Cinnamon Stars, complete with a hole for hanging them off your tree.
This is the cookie we point to when people ask for an example of what we mean by a “heritage” cookie. There aren’t many Americans who are familiar with Zimtsterne (zimt = cinnamon, sterne = stars), but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in a German speaking country who does not know them. Or in a country that borders on one of those nations. They are as common and ubiquitous in that part of the world as Chocolate Chip Cookies in the U.S.
The fact that people need to learn about them is one part of the “strange”. The other lies in how the cookies are made.
If you’re reading this, we assume that you’re a baker. Have you ever seen, anywhere, a cookie where you bake on the icing? It’s brilliant!
At their core, Cinnamon Stars are nothing more than a very refined version of a dense macaroon. You grind up nuts (in this case using a mixture for added complexity), flavor those nuts (in this case with spices for yet more complexity), mix that with a French meringue (egg whites whipped with superfine or powdered sugar), and then bake (in this case using a very low oven for color and texture. Change the type of meringue with a higher percentage of whites, and you’ll end up with a flavored Macaron. Change the spices to metric ton of almond extract with an average 350 F (175 C) baking temperature, and you’ll have Amaretti. Make that a bit of citrus with almond meal instead of flour, and you’ll get the antique Renaissance versions like Sienese Ricciarelli or Spanish Almendrados.
It’s a simple concept. But… whoever heard of rolling out your macaroon dough before baking? Or baking on the icing?
It works because the icing is just that same French meringue mixed with added lemon juice. Meringue bakes well. Obviously. And that lemon juice works wonders, because being in the icing preserves all the high notes. That is one of the tricks we learned along the way. Lemon zest works great inside a cookie because the zest holds all the essential oils (the perfume of the fruit). But the tang of the lemon juice will disappear. If you want to catch those sharp, acidic notes you need to put them into an icing.
That covers “strange.” Wonderful comes from the overall flavor, and a Northern European tradition we’ve adopted for years: the Tree Of Gifts.
Moravian Snowflakes, Polish Gingerbread (Pierniczki), a chocolate angel (on the bottom), and a Cinnamon Star hiding behind the candle on the upper right.
Another view, with the Cinnamon Star on the upper left. Note that all the cookies are on the upper half of the tree. That’s essential if you have either small children or, in our case, a labrador retriever in residence.
A guest arrives during the holiday season? Invite them in, and say “Please have a treat off the tree!” It captures the spirit of the holiday like nothing else. Tree; decorations; sweets; cookies; and all topped off with hospitality.
Cinnamon Stars make great decorations because they’re sturdy enough to last through the holiday season. Snowflakes have no rival when it comes to appearance, but any humidity in the air will soften them up enough to sag an break through a ribbon. (Don’t even think of hanging them with a metal wire). And gingerbreads tend to be so thick and heavy that they make the branches sag if you aren’t careful. Cinnamon Stars are ideal.
You can decorate Cinnamon Stars by tinting the dough, the icing, or both. Or by standard decorating after they’re baked using royal icing, dragees, luster dust, etc. We tend to keep them plain, but that’s a question of taste.
As for “familiar”, there is absolutely nothing in this cookie that will surprise or offend the most tender of American palates. Cinnamon Stars taste like dense, chewy, lemony Snickerdoodles with a fantastic appearance, and a lot of fragrant nuts. It’s a no risk experiment.
A FINAL BONUS: THREE FREE TIPS THAT AREN’T IN THE BOOK:
The recipe calls for three egg whites. That works, but things get tight when you try to toe the line between reserving what you want for the icing, and still having enough to hold all the nuts. You’ll gain safety margin if you use size XL egg whites instead of the standard U.S. “large”.
Add a tablespoon of molasses to the dough if you want a higher contrast between the base and the bright white icing. It changes the flavor a bit, but not unpleasantly. Our book includes a standard variation on this recipe (Vanilla Sticks), and that is more different than the effect of a little molasses.
