Are you also baking cookies for the season? I was and it is so much fun! You especially seem to like my new recipe for spritz cookies without a cookie press. Below I give you a lot of new ideas (including previious years of my cookie plate) so that you have an abundance of cookies available. Have fun baking!
Have you heard of Springerle cookies from Germany? Traditionally they are made with anise seed. However, I don’t really like that flavor and instead made them with orange zest and vanilla extract. If you want to do the traditional flavor, I have you covered as well. Springerle cookies are a cookie that needs to be made in advance. It takes three days until they are baked and will intesify in flavor over the course of weeks. For that reason I recommend making them already now if you want to try them for Christmas. If you believe Wikipedia, Springerle cookies were already made in the Middle Ages and served for a lot of festivities, including weddings. The cookie molds were made from pear trees and passed down from generation to generation. I found my cookie mold here in Munich at the store Holzstandl, you may also try Etsy.
Spritz cookies without any cookie press, this is what I am presenting to you today. All you will need is a piping bag with a star tip and you should be good to go. In order for it to work, there are two secrets: first the consistency of the dough can be altered by adding milk by the spoonful, and second, in order for the piping bag not to explode, we will fasten it with some scotch tape. Kindly note that you need to find the happy middle between very dense dough, which is hard to pipe and dough that is too loose so the cookies won’t hold their shape. It does require a bit of experimenting until you have the right consistency. I hope that below instructions are helpful.
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Have you every heard of “alfajores”? These are sandwich cookies that are usually filled with the caramel cream called dulce de leche. They originally stem from Andalucia in Spain, but have become extremely popular in Uruguay and Argentina. Supposedly about 10 million (!) alfajores are sold each day in Argentina in 2023. The “original” is usually made with flour and cornstarch and creates this nice crunchy texture, however, my version below contains flour and almonds instead. The classic alfajor is usually rolled in coconut flakes, however, I will used chopped almonds for this version.
Aren’t these tiny gingerbread houses cute? Bonus point, they are even vegan, I tried for the first time vegan royal icing and the secret is chickpea brine! That is the only “funny” ingredient you need, but other than that, all pretty normal. Of course I already have these cute little gingerbread houses here on the blog. Those are made with normal royal icing, which has egg whites. However, this time I decided to make them fully vegan. I already knew that making the dough vegan was super easy as it does not contain any egg (or potassium carbonate, which for some strange reason is used in seasonal baking in Germany). So I knew the only obstacle to tackle was the vegan icing. Royal icing contains egg whites, however, we are going to use the brine of chickpeas, also known as aquafaba. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was. So are you in? Do you want to gift these to somebody?
Guys, I will do a cookie week starting as of today. I decided to do this early so that you can research recipes and plan ahead. You may even ship cookies and for that it is always better to start in advance, I at least freeze mine before I send them out. You can read about how to ship cookies in this blog post. However, let’s get back to these Taiwanese pineapple cookies. I found the recipe on the German blog Life is full of goodies, Mara self-published a cookie cookbook, it is called “Internationales Plätzchenbuch“. She glazed hers, I decided to leave mine plain and just dust them with some icing sugar. 
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If it were for me, we could skip Halloween all together and dive right into Christmas season. Do you also feel that way? For me fall is perfect for a nice cookie, they are simply comfort food for me, cozy and simple. I remembered that I have a wonderful chocolate cookie on the blog with a caramel center. So I decided to revisit the recipe and tweak it a little bit. I mean, I originally published the recipe in 2017 and I do have a bit more baking experience under my belt. You won’t believe how many cookies I have baked in the last seven years as a pronounced cookie monster. The below recipe has a slightly lower amount of butter and chocolate chunks and I also decided to make them a bit smaller. Also, I decided to sprinkle the cookies with sea salt after baking. Seriously, it took nothing for the cookies to disappear and I need to make more again…
Today I have pumpkin cookies with browned butter for you. At least here in Germany pumpkin is normally only used in savory dishes, which is a pity! So I am following the North American tradition of using all things pumpkin in sweets and the like. I already have a few pumpkin cookies on the blog, so I will add this one to my small list. What I like about these is that you do not need to chill them and if you have canned pumpkin at hand, these are really easy to make. The only extra step is browning the butter, which will give a nutty and caramelized extra flavor. The icing also contains browned butter, so how about you try these?
Finally the heat wave is gone, it is rainy and cold and I can turn on the oven again, yay! Finally! So I decided to give these oatmeal chocolate chip cookies another go. Cookies are the best example of “ROI”, return on investment, you have to invest very little time and money for a wonderful result, cookies have the best ROI in my opinion. This is the cookie monster speaking. Oh, and in case you were wondering, yes, I did work in HR of a consulting company for a few years, I guess their lingo did rub off a little… So are you in for these simple and delicious cookies?
Awww, these are super cute, aren’t they? Cute little snowmen as macarons. I find it so fitting that it actually snowed during the night, what better time to publish this recipe than today? I published a bucket list on January 1 with 24 ideas of what you may wish to tackle in your baking, myself included. In my opinion French macarons should definitely be on your baking bucket list. I already have several recipes on my blog. However, what I hadn’t tried so far is to decorate macarons with royal icing. Maybe due to all the gingerbread houses I decorated with royal icing not long ago made me think. You can also decorate French macarons with them, so I decided to make some snowmen. I only decorated the macaron shells on the top with rocal icing. It actually was a lot of fun. I hope these sweeten a cold winter day for you!
