Cookies

Contents

• Butter Cookies
• No Bakes
• Colleen's Superdooper Combination Gingerbread Cookies
• Pfeffernüsse
• Seven Layer Cookies
• Gevulde koekjes

ButterCookies

Mix thoroughly...

1 c.	soft butter
1/2 c.	sugar
1	egg

Stir in...

1 T.	flavoring (vanilla, lemon, almond, etc.)

Sift together and stir in...

3 c.	sifted flour
1/2 t.	baking powder

Use cookie press to make cookies or else chill, roll, and cut into shapes. Place on ungreased baking sheet. Bake at 425°F until delicately browned, about 5 to 7 minutes. Makes approx. 7 dozen cookies. (Made 5 dozen Dec. 16, 1996.)

--The New Settlement Cook Book?

No Bakes

Mix ingredients in first column, bring to rolling boil. Add 1/2 t. salt & 1 t. vanilla. Add remaining ingredients, mix, and drop spoonfuls on waxed paper.

Colleen's Superdooper Combination Gingerbread Cookies

"So good Colleen can't eat 'em."

4 c.	flour	1 T.	ginger
1 1/2 t.	baking soda	2 t.	cimmonim cinnonim cinamon synonym
1 c.	shortening	2 t.	cloves
1 c.	sugar	1	egg
1/2 c.	dark corn syrup	1 or 2 t.	vinegar, optional
and 1/2 c.	water	1/2 t.	salt
or 1 c.	molasses

Stir flour, soda, spices. Beat shortening. Add sugar, beat. Add egg, molasses, beat. Add dry ingredients, beat. Cover. Chill 3 hours to overnight. Roll (by 1/3s, keep rest chilled) to 1/4 inch thick, cut. Bake at 375°F for 5-6 minutes. Cool 1 minute. Remove to wire rack.

--Colleen

Pfeffernüsse

Warm syrup (not too warm), add shortening and lemon juice and remaining ingredients in order given, soda mixed with flour. Roll into little balls, brush with egg white, place on greased pan, far apart, and bake until brown, 350°F. Roll in confectioner's sugar. Will keep.

Notes: add more flour; dough should be just stiff enough to roll by hand (use plenty of flour on hands—it works well to pat a hand on a plate of flour between cookies and dust one's hands off against each other). Bake and test, add more flour if desired—may take up to 2 c. more for full recipe. (Dec. 12, 1996, half recipe took extra 1/2 c.)

Since dough is brown, "bake until brown" is a useless instruction. Bake about 10 minutes until when cookie is broken apart—not cut—it shows moist crumbs inside. (If you cut the cookie it will crush down into apparently uncooked dough.)

Half recipe makes about a hundred. A full recipe made 265 (estimating those who died prenatally or in infancy). If all were made with quarter (instead of half dollar) bases, there would be about 300.

Store in an airtight container with a slice of apple or bread to preserve moisture. Replace the apple or bread every few days as they tend to mold when left too long.

Storebought pfeffernüsse are nicely rounded but hard as rocks. Cookies as made above are chewy but flattened. We found another recipe which recommended rolling the cookies and leaving them to dry for a few days before baking. We tried this, leaving them for about a day and rerolling them before baking, and successfully got a slightly more rounded but still chewy cookie. Two or three days sitting time would probably be best. But they don't taste any better if left to sit. They just look nicer.

--Sue and her Mom

Seven Layer Cookies

9x12 inch pan. 350°F. ~30 minutes.

Gevulde koekjes ("filled cookies")

Gevulde koekjes are the world's most perfect cookie. Seriously. This was the "secret recipe" of my beloved old lace teacher, Lies Stolk (1934–2021). In her old age she had to reveal the recipe so that we could help her with her annual Christmas baking of mountains of gevulde koekjes, and eventually take over the baking entirely. We discovered that the recipe is exactly as printed in a Dutch cookbook she had, except that she cut the sugar in the filling in half because she said otherwise the cookies would be too sweet. I must say I agree—the cookies are plenty sweet when made according to her recipe. The procedure as shown below was developed by my fellow student and lace maker Linda and I, as taught by Lies, with our added advice on how to make things go more smoothly.

For the dough:

(The recipe says to use "basterdsuiker", which Google Translate says is caster sugar. Wikipedia says it's sold as "superfine" sugar in the U.S., and I have found it in grocery stores, although I haven't looked lately.)

Mix flour, sugar, butter, and salt in bowl. (Mix using hands, or heavy duty mixer.) Add eggs and mix. Add more flour if too goopy. Chill.

