It’s Christmas time, and with it, I bake cookies again. Not being a family man, I don’t celebrate a lot but I love the memories of baking cookies with my mother and then eating them day after day. Snow felt hard this week, so it’s a perfect time to make the most of using the oven: combined baking and heating with the smell of spices on top.

I confess: I love spices.

I grew up in Strasbourg, famous for it’s Christmas market and seasonal sweets. Later I learned about spices in India. That’s when I had the light bulb insight that Lekerlis are the fusion of Asian and Western traditions.

Despite the world reputation and intense taste, Lekerlis are easy to do. It’s an easy to do treat everybody should indulge in. There are no sugar, no butter and no eggs in this recipe.

Ingredients (by order of use)

Quantity for 1 large tray or 2 smaller ones

step 1

• Flour: 600g
• Food bicarbonate: 1 large spoons (may be replaced by baking soda)
• Cinnamon powder: 4 small spoons
• Nutmeg powder: 1 small spoon
• Other spices like pepper or ginger: 1 small spoon

step 2

• Honey: 500 g

step 3

• Almond power: 250g
• Candied orange and/or lemons: 100g

Icing

• Icing sugar: 200g
• Water: 3 large spoons

Note: I do my candied fruits myself using the peel of organic oranges. I cook them 15’ slowly in a thick sugar sirup. Meanwhile I eat the inside of the orange.

Process

It goes in 5 steps

1. Mix powder ingredients: flour, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, but also ginger, pepper, as desired. Use a whisk to evenly blend the spices and the flour.
2. Warm the honey until it becomes fluid. I heated the honey until 70°C. Go slowly because you don’t want it to boil, burn, or caramelize. pour the liquid honey on the above mix and turn. It is quickly hard and if you have second thoughts that you have too much flour: No, it is long and hard. After a while, the dough starts to take but it will never be malleable like a pizza dough.

3. now add the almond or chestnut powder. You can also add tiny bits, crushed nuts or almonds. End with the finely chopped candied orange and lemon.

Go step by step because the mix was already hard and it gets harder. Despite intuition, it all fits into the dough. With the combined effect of the honey cooling and the added ingredients the dough becomes very firm and requires both hands and the full body weight to keep working it. Now, the mix needs 24 hours of rest. It will mix further and aromas become more subtle. Spices give their smell to the almonds and honey. Honey diffuses sugar in the flour. Keep it at ambient temperature with a cloth on it. 4. Baking time! Use parchment paper. Be generous and cover the whole surface of the cookie tray. Leave a 4 cm margin around. Flatten the dough with a rolling pin into a 1cm thick rectangle on paper spread on the cookie tray. I typically cut edges so that it’s a rectangle and reuse the bits to fill indentations. Place in oven and be careful.

Bake for 12 to 15 minutes at 180°C.

My experiment with my old electric oven is that 14 minutes is the best for 8mm thick plates.

That’s the tricky part.

• It’s likely all sides will bake differently.
• With the heat the honey may melt again and some dough may flow on the sides. It’s sugar, it burns.
• A little too early, cookies will stay soft, a little too late they will be too hard. You decide from the outside based on the color
• beige brown: like desert sand, a bit too early
• dark brown: like dark chocolate, too late
• The middle brown is perfect, take it out

remove with the paper from the cookie tray, onto a heat-resistant surface.

Let it cool a bit, like 15 minutes until you can touch it, not more. The longer you wait the harder it will be harder to cut.

Learn from the first batch and adjust thickness, baking time and cooling time for subsequent batches. Reduce by a minute as the oven is now hot.

1. Icing Use 100g of Icing sugar mixed with 3 large spoons of water. The consistence must be a bit thick like whipped cream.

Cover with the icing sugar. Spread and flatten with the back of the spoon.

Cut in shapes using a large dented knife, the kind we use to cut bread. ( I do 4cm by 5cm rectangles).

Post-Scriptum

• Keep them in a metal box with wax paper between layers
• If they are too hard, save your teeth. they will soften within a couple of weeks because they soak all humidity from the air. The hardest is to have the willpower to wait.
• You can keep them one or two months.
• Everything that would go into a Massalla Chai should do: cardamone, badian, ginger, pepper, turmeric.
• I read that Lekerlis are in fact originating from Basel, in Switzerland 120 km south of Strasbourg.
• A large spoon is 15ml, a small spoon is 5ml.
• I work on a web component to add automatically imperial measures. Stay tuned :)

This blog post was edited using astro-editor (and while debugging it)

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