there is a limit on just how much cake is safe to eat!

To make a Tiger Cake:

For the batter

• 180g butter
• 150g white caster sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 3 large eggs
• 180g plain flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 2 tablespoons milk

For the chocolate mixture

• 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 tablespoons milk

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Prepare a ring pan or bundt tin (mine was 20cm diameter, 10cm deep) – grease liberally with butter, then dust with plain flour, shake to get everything coated, and tip out any excess flour. Pop the pan into the fridge until you’re ready to use it.

2. Weigh your empty mixing bowl. Write down how much it weighs.

3. Make the batter. Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the vanilla, and mix well. Next one egg, beat well, plus a tablespoon of the flour. Repeat with the rest of the eggs. Finally, combine the remaining flour and the baking powder, then fold it into the batter. Finally add the milk and mix well. It should be smooth and soft, not firm.

4. Now you need to put one-third of the batter into a separate bowl. Weigh the main bowl again, and then subtract the weight of the empty bowl. Divide that number by three, and then take that amount of batter and put it into a separate bowl. Congratulations – you’re done this far more accurately than if you were doing it by eye with spoons!

5. Add the cocoa powder and milk to the separate bowl, and mix well.

6. Get the ring pan from the fridge. Add spoonfuls of the two mixtures – two of the plain, then one of the chocolate – and keep going until it is all in the pan. Try to get as much variation as you can so that the cake has lots of marbling / tiger pattern when you cut it later. Finish by dragging a clean knife gently through the batter for even more swirling.

7. Bake the cakes for around 40-50 minutes or until and inserted skewer comes out cleanly. Remove from the oven and leave to cool until lukewarm. Finally place a cooling rack or plate on top, then flip the cake over and it should come out cleanly. Wrap in cling film and leave to rest overnight.

8. Serve the cake as is, dust with icing sugar, or drizzle with chocolate or icing.

Cookie of the Week: Pain d’Amandes

Today’s cookie recipe is one that combines sophistication with simplicity. Just what you want with your lockdown mid-morning coffee.

They hail from Belgium, and go by the name of pain d’amande in French and amandelbood in Flemish, and just plain almond bread to you and me. Think of butterfly-thin crisp spiced cookies studded with almonds and you’re there. They’re a lovely addition to a cup of coffee, or used as a wafer with some ice cream. You can also stack them up like a house of cards, as we’re in lockdown and need to things to amuse us. I managed 3 levels!

I say that these are easy because they really are. You make a butter and sugar syrup, add the flour and spices, then add the almonds, then let it all set and chill in a block. Then you slice, bake and enjoy eating lots and lots of them.

The only bit that is vaguely tricky is getting those very thin slices. I found the best way is to make sure you have a very, very sharp knife, line it up, and go for it – press down in one clean move, and you should get an even slice. Avoid sawing or serrated knives so that you get nice, clean slices of almond peeking out.

You can play around with the flavours here. I used cinnamon, but you could add a dash of ginger, or cloves, or mixed spices. Orange zest would also work well, and you could swap out the almonds with whole hazelnuts or pistachios for a bit of contrast. I’ve seen some recipes that suggest you need to remove the skin from nuts before using them, but I happily used whole almonds, skin and all, and they were fine.

One little word of warning – whatever you do, don’t swap the sugar. I’ve made these a few times during lockdown, and they work well with dark brown sugar. But I decided to get creative and swapped it for light brown sugar. Big mistake. The dough seems like it is working, but once it has cooled, it becomes hard and brittle, so it is impossible to cut. It probably has something to do with the moisture content of different types of sugar, and I though it is worth sharing my culinary mishaps to prevent them happening to others!

I would also highly recommend doing a test bake with these – when you’ve sliced the first one, bake it solo to test how long you need in the oven. They are so thin that the difference between baked to crisp, buttery perfection and being incinerated is not that long. Better to go wrong on one than a tray of 30!

To make pain d’amandes (makes around 100 cookies)

• 100g butter
• 165g dark brown sugar
• 30ml water
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 250g plain flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 75g whole almonds, hazelnuts or pistachios

1. Put the butter, sugar, water and salt into a saucepan. Warm gently until the butter has melted and the sugar has dissolved, but do not let it boil.

2. Add half the flour and mix well. Add the rest of the flour, the cinnamon and the baking soda, and mix until combined. Mix in the nuts.

3. Put the mixture into a container to set. You want something with straight sides, and aim for a rectangle of 10 x 20cm. I used a square baking tray, then built a little “wall” of tin foil to get the right side, and lined it with greaseproof paper. Pop it in the fridge for a couple of hours to firm up.

4. Time to bake. Preheat the oven to 160°C (320°F). Line a baking tray with greaseproof paper.

5. Remove the dough from the fridge. Cut it in half lengthways. Now use a very sharp straight-edged knife to cut thin slices off the dough. Aim for around 2mm, and push the knife down in one clean movement. Arrange the slices on the baking sheet, leaving space fo them to expand(*).

6. Bake the cookies for around 8 minutes (or longer if your slices are thicker), turning half-way to get an even bake. They will be soft when they come up, but will turn hard once they cool. Store in an airtight container, and enjoy with coffee.

(*) I found it easiest to slice off as many piece of dough as I needed to fill the tray, then bake them in batches. Pop the dough back in the fridge while a batch is baking so it stays firm and easy to slice.