![]() This recipe includes ground cinnamon, ground cardamom, ground cloves, and ground ginger. I knew I wanted to use the Dala horse cookie cutters my in-laws gave me a few Christmases ago, so going with a Swedish recipe felt appropriate. In the end I decided to use the recipe from Fikaby Anna Brones and Johanna Kindvall. There are also differences in whether recipes use molasses, golden syrup, or something else. In fact, during my time in Norway I realized that whether or not pepperkaker should include actual black pepper is somewhat of a perpetually ongoing debate. While ginger and cinnamon are basically always included, you may or may not see cardamom, grated orange peel, and even pepper (hence the name!). I looked around at several different recipes – classic as they are, there can be quite a lot of variation in recipes for these cookies. So, as I mentioned, I decided to bake pepparkakor. You then have plenty of cookies on hand for holiday parties, gifting, or simply snacking on over the break. With our group of eight, we each went home with a selection of eight different kinds of cookies, but we each only had to bake one kind. After the cookies are baked, you meet up for a little holiday gathering, and you swap cookies with each person in the group, so that you dole out a dozen of your own cookies to each person (keeping a dozen for yourself), and you receive a dozen cookies of different types from each person in the group. Each person picks a cookie recipe to bake, and then you bake a dozen cookies for each person in the group. Here’s the basic concept: gather a small-to-medium sized group of people (say, 4-8 people). I’m so happy that Liv introduced me to the idea of a cookie exchange, too. Thanks to the array of spices in this dough, it is incredibly fragrant (it genuinely smells like gløgg, or mulled wine), and cutting out shapes with cookie cutters evokes a childlike glee within me, so how could I not? It’s been a slow transition, but I’m finally enjoying making food in our kitchen (hurra!), and I definitely enjoyed baking this classic Christmas cookie. It’s funny how sometimes you don’t realize how settled you feel in a place until you leave it in September we moved to Montréal, Canada, and after several months here we are just now starting to feel at home in our new apartment. I mentioned in my last post here, months ago, that we were getting ready to leave Norway. When my friend Liv invited me to take part in a Christmas cookie exchange, I saw the perfect opportunity to remedy that situation. Somehow, in my years of baking – before, during, and after living in Scandinavia – I had never before made the classic Scandinavian Christmas cookie: pepparkakor, as they’re known in Swedish (spelled pepperkaker in Norwegian), which are thin, crisp ginger snaps. ![]()
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