Remember that you don’t need to spread your icing all the way to the edge. The cookies look just as good, and arguably better, if you leave a gap between the edge of the icing and the edge of the cookie. To be completely honest, we only avoid that because our decoration skills aren’t up to that level of precision. Baking, yes. Precision artistry? Not so much.
And now, on to the recipe. Enjoy! This was the very first Pavelle addition to the Stoy family collection of every-year cookies. Don’t be at all surprised if it turns out to be mandatory for your family too.
NOTE: If the cookies dry out, put them in a tin with a piece of bread and leave it overnight. Come the next day they’ll be perfect all over again.
Our adventure with this extraordinary cookie began in 2019 when I met an old friend in the local supermarket – a former partner at the firm I joined out of law school. He had a cart full of baking supplies, I had just finished the initial version of our book, and Christmas was in the wind, so you can guess what happened next. I asked a question, he enthused, and we ended up in a discussion about family baking traditions. Who knew that Tom had a reputation going back for decades as the Great Baker of his circle? Birthday cakes, holiday cookies, even the occasional wedding table… just like us.
Tom gave the credit for his skill and passion to his Italian mother and grandmother. And he absolutely *loved* our cookbook project! “That reminds me of the one cookie I never managed to learn,” he said. “I don’t even know the name. It was black, dense, diamond shaped, and filled with chocolate, fruits, and nuts. Never any other shape. I wish I knew what it was.”
We used to follow a public radio program called The Splendid Table, hosted by a scholar of Italian cooking traditions named Lynn Rosetto Kasper. She had done a segment on something she called “winter cakes;” meal-sized Italian equivalents of what we call “waybreads” in our book. It’s a category populated by dense, ancient treats that your great-to-the-Nth ancestors prepared at two different times: (A) during the holidays, to enjoy in slivers all the way through April, or (B) for a loved one to take on some extended journey. The common denominator? Winter cakes (waybreads) last basically forever from a practical point of view, being packed with so much sweetness, dried fruits, nuts, and often booze that they won’t go stale.
The old English version is fruitcake, inherited into the U.S. tradition with a great deal of snickering and jokes. But other versions abound across Europe, and I knew this had to be one of them. The diamonds gave it away.
I know from earlier research that American immigrants often adapted their traditional waybreads to the new world by using a standard U.S. sheet pan in place of the specialty cake pans they’d left behind. Cut the sheet-waybread into cookie-sized pieces with a vertical line in one direction and a diagonal in the other, and voila! Diamonds, which are much prettier than little squares, much more “American” than big cake shapes, and have the added bonus of creating a series of little triangles by the edges for the cook and her helpers to “test the bake.”
SIDEBAR: Cookie bits have no calories if you’re nibbling for practical reasons like testing! Everyone knows that, right? Ask your own Baba or Nana or Grandma if you doubt me. Most of them will admit it, and the ones who don’t will huff up in that particular way that lets you know the truth.
So here’s the bottom line. This was some kind of ancient waybread or winter cake. It probably came from Italy, given Tom’s heritage. It was dark to the point of being black. It was heavy and probably unleavened. And the primary ingredients were a mix of various nuts, several fruits, and a solid hit of chocolate.
Which Waybread Was It?
Off to the Internet I went and it wasn’t long before my search returned a long series of hits for something called Panforte; a specialty of the ancient Italian city of Siena, in Tuscany, about an hour by car to the south of Florence. It hit on every category, even down to a series of American photos showing thin, cookie-sized diamonds.
Bullseye!
Our now-familiar development procedure followed after that. First I compiled as many recipes as I could to get a good feel for the variations and the flavor profile. Panforte is pretty common, so I had well over a dozen to choose from.
This research confirmed the mix-of-nuts approach Tom had described, with almonds and hazelnuts being the most common. I balanced the fruit flavors in my head, adding dried apricots as a potential substitute for the surprising presence of candied pineapple in so many recipes. I rejected citron – the bane of fruitcake eaters everywhere! – for the equally common and much better tasting candied orange peel. All pretty standard. Alter as you wish.