For the filling:

Mix almond paste, sugar, and lemon extract, using hands (or heavy duty mixer). Add eggs, one at a time. Well, Lies would mix everything together all at once. Mix until there are only small lumps of almond paste—smaller than pea-sized, but petit pois size is fine.

For the glaze:

To decorate the cookies:

To make the cookies:

Preheat oven to 325°F. Roll out dough on well-floured board or counter, pretty thin, about an 1/8 of an inch, using plenty of flour on rolling pin and hands, and replenishing flour with wild abandon, to prevent sticking. (Before rolling, divide dough into 2 or 3 pieces depending on size of board and roll out one piece at a time.) Cut out rounds 4″ in diameter, using cutter or thin-walled glass or cup. Put leftover dough back in fridge to re-chill a little (if you work quickly enough, you can skip this). Fill a well-greased cookie sheet with rounds. Grease the sheet with butter. The cookies will only spread a little, so you can space them with as little as 1/2″ between them. For each round on the sheet, generously wet the whole round, making sure you get the edges and not worrying about whether or not you wet the centers—water can be any temperature, but lukewarm water works well. Put about 2T of filling on the round. Cover with another round. Press down well using well-wetted fingers, making sure edges are sealed all around, but don't crush. Brush generously with glaze, using pastry brush. Lightly press one whole almond into the center of each cookie. Bake 25–30 mins at 325°F, or until done—glaze should appear light brown. To cool, set cookie sheets on top of upside-down baking pans in a cool part of the house, like near a leaky exterior door. (You should insulate your doors better. If it's cool enough outdoors, you can set the cookies outside for a few minutes.) Be sure to use reasonably cool pans to start the next round of cookies.

When re-rolling leftover dough, add a little water to compensate for flour added during rolling, so that the dough will stick together. Add some butter and remix if it seems like the dough needs it. We didn't have to do this, though, even though we added something like half a cup of flour per dough recipe while rolling out rounds.

It's rather difficult and time-consuming to make this recipe alone, what with managing the rolling, the assembling, getting the cookies in and out of the oven at the right intervals, and cooling the cookies and pans. The cookies keep for months. It's enough effort to mix the dough and filling that the best way to make gevulde koekjes is for two people to mix up several batches and then assembly-line the baking. As a general rule, one person can roll and cut rounds and put them on trays, the other can wet bottom rounds and add filling, the roller can add top rounds, and the filler can assemble, glaze, get sheets in and out of the oven, cool cookies, and return cooled trays to receive new bottom rounds. This goes much more efficiently if you have a double oven, plenty of cookie sheets, and multiple timers, and slightly more efficiently if you have three people.

If you are making gevulde koekjes in quantity—even just a single recipe—you will need far more almond paste than comes in one of those teensy tubes one typically finds in a grocery store. You can buy almond paste in large cans. We get "American Almond Almond Paste 7 lb." ("American Almond" is the brand name.) At 800 g. per recipe, one 7-pound can will make 4 recipes of filling, so if you're ambitious you can use it up in a single baking spree. But as long as you store it well-sealed in the fridge so that it doesn't dry out, it will keep just fine for two or three years as you work your way through a can. Unless you snitch too much before baking time rolls around again.

Output:

• January 2015: A single recipe made 36 cookies at 3 7/8″ diameter. (My 4-inch cutter is very slightly undersized.)
• December 2015: Four recipes of dough and three of filling made 96 cookies at 3 7/8″ diameter—24 per recipe of dough and 37 per recipe of filling, and we used the leftover filling plus one cookie's worth of dough to make a semi-open tart with lots of filling. I think the moral of this story is that we weren't putting enough filling in each cookie. (And that we should communicate better so that we don't both make two batches of dough in advance.) Linda's clever innovations, for speed, were to assemble the cookies on the sheets so you don't have to transfer them, and to wet the whole bottom round before putting the filling on, which is much quicker than putting the filling on and them dabbing water around the edges of the round. With the two of us working at breakneck speed, it took ... 4 hours? Plus cleanup.
• December 2019: With Linda and Noa, 3 1/3 batches dough, 3 of filling, and Noa's kitchen with an endless supply of ovens, cookie sheets, etc., made 60 regular (i.e., large) cookies and 7 dozen small (made with a donut cutter). Small cookies may be suitable for a party with the kind of people who don't want to take a half cookie, but they're not as good—too much dough and not enough filling.

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