I made my Lebkuchen for the first time eight days ago closely following the KAF recipe. The honey I used was raw honey from our Farmers' Market (so much more delicious than supermarket honey). I used both the orange and lemon zest as indicated but also added three tablespoons of candied diced lemon peel. Next time I might experiment with adding eight tablespoons of the candied lemon. When grinding the crystallized ginger and blanched almonds in the food processor, I think I would pulverize the ginger in the food processor first and then add the almonds for grinding so that the ginger would be finely ground and the almonds could be ground big enough to bite. The finished dough was surprisingly stiff and sticky from the refrigerator, but I managed to get it nicely into a glass baking dish having rolled it out on parchment paper. I appreciated the how-to photos on the blog; when removing my baked dough from the oven it had the same dimpled effect as in your photo. For the glaze, I used three teaspoons of Applejack Brandy (from a suggestion by knemeyer above) and three teaspoons of regular supermarket apple juice. That worked for me. Very tasty! I baked the dough for 21 minutes--22 would have been too long in my oven. The baked dough was extremely dense. At first, I preferred the bars from the "inside" of the pan as opposed to those touching the "outer rim". After cutting, I stored the Lebkuchen in a tin with apple slice as suggested. I think the apple slices "lessened the distance" in flavor and texture between the "inside" and "outer rim" bars. At first the bars were good, but with each passing day their flavor became deeper, more complex, and finally--astounding! I had a couple with my morning coffee each day. The ginger bars tasted great through the whole eight days with no loss of quality. Thanks to KAF for offering this series of special recipes. Without it I would probably have never even heard of Lebkuchen, but now I have made it! I am hoping to bake all of the recipes in this series. Thanks for sharing your Lebkuchen story. I'm so glad that we were able to bring you a new recipe that may well become a new tradition. With your saying you may bake all the recipes in the series, that gives me a fun idea for more series, and maybe even "baking challenges" ... Can you bake them all? Can you make these 4 recipes in 5 days? Sounds like buckets of fun to me! ~ MaryJane

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