The sweetener in the recipe turned out to be a mix of honey cooked together with sugar. No surprise there! One of the best waybreads in Volume I is called Leckerli, a sheet pan cookie centered on walnuts. Northern Italy and Switzerland aren’t that far apart, so it came as no surprise to see parallels in their cookies.ƒ
Next came the spices. These varied hugely, as you might expect. I sifted through a dozen variations and then settled on something more or less in the middle with two minor variations – chili powder and cardamom. Neither was unknown, so this wasn’t a true heresy, but neither were they common. Still, the combination made sense in my head, and offered a side benefit. They gave the flavor profile a little twist compared to all our other recipes. Again, modify as you desire.
Time For Attempt #1, And… Wow.
Mega wow. Ridiculously absurd, over the top, odes-to-the-cookie-gods wow. These darned things were awesome! We almost couldn’t believe it. Were all Panforte this good?
Aye, there’s the rub.
Kate and I can tell good from bad easily enough. And these were certainly good. But how could we tell if they were “right”? Neither of us comes from an Italian background. We had no internal target to aim for.
This, my friends, called for a trip to the Strip District.
Always Find Native Testers
The Strip is a narrow piece of land in Pittsburgh about 2-3 blocks wide and 6-8 blocks long, located just up the Allegheny River from the Downtown triangle where the Al and the Mon meet to form the O. It’s been our favorite part of the city since we moved here because the two main drags (Penn Ave. and Smallman) are lined with wholesale/retail ethnic stores. These include a number of different Italian places with histories going back close to 100 years, and a veritable bevy of first generation immigrants. Just the people to test our new cookie!
First up: Giuseppe at Penn Mac a/k/a the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company. This is our go-to stop for nuts, dried fruit, and other staples, and we bring them a tin every year.
“Giuseppe, we know these are good. That’s obvious. But are they Right? We need someone from the Old Country to give a reality check. Would you mind?”
No, not at all. He took a bite… and then looked at us like we we’d left our brains in the street. “You think there’s something wrong with these? They could be straight from Italia! They’re perfect! Just let me have a couple more pieces before you go… [munch, mumble, mumble, munch].”
Wait a sec. That never happens. Not ever! I had to visit the Strip three different times when I was working up South America’s famous Alfajores, and those are a simple, childhood shortbread. Maybe Giuseppe was just being kind.
No problem. There are other Italian stores in the Strip. On to Enrico’s Biscotti, whose owner, Larry, teaches traditional Italian baking to full houses several times per year. He’s a generous man with both his goods and his knowledge, but also one who believes in sharing the hard truths too.
“They’re perfect! What are you worried about? I especially like that little hint of heat at the end. And that floral note. It’s fantastic [munch, mumble, mumble, munch].”
Chili powder and cardamom: check. Let’s try Colangelo’s around the corner, another wonderful Italian bakery/restaurant.
“You could sell these anywhere in Italy and they’d call them Panforte. And believe me, they’d buy them, too! [munch, mumble, mumble, munch].”
The pattern continues! Sunseri Brothers? Ditto. And on it went, up and down the Strip. The answer was always the same. These weren’t just authentic Panforte, they were among the best Panforte that anyone had ever tasted. Stop worrying. Start bragging. And don’t mess with success. [Munch, mumble, mumble, munch].
Conclusion
I heard back from Tom about a week later.
“You got it! You nailed it! After all these years it’s just like sitting in my mother’s kitchen again.”
I love cookies.
NOTE: You can convert this to the traditional Italian winter cake with a few easy adaptations:
First, bake it in a tall cake pan instead of a sheet pan.
Second, sandwich the result between special wafers you can buy online.
Third, feed the cake version with brandy over time just as people do with fruitcakes; a thin brushing once per week for a month or two.
And FWIW… We also found an online note suggesting that Tom’s great-to-the-Nth-Nana would have stored her Panforte in chestnut leaves back in the day. How cool is that?
Panforte cakes should be served it in slivers (not slices) as a special treat to enjoy all the way into early Spring. A little goes a long way.
