Cookies!

Recently I revisited the list, and, in an effort to continue progress, looked at what could be completed with minimal effort, what required a specific person or event to be completed, and what was probably out of my league for now.

Top of the list was Springerle.

I've wanted to learn to make Springerle for many years, since I first tried them at Pennsic, courtesy of Goode Cookys, who were selling them for a couple of years.
My taste for them was encouraged by the gift that Master Huen of Damebrigge made to AEthelmearc Royal for several years in a row, of boxes of Escarbuncle Springerle, which are as beautiful and patriotic as they are delicious.
They were the main snack at my husband's sudden Pennsic knighting vigil.

I've been put off by the fact that making Springerle requires molds, which are often fairly to very expensive. Last year I bought a Springerle mold at Pennsic, relatively cheaply, with a cutter that matches it. It's a Celtic Knot, which I also find appropriate for the fact that I'm posting this on Saint Patrick's Day!


I bought the Springerle Starter Kit from House on the Hill,who specialize in Springerle molds and supplies, and was on my way.

First a little background:
Springerle are a type of molded hard cookie from the area around Germany. They originated sometime around the 14th century, per wikipedia, making them well within our period of study.
They are a close relation of the Dutch Speculaas, which are made at the Sinterklaas festival (Saint Nicholas Day, Dec. 6), and usually feature windmills. The main difference is that Springerle are made with flavoring oils and hartshorn (a predecessor of baking powder), and Speculaas
are made with cinnamon and cloves and baking powder.

Springerle and Speculaas molds are made of wood, usually fruit wood, but almost always hard wood. They can be typical cookie-sized (2-3" diameter) or up to 2 or 3 feet in diameter for the really fancy ones. Many people use a Springerle rolling pin, which has multiple designs that get rolled into the cookies, and then you can use a knife to separate them.

Hartshorn is baker's ammonia, and was formerly made with ground deer horn (hart=adult male deer).
Because we generally don't use hartshorn anymore, it is not easy to find. The kit I bought contained a very small packet of hartshorn and a very small bottle of oil of anise, as well as a recipe.

I opened the package, and was immediately taken aback by the smell. I knew that hartshorn was a leavening agent, but I hadn't known the chemical composition, and was not prepared for it to smell like the strong ammonia they use as smelling salts in hospitals!
Luckily, the smell dissipates after a bit, so I let the package breathe, and then took out the components, letting each one sit for a bit before opening it further.
My historical baking friends assured me that the scent does not affect the taste or smell of the cookies--it bakes off. This is apparently only true for cookies and crackers, because the thicker the dough, the longer it takes to bake off. The recipe warned not to eat the dough.

The next surprise was how very much powdered sugar and cake flour is in this recipe. It takes a whole container of each.

The dough-making was rough on the shoulders, because it is such a stiff dough that mixing the last of the flour and powdered sugar in is really hard. I think that if I were doing it by hand instead of with a mixer for the most part, I would be exhausted by the end.

On the plus side, once the dough is done and rests a bit, it rolls like a dream, and the impression of the stamp is beautiful.


I started by stamping the cookies and then cutting them out, but that turned out to be a mistake. My cutter is slightly larger than the stamp, so there I was, trying to be frugal with the dough as I'd been taught, and when I went to cut the cookies, there wasn't enough room between. After the first batch, I ended up stamping and then cutting as I went, to make sure it worked.

The recipe warned that they yield is tied to how thinly you roll the cookies, and what size mold you use. I was using a 3" round mold, rolled mine about 1/4" thick, and got about 180 cookies.

Once cut, the cookies had to dry overnight. There was my next mistake. I commonly skim recipes and that results in missing information, which usually means going to the grocery store in the middle of cooking. This time I missed two things: I made them late at night, which meant that when I went to bake them in the morning it had only been a few hours, rather than the 24 recommended. I also didn't turn them over in the middle of the drying process, so the bottoms were not dry.

I baked the first batch for 30 minutes, went to take them out and found that the bottoms were still doughy, and if I took a bite, it was dough all through, with a slight crust on top. I put them back in for another 30 minutes. Not much change.
The first batch ended up taking 3 hours, and the second batch (which I turned over as soon as I realized what was going on, didn't bake until late afternoon, and then turned up the heat a bit) took about 1 1/2 hours.

You can tell which ones are from which batch: the first batch is a little tan on the inside, where the second batch is white all through.


They taste fine, although they are hard as rocks, so need to be dunked in liquid to be eaten safely (my toddler likes to gnaw on them, though).

I couldn't eat them until 24 hours later, though, because my life was so saturated with anise scent that day that eating a strongly flavored anise cookie was just not okay.

In the future, I would like to try other flavors and maybe colors and stamps, and I would like to consult with Master Huen on the potential differences between the medieval recipe, the recipe he uses, and what I used. His cookies are always soft in the middle, but not doughy, and I'd like to figure out how to achieve that.