Our favourite German Lebkuchen: Recipe
I married into the German culture and I am pretty sure that Lebkuchen are high on the list of the best and most loved food from that culture. At least it's very high on my list. Every year my mother in law makes sure that I have enough spices to make them and it really has become part of my Christmas experience. We make out advent calendar out of them, always build a house, bake them for the neighbours. Every year people have asked me for this recipe and every year I promised that I will give it to them, but I never did, because I only have a paper version and it is in German. But here it is, translated and all.
If you make this complete recipe you will end up with over 4 kgs of cookies which is amazing and they will be eaten, but it is also a lot of work. I usually make a quarter and I am sure that you can work out for yourself what the measurements should be for that.
Ingredients
- 400 g butter or margarine
- 500 g (brown) sugar
- 1 kg syrup or honey
- a pinch of salt
- 4 eggs
- 30 g cocoa
- tea spoon of vanilla essence
- 2 packets of "lebkuchen spice" (or 8 tsp cloves, 12 tsp cinnamon, a pinch of aniseed, cardamon and ginger.)
- 2-2,5 kg flour
- 10 tsp baking powder
Instructions
- Put the butter, the syrup and the sugar in a pot and place over a medium heat and bring to a soft boil.
- Let this mixture cool down.
- Mix everything except the flour in the cooled down syrup mixture and stir well.
- Lastly add the flour. It is hard to say how much you must mix as it seems to depend on your mixture, your flour, the weather and maybe even your mood. But mix until you have a nice play-dough like substance that you can easily roll out. It should not be sticky (then you need to add more flour) or too crumbly (when this happened I have had success with adding a little extra syrup but it's a bit tricky.)
- Dust some flour over your kitchen counter and roll out. I have noticed that it does not really matter how thick or thin the cookies are, so do whatever you like. Just make sure that you don't add too much flour during this stage.
- Cut out your shapes with cookie cutters or a knife (This dough is perfect for gingerbread houses too.) and bake in the oven on 180C until they are slightly brown.
When they are fresh out of the oven they will be soft so you can make holes in them if you want to hang them in the tree. They will firm up and get super hard but if you leave them out of a closed box they will get nice and soft, that's the way I like them best.
To decorate them I mix an egg white with powder sugar until it is rather firm. Pipe this out with a piping bag or make your own piping bag with baking parchment. (bbcgoodfood.com/videos/techniques/how-make-piping-bag)
Enjoy and let me know how it worked for you!
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| Last year! I promised Sophie we will make one on the farm this year. |