When you make as many high quality cookies as we do, you get used to a couple of standard questions. The top two have to be, “What are your favorite cookies?” and “What is the favorite cookie overall?” The answer always disappoints: there are no real, statistical favorites because individual tastes end up dominating. But one thing we can say for sure is this:
People adore filled cookies.
There’s just something very “extra” about treats inside a treat. And that’s extra “extra” for Butter Jellies, because the jam in the middle (a) makes them spectacularly pretty, and (b) adds a series of bright berry flavors that cannot be baked into a dough. Yes, you can now find freeze dried berries in a lot of supermarkets. And yes, they add a bit of true berry flavor into your dough that people can taste even through all the butter and other ingredients. But it isn’t the same because the full berry flavor includes a lot of things that don’t come through, such as all the bright high notes.
Those require either an icing or, as in this case, a filling. The combination of tart/sweet jam and buttery cookie is irresistible. If these aren’t the #1 favorite on our annual tray, they probably count in the top three for a vast majority.
It’s really a simple cookie. Butter Jellies and their variations are a basic, roll-and-cut, shortbread/butter cookie with just enough flour to hold together for a few days after they’re sandwiched around liquidy jam. The variations are subtle, and amount to either more egg yolks (Grandma Kandler’s version, which is known in Switzerland as star shaped Mailanderli), or the use of egg whites instead of yolks for a drier mouthfeel (Swiss Spitzbuben). What about whole eggs? We tested it of course, and they work fine from the sturdiness point of view, but we ended up preferring either the rich chew of yolks alone or the dry counterpoint from using only whites. Your mileage may vary.
The jam is up to you. We used to adore rose hip jam, but it became unavailable 5-10 years ago. Nowadays it’s currant jam or blackberry because we reserve raspberry for Linzer Tarts.
And no! These are not Linzer Tarts! That is a name that comes from a classic, pie-sized Austrian Torte made from a fragrant hazelnut/lemon piecrust. No nuts, no Linzer. Thus Sayeth The Lord! So do not blaspheme. These are Butter Jellies.
Make Linzers too. That’s our solution, and if it’s good enough for our family, it’s good enough for yours!
BONUS FREEBIE! To convert Grandma’s version into true Mailanderli:
Use 3-4 yolks in the dough.
Increase the amount of lemon zest to a full 1-1/2 tsp.
Increase the amount of vanilla to a full 1-1/2 tsp.
Cut the dough into stars
Coat the top before baking with an egg wash made from 1 whole egg thinned with a bit of water.
You can follow Grandma’s cooking technique but we’ve had equal success with a constant 325.° Either way, they will want to cook longer because of the lower temperature. 20-25 minutes should be about right.
The recipe for Bear Paws took us more time than any other recipe we’ve dealt with so far. It took that long because Kate knew what they were supposed to be, and there wasn’t a single version that even came close. It was maddening! We went through more than a dozen trials trying to nail things down. Probably closer to 20. At some point you stop keeping count.
As always, feel free to skip to the bottom if you want the recipe without the blow by blow development choices.
Building Up From Flour And Nuts
The first problem we faced had to do with flour. Most Czech recipes specify an even 3 cups of flour (400-425 g) but our experiments with this amount failed. The flour you buy in Prague is a little coarser and lower-protein than the AP flour used here, and the amounts did not translate. We vacillated between adapting the recipe around that standard, or reducing the amount of flour to match the other ingredients. In the end we went with the latter, settling on 2¾ cups (around 350 g). (NOTE: For what it’s worth, adding an egg yolk had been the best solution at the 3-cup level and we invite you to use it if you want a cookie that’s a bit less heavy on the nuts. We needed an egg yolk anyway for the chocolate version.)
Next up came the nuts. You need to understand that nut cookies lie close to all Czech hearts, as exemplified by the national adoration for Nut Horns. Bear Paws don’t go quite that far, but they’re still a nut-centric treat. That meant we had to spend a lot of time playing with the flavor and texture at the same time we were working on the flour as well. Quick tip: there is a reason why scientists insist on changing only one variable at a time.
