I have some questions for you. I'm using my grandmother's recipe and her hand-carved Springele board as well as your fireplace mold. This recipe looks a lot like Susan's (Dec 9, 2016 comment above) recipe from Switzerland. 1 lb powdered sugar, 4 eggs, 1 lb flour, 1 tsp lemon extract, 1 tsp baking powder. My Mom always refrigerated the dough until the next day. Then she'd roll it out and press it on the Springele board. The cut cookies would go outside at least overnight. She'd put them in boxes and on the back porch for a day or two - in Richmond, VA when they were going to have the coldest nights and no rain. We're in northern MN. It was a low of 1 F overnight, and only up to 16 F today. We put them on cookie sheets in the back of our Explorer. The cookies were in the car overnight. Today I brought them in and baked them. Grandma's recipe says 350 F for 10 minutes and not to let them brown. I put anise seed under the cookie which was laying on parchment on the cookie sheet. These are the worse prints I've ever had! I'm not sure what went wrong, and hoping you have some suggestions. This is at least the 16th year I've made them in MN. I always have a bit of a guess as to when to bring them in relative to when they go in the oven. it's a big temperature difference! But I don't remember my Mom ever doing anything special. She'd bring in what she needed, put on the tray and bake. I've heard that my Grandma would leave them on her porch and bring them in and bake some as needed when friends came over.
One thing is that the eggs were larger than usual this year, and I probably should have added more flour. I didn't do that here. The cookies were very soft when I put them on the tray to go in the car. I notice that a lot of the recipes here use a 300F oven for a longer time. Would that help me? Any other suggestions? Thank you!
December 21, 2017 at 7:10pm