Svenska Pepper Kakor / Swedish Spice Cookies

The other most common Christmas goodies here are these Pepper Kakor/ Pepper cookies. There are boxes and boxes of these in all the stores and super markets. And the stores are offering samples of these to customers, people are buying them or making them in bulk to eat and distribute among friends and relatives.

These cookies are paper thin, very crisp and almost melt in the mouth once you chew it. With significant flavors of spices like Cinnamon, Pepper, Ginger, Cloves and with tastes of sweetness, salt and heat from the pepper, they are quite interesting. And let me warn you – they fit into the 'can't stop eating, one after the other' category!! I halved the recipe below, and it was quite sufficient for us – half the dough still lies in the freezer, and there are still some more baked cookies left over too – in spite of eating them constantly!! So it makes quite a huge batch.

Svenska Pepper Kakor / Swedish Spice Cookies

Preparation time: ~10 min + ~20 min + resting time

Baking Time: ~10 min

Adapted from: Many sources on the net

Ingredients:

• Sugar – 1 ½ cups
• Shortening - 1 cup
• Egg - 1
• Molasses - 2 Tbsp [I omitted this – see notes]
• Vinegar - 2 Tbsp
• All Purpose Flour - 3 cups
• Baking soda - 2 tsp
• Salt – ½ tsp
• Finely ground Cinnamon - 1 tsp
• Finely ground Cloves - 1 tsp
• Finely ground Ginger - 1 tsp
• Finely ground pepper - 1 tsp [I also used a little chili flakes for extra heat!]
  
  
  
  

Preparation

• Mix sugar, shortening, egg, molasses, and vinegar together well.
• Sift together flour, soda, salt, cinnamon, cloves and ginger.
• Mix the two together.
• Cover in a cling wrap and chill in the refrigerator for a few hours or overnight
• Preheat the oven to 170°C and line two or three large baking sheets with baking parchment.
• Roll out the biscuit dough with a floured rolling pin on a lightly floured surface until it is roughly 2mm thick. [The thinner you roll it, the crisper the biscuits will be – but if the dough gets too thin, the biscuits will be tricky to transfer to a baking sheet – see notes for why mine are shaped so badly]
• Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for 8-10 minutes or until golden brown and crisp.
• Allow to cool on a wire rack while you repeat the rolling, cutting and baking until all the dough is used up.
• If you find that the cooled biscuits are still a little soft, you can always pop them back in a 150°C oven to dry out.
• Cool completely and store in airtight containers – they stay fresh for several days – apparently even a couple of months.

Notes:

• This dough freezes well, so you can mix a batch and freeze half for later use.
• Since I didn't have molasses, I just omitted it. I should have substituted honey for it. Since the binding of the dough was thus less, rolling and cutting out shapes was quite difficult for me – as I wanted them real thin like in the stores. It took a lot of juggling to do it, so I simply pinched out marble sized balls of the dough and pressed them flat on the baking tray and with a rolling pin, rolled them thin. That explains the uneven circles!

Lussekatter / Lucia Cats / Sweet Saffron Buns

The whole city is glittering in the Christmas and New year spirit.... with the roads glittering with lights, malls with X-mas tree decorated so well, all the window panes of apartments shining with a star and candles, shops bustling with people... It is such a nice feeling in the cold month of December, that keeps the spirits up when the days are so short and hardly any trace of Sun and cold weather outside.

From the beginning of December the stores are selling a lot of Christmas goodies, most of them traditional, sold and eaten mostly in the month of X-mas. One of them is this Saffron Buns that the Swedes call Lussekatter or Lucia Cats.

These buns are traditionally served in Scandinavia on 13 December, St. Lucia Day. But people also have it on Christmas and also on other days of December.

They contain butter, milk and optionally a small amount of egg, sweet and loaded with a flavor of Saffron. The saffron also gives them a nice golden color. Seeing them all over the stores, I was tempted to make them too! And here they are...

Lussekatter / Lucia Cats / Sweet Saffron Buns

Preparation time: ~20 min + ~10 min + rising time

Baking Time: ~15 min

Adapted from: http://etherwork.net/ejmtph/recipes/luciacats_saffron.html

Ingredients:

• Milk – 1 ¼ Cup
• Butter - ½ c (100 g)
• Instant Yeast - 2½ tsp
• Sugar - ⅓ cup
• Saffron threads - ½ tsp (approx 1g)
• Salt - ½ tsp
• Egg - ½, beaten
• All-Purpose Flour - 3 c (450g)
• Cream or Milk (or the other half egg), for brushing
• Raisins, for decoration
  

Preparation:

• Heat milk till it is warm
• Cut butter into pieces into a mixing bowl large enough for the dough to double.
• Pour the warm milk over the butter and stir to let it melt. Mix in yeast (If using Active dry yeast, allow 5 minutes to froth, if using instant yeast, continue)
• Put saffron and a bit of the sugar into a mortar and use the pestle to grind the saffron finely.
• To the milk mixture, add the rest of the sugar, saffron, ½ an egg. Stir. Then mix in almost all of the flour and salt until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl.
• Sprinkle a little of the leftover flour onto a board. Turn the dough out onto the board.
• Knead the dough until smooth and shiny (about 10 minutes). Add a little more flour if the dough seems sticky (but try not to add too much - the dough should be soft).
• Put the dough into the bowl; cover and let rise in a warm part of the kitchen to double (approx 40 minutes to an hour).
• After the dough has doubled, scatter a little flour onto the board. Turn the dough out onto the board. Fold it in half, pat it down and fold in half again and pat it down (or knead it a couple of times).
• Divide into 16 equal pieces and form into ropes. Make an S shape with the ends curled inside (Lucia cats).
• Place the shaped buns well apart on parchment covered baking sheet. Decorate each bun with raisins. Cover with a clean tea towel and allow to rise in a warm part of the kitchen to double (20-40 minutes).
• Preheat oven to 180C. Just before putting them in the oven, brush the tops of the shaped buns with cream (or milk or use the other half of the egg).
• Place buns on upper shelf and bake for 10 - 15 minutes til hollow sounding on bottom. Mine were done in about 12 minutes.

Notes:

• Make the cats with a bit longer ropes. Once they rise again, the shapes would be better. Mine looks better before rising, but after rising, they got filled up losing some of the shape. Nevertheless, I hope they do look good! 
  
  
  
  

  This post is for the Bake-A-Thon event by Champa. These are the other co-bloggers baking with me... 

  Champa, Srivalli Jetti, Priya Suresh, Veena Krishna Kumar, Preeti Deo and Jayasri Ravi.