But we got there in the end! A big key to getting this recipe “right” lies in using different sizes of walnut (ground and also chopped), combined with some other nut for a more complex flavor. We ended up using ground almonds. Hazelnuts would have worked too, but I put my foot down. “Enough is enough. People who want nut perfection should turn the page to the Nut Horns recipe!” Besides, cookbook recipes should have different flavors, not just different shapes and textures. We weren’t after Nut Horns made in a mold.
The same logic applied to toasting the nuts in advance. We do that religiously for Nut Horns, but chose not to for Bear Paws. The added flavor, combined with the spice/honey flavors, did not add enough to justify the extra work, especially when we wanted the final product to stand out as something different.
But – the big “but” – you Dear Reader, do not have that same need! These may be forks in the road where you want to go right instead of left. Are you a founding member in the Cult of Filbert? If so, by all means feel free to replace all or part of the almonds with hazelnuts. (Just be sure to make a note in your book about the experiment and its results, so both the future you and your heirs won’t have to rely on the vagaries of the mind). The same thing goes for the soft nut component. We used walnuts because that’s what they have in Prague, and Heritage Cookies of the Old and New World focuses on traditional recipes rather than exploring new possibilities. But there’s no reason why American pecans would not work as well as walnuts, and maybe even better. Go ahead and give them a try. The same goes for cashews, macadamia nuts, and even peanuts. Play to your heart’s content.
Moving On To The Details
That covered the two main ingredients: flour and nuts. Our next few batches involved ventures into Spice Cookie Land. This, thank heaven, took less time than the first set of issues. The only complication lay in customizing the mix for the nut-only version and the chocolate-nut variation;, and then a third time for my Honey Bear Paws (which have now become the family favorite).
AN ASIDE: Yes, I really did put the name “Hunny Bear Paws” down as the initial recipe title for that variation. You have Kate to thank for avoiding the pain that eye roll would have caused. Just note that she issued the veto more because they were too good, than in protest against poor Pooh. “There’s nothing childish about that cookie, and it doesn’t deserve a childish name!” Fair enough. She was right on both accounts.
Of Cookies That Stick And Life Hacks Around Them
Don’t let the appearance confuse you! Actual Madeleines are a small, handheld cake. Bear Paws are a dense, flavorful nut-and-spice cookie. Only the shapes are the same, and in the Czech Republic people use the traditional paw-shaped molds instead.
Think we were done? Nope. There were two separate issues that go to the question of casualties. First, as Kate wrote in the book, “Whether in Prague or in Princeton, these were a right pain to make. The reason? They were tender, they stuck to the molds, and the yield was relatively low compared to cut-out cookies.” We tried, but could not solve that inherent problem.
Coat your your trays well with both butter and flour. Very well indeed. Fail and you won’t be happy.
But that still left us with some family history to contend with. Kate’s Grandma Kandler actually liked to have a certain level of “casualties” because they made perfect snacks to go with her daily cup of tea. [NOTE FROM SCOTT: And perhaps as perfect lures to gain tea-time with a cookie-obsessed granddaughter…? Grownups are tricky that way.]
Kate’s mom faced a different problem after they immigrated to America. She tried to avoid the casualties. First, because a lot of nuts were hard to find back in the 1980’s (particularly hazelnuts), and second, because she got less joy from sampling the wares. So Mom created a life-hack instead. Old fashioned Bear Paws resulted in too many losses? No problem. She saved those casualties in a big bag along with all the other damaged nut, spice, and butter cookies, and then combined them to make what we’ll call “Smart Lady Bear Paws.”
After everything else was done, Jarmila took out that bag of broken bits, tossed them into a food processor, and ground them into crumbs. Then she bound the crumbs with an egg-white meringue and voila! A tasty and pre-sweetened Casualty Macaroon dough! But then she made the next discovery; that dough would hold its shape if baked in a (religiously buttered and floured) Madeleine mold. And it was much less fragile than true, old fashioned Bear Paws. What came next… Well, let’s just say that the original ursine appendage cookies found themselves on the endangered species list.
