Pepparkakor are traditional Swedish Christmas biscuits–

What’s that you say? Christmas was last week? Yeah I know…

Luckily for me, and my knack of blogging at a snail’s pace, pepparkakor are now eaten all year round in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries so I can safely tell you all about them without being rapped on the knuckles for being un-seasonal.

As you might suspect, the name translates to “pepper cookie”, but fear not! There’s no pepper in these little beauties. According to one website I came across, back in ye olden days when pepper was very valuable,, people tried to emulate the colour–if not the flavour–with (slightly) less expensive spices. In this case, cinnamon and ginger. I’m not entirely sure that I buy that story since cinnamon was always considered a highly valuable spice, too.

Slight tangent: if even just a sole merchant ship–from the small fleet that would have made the outbound journey from merry olde England–made it back from the East Indies, laden with cinnamon and other spices… well, that would be enough to defray the cost of the loss of the other ships and set up the merchant trader for life. It’s quite humbling to think that the spices I take for granted were so difficult and perilous to procure in times gone by.

This recipe from Diana Henry is very simple. Possibly a little too simple, in retrospect. The flavour is fantastic but the dough is quite tough to work with. Next year I’d probably up the butter to 75g, giving equal proportions with the sugar and add in an egg to make it more supple. But, as I say, the flavour of the cookies was fantastic. Sweet and spicy, with a very, very subtle hint of citrus from the orange zest which was unexpected but quite welcome.

I had a lot of fun icing the pepparkakor, despite being somewhat hampered by my lack of a fine piping tip which led to me improvising with a decidedly floppy sandwich bag. I’m going to use this as my sole excuse for the rather rustic appearance of the icing. I know, I know… only a poor workman and so forth.

Next year Lucas will be two and should be well up for some sticky fun with a piping bag, icing and cookies. I can’t wait to see what sort of designs he comes up with!

Swedish Pepparkakor

Source: Roast Figs, Sugar Snow by Diana Henry

Makes about 24, depending upon the size of your cutters

60g unsalted butter
75g soft, light brown sugar
2 tablespoons milk
1 tablespoon treacle or molasses
225g plain flour
1/2 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamon
1 teaspoon finely grated orange zest
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

to decorate (optional)
1 egg white
icing sugar
squeeze of lemon juice

1. Cream the butter and sugar together until very light and fluffy. Add the milk and treacle, beat well until smooth.

2. Stir in the rest of the ingredients and bring the mixture together to a dough. You’ll need to get your hands in there and knead lightly. If it isn’t coming together easily, then you haven’t creamed the butter and sugar well enough. This can be rescued by drizzling in some extra milk and mixing by hand until the dough forms.

4. Divide the dough into four small balls. Wrap each in clingfilm and chill overnight.

5. Preheat the oven to 180C/160C fan oven. Roll the dough out to 3mm thick between a couple of sheets of clingfilm. The dough will be hard and it will crack. Just shove the bits back together and keep rolling. It will become nice and smooth. Stamp out biscuits using cutters of your choice–I used stars, hearts, and improvised moons with a circle cutter–and transfer to a non-stick baking sheet. (You don’t need to grease it.) Bake for 8 minutes. Leave to cool on sheet.

6. You can now ice the biscuits using either a simple glace icing–sieved icing sugar and lemon juice–or a royal icing. To make a simple royal icing, beat sieved icing sugar into an egg white along with a squeeze of lemon juice. You need to keep adding icing sugar until a pipable consistency is achieved. Give it a really good beat to get plenty of air inside, which lessens the amount of sugar you’ll have to add.