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Anise-Seed Cakes
8 eggs, 1 pound sugar, 1 scant pound flour, 1 teaspoonful baking-powder, pinch salt, 1 tablespoonful anise-seed. Beat eggs and sugar together thirty minutes, then add anise, flour mixed with powder, and roll out thin. Cut in fancy shapes and bake on flat tins in quick oven.
A German-style anise cookie built on nothing but eggs, sugar and flour — no butter at all, so the eggs do every bit of the leavening work. The long beating is the whole recipe, not a formality.
- The beating is the recipeThirty minutes of whisking eggs and sugar was hand-work; a stand mixer on medium-high does the equivalent in 10 to 15 minutes. The mixture must fall from the whisk in a thick pale ribbon that holds its shape for several seconds, or the cookies will bake flat and hard.
- Weights, not cups1 pound of granulated sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; 1 scant pound of flour is roughly 3 1/4 to 3 1/2 cups. "Scant" matters here — the dough is meant to be barely stiff enough to roll, and extra flour makes it tough.
- Quick ovenRead as roughly 400 to 425F. At that heat thin cut cookies take only 6 to 8 minutes and want watching from minute five; they should be set and barely coloured at the edges, pale on top.
- Rest the dough before rollingThe original rolls it out straight away, but if the dough is too slack to handle, chill it covered for an hour or more to firm up, then roll thin (about 1/8 inch) on a lightly floured board.
- Drying, the traditional stepDrying -- Moulded anise cakes such as Springerle are traditionally left uncovered for several hours or overnight before baking, which sets a dry skin. The original says nothing of it here, but it can be tried.
- Anise seedWhole anise seed, not star anise and not anise extract. A tablespoon is assertive; bruise the seed lightly in a mortar to release more flavour, or reduce to two teaspoons for a milder cookie.
- Flat tinsAn ungreased or parchment-lined heavy baking sheet, i.e. a flat sheet rather than a deep pan.
- YieldWith eight eggs and a pound each of sugar and flour this is a large batch: something on the order of 6 to 10 dozen small cut shapes, depending on size. Halve it comfortably. Baked crisp and stored airtight, they keep well and harden as they age.
Anise-flavoured egg-and-sugar cookies belong to a long German and Swiss baking tradition — Anisplätzchen, and their moulded cousin Springerle — carried into American kitchens by German-speaking households and printed in nineteenth-century community and compiled cookbooks. The formula is essentially a sponge batter stiffened with flour: little or no fat, which is why the