That trick reduced Mom’s stress level a good deal, but it added to ours. Did we need to include the egg white version too? Should we just focus on the original ones you’d buy from a bakery in Prague? Should it be a separate cookie, a variation, or a Cookie Nerd note about casualties?
We went a good way down that road before I put my foot down again. “We’re writing a bookabout Heritage Cookies, not life hacks. The Smart Lady version might be a family tradition, but it hasn’t been around long enough to qualify as a heritage recipe.” And 20 darned attempts was enough. Besides, I wasn’t producing that many casualties after all that practice.
KATE: Bwaa haaa haaa! Tee hee hee hee!
SCOTT: She really does tee-hee. Honest.
KATE: Well, that part is true.
SCOTT: And no, the scarcity is not tied to me testing the bake! Besides, that’s the baker’s privilege.
KATE: omitted. [Author’s privilege].
SCOTT: Did you know, Dear Reader, that some people view unladylike words as even worse than unladylike guffaws?
KATE: Touchy, aren’t we? Tee hee hee.
But seriously – how do you write a recipe when there’s no way to know the proportion you’ll have of spice cookie bits compared to broken Butter Jellies and Bear Paws? Jarmila’s life hack wasn’t a “recipe,” it was a way to beat the system. And now you know it too.
Final Notes
About the decorations… The photos in our book show the full, impossibly cute version but there’s no need to go that far. We went whole hog with the decorations so the photo would tell a story that prevented people from confusing these for actual Madeleines.
The thing is, Kate will argue that less really is more in this case. The cookie itself tastes and feels amazing all on its own. All three varieties! The decorations add some extra sweetness, and the nut “claws” mess with that texture. There is something to be said for impossible cuteness, but fair is fair: you, Dear Reader, deserve to know that our household version does get baked in the Madeleine trays, but they’re served with nothing more than a dusting of powdered sugar. Especially the Honey Bear Paws.
And that covers it. Sorry for the length, but getting these right really was a saga. Enjoy!
It’s Autumn, which means I am already in the early throes of cookie baking. The annual checklist has been pinned by the calendar to keep track of the various cookies, and their status. These will be for giveaway; those for the house; those others for giveaways at book signings; etc. It’s all part of a well established system.
First, everyone in the family goes through our entire list of primary recipes. Each member picks five cookies that no one else has selected, making a total of 20 since our Labrador gets no say. Those go above the line.
Next, the parents/primary bakers slide in a few recipes to “balance the tray.” Have we covered citrusy, chocolaty, nutty, fruity, and dry-fruity? Did crunchy, light, chewy, fancy, and melty all get their due? We have to be fair, you know [eyes roll].
And then we get to step #3: cookies that I want to test. It isn’t official, but it happens every year so I may as well own up to it. You see, the research may continue year round, but we really do very little baking before October or after January. The recipes pile up until the [ahem] weight becomes hard to resist. And thus every Fall includes a certain amount of nagging requests for input about which ones the feminine component are [ahem] most eager [a/k/a willing] to try.
We probably average 2-4 of these every season, with January devoted to another 2-3 that I couldn’t get authorized during the Holiday extravaganza.
This year’s first experiment involved a Corsican specialty called Canistrelli, a famous wine-or-coffee dunker with several odd ingredients like olive oil and some white wine in the dough. The mix also had a hit of what we call “poverty flours;” those highly flavored, lower gluten flours that got replaced by standard white flour once technology made it cheap enough. Whole wheat (the precursor of white) is standard around the word, but this broader category includes anything that was a cheap substitute in pre-industrial times. In some parts of the world it was buckwheat. In Scandinavia it would have been rye. In central Europe, acorn flour. The Mediterranean nations used a lot of chestnut flour. Etc.
So… Canistrelli are ancient, regional, well loved, and unique? And they feature earthy chestnut and whole wheat flours? What could be more perfect target for Heritage Cookies Volume II?
I quickly set to work and put together an initial test recipe emphasizing the rustic notes. The main elements had Kate all but jumping around with excitement. Whole wheat that she’d picked up the other day; chestnut flour we saw on sale in the Strip District; olive oil, white wine, lemon zest, and brown sugar. Several online recipes also included anise seeds and either whole or slivered almonds, but we decided that would create too much overlap with other cookies, and might make it harder to focus on this rural core. I opted to keep them out for the initial test, and to instead rely on the flours for flavor. Those touches could wait for the later versions. Maybe some raisins or chocolate chips to add a few sweet pops, but that would be it.
I showed the test recipe to Kate for her input, which only made her more excited. “This one! You definitely need to do this one for the first experiment.” No butter? Great. Limited sugar? Fantastic! And ooh, it’s jam packed with heart healthy grains that measure high on the virtue spectrum. With all that in their favor, what could these be but…
Dog biscuits. Hand to heart, that’s what they taste like. Dog biscuits with sweet little pops.
One from Corsica and the other from Alpo! One must admit that the Corsican one improved over time.
Admit it: you know that flavor. Every child in America has sneaked a biscuit or two. What is that makes Fluffy, Spanky, and Rex sit there drooling each night? They had to be good, right? The dog isn’t a fool. And then you learned. Dog biscuits are plain, crunchy, vaguely bitter, and just not worth the effort to finish. Sort of like whole wheat bread from the 1970’s.
Our teenager wondering, “What is it that labrador sees in these things?”
Healthy? Well, that sort of depends on how much credit you give to those slim, thin diet gurus who stay that way by filling their plates with pseudo-food that isn’t worth eating in the first place. Maybe that’s how these should be marketed! Whole grain desserts perfectly suited to follow a dressing-on-the-side, chicory-sprouts-and-tofu salad.
Sorry folks. Virtue points go only so far. Even for Kate. And you know the worst part? Even our lab got stiffed on this one, because I did add those raisins and chocolate chips, and both are bad for dogs!
Epic fail. Post it on Facebook as a funny story and a lesson about just how badly an experiment can go wrong.
Still, we knew there had to be a version of this recipe that works. It’s just too popular to be this actively bad. Besides, the texture came out just as we’d hoped. So, duly chastened and just a bit traumatized set back to work with the reminder that poverty flours lost out to white for very good reasons. They’re only romantic in myth, age-dimmed memories, and very limited amounts. Hints are intriguing. More than that is… not.
Version two changed the recipe by trying a 4:1 ratio of white to “other” flour, with the olive oil cut 3:1 by a flavorless vegetable oil. That was much better. Yes, they were a bit plain and somewhat boring, and it became clear that chocolate chips were just a bad idea. But it was getting close.
So version 3 would be… Wait a sec! Something strange just happened! Kate found the old tin of Version 1 dog biscuits, and came running over in excitement. “These are way better than they used to be!” And they were. Even I, traumatized and doubting as I was, had to admit that the worst of the bitter, acrid flavors had gassed out over the past three days. They still weren’t something I’d serve to company, but Kate was actually willing to eat them. [Her stance on health based brownie points being a lot more generous than mine]. Marital harmony was restored and, more to the point, it became clear that something was going on at a level I hadn’t considered.
I suspended the baking and went back to search through the Internet for a bit more background. The first effort had been based off four different versions, with a slant toward the poverty flours. We don’t have access to someone from Corsica to tell us about the norms, so research would have to substitute.
Some 14 recipes later, I emerged with a clearer view of what was going on.
1. The further you get from Corsica, the lower the amount of poverty flour. Two English versions were all the way down to zero! That made sense in a way. Corsica has never been what you’d call wealthy. Beautiful, yes. But not wealthy. So a higher percentage of poverty flours made sense, especially when reinforced by the way people get used to the taste of whole wheat flour. The more you eat, the more you can get away with.
Kate really, really wanted to come out of this with a cookie that would feature a distinct poverty flour tang. It just had to contain that tang enough to be friendly for rookies who hadn’t become accustomed to those notes. We’d start by simply cutting the amount of tangy product, with notes that bakers should increase it as tolerance and taste permit.
2. The amount of variation in added flavors said something too. My research showed some absolutely huge variations. This recipe reeked of anise. That one included no anise, but had a full two tablespoons of aromatic herbs. This other centered on smoked paprika. That fourth one piled in whole nuts, with walnut oil and almond extract. On and on.
You’d think all that variation would make it even harder to nail down the pattern, but the third observation tied it all together:
3. Canistrelli inevitably get described in romantic terms that basically amount to, “That treat we enjoyed while sitting on the veranda of our hotel, watching the scenery with a glass of wine/espresso as we talked…”
Step back and you’ll see the pattern. Hotel = chefy variations, restrained only by a strong tradition that defined the texture and the purpose. But at the same time, those variations were all very intense in their own way. Whole wheat and chestnut flavors dominated the dog biscuit version. Anise, herbs, smoke-and-spice, nuts, and what-have-you clearly did the same to the new ones. Got it! Anything goes, so long as it’s dialed up to a “10”. That was enough to finalize the target.
Canistrelli are supposed to be right on the dividing line between savory and sweet, with much less sugar than the things you’d see on a wedding table or holiday tray.
They must be very crunchy, on the dry side, and are intended to be a dunker.
They usually have a bitter element, but it’s always balanced against the baker’s choice of flavor.
That flavor can be anything, so long as it’s strong enough to fight through the dryness, and clear enough to complement whatever drink you’re serving on that veranda.
And some of that flavor really ought to come from oil, wine, and/or liqueur in the dough.
Day 6. I went back to the drawing board, properly armed, to the music occasional snarfing noises as Kate dug into the no-longer-dog-biscuits beside her morning coffee, and sometimes her evening glass of wine. [Objection from the peanut gallery: “Kate does not ‘snarf’!”][Of course not dear. Poetic license. What words would you use to describe the sound?] [“Just zip it, okay?”]
Let’s try this again. Day 6. Kate has decided she likes the original version, and keeps saying, “Don’t change it too much…” Listening attentively with nary a twitch of brow nor roll of eye, I manfully forge again. Don’t worry my love, I’ve got this!
And this time… it works. These aren’t my personal favorites. I’m not going to hide that fact. But they have become one of Kate’s, and she has put her flag in the ground to defend her plan of keeping a regular supply on hand. So the bottom line is this: The recipe below will produce something the natives of Corsica would call a Canistrelli every time, even if those who don’t know the story would be hard pressed to understand how they all fit together. If you have a taste for whole-grain tang, you’re likely to fall into Camp Kate and find this to be one of our greatest triumphs.
If you lack that taste, you’ll be off in Camp Scott, shaking your head in a confused state evenly spaced between wonder, delight, horror, and some culinary word to invoke my inevitable wince. But I’m man enough to admit that my taste isn’t “right;” it’s just mine. Your mileage may vary.
One of my favorite bakes is gingerbread, and I especially like the way it comes out of the mold. I know that Scott gave you got a molded cookie in a recent blog, but we tend to start with the hardest ones first. We also start our baking with cookies that need to sit for a while and soften naturally.
Behold the soft plentitude of molasses and spices! The glaze is optional – I like to mix rum or brandy with powdered sugar until it’s thin enough to paint on with a soft, clean paintbrush.
These beauties are raw, the way they come out of the carved wooden mold. Their features dull a little upon baking, but the glaze will bring them back out. Stay tuned for more images later.
Leave the formed cookies out to dry overnight, preferably in the fridge or under a fan. This will create a surface that’s just a little firmer than the bottoms that were resting on your parchment or tray. When the cookies rise during baking, Boyle’s Law says they will tend to have that surface rise up instead of spreading out with the moister, underneath part of the dough.
These are the two main tricks that allow for the creation of super-fine features on Springerle, the smooth caps on Macarons, and all the other cookies that feature a “foot” on the bottom..
And now I’m off to order our special, “we’re releasing our cookbook” tins! We’re not scouring local dollar stores this time. I want all the tins to have a nice, streamlined design and a custom-made label that will echo the branding of the cookbook cover – something I hope to show you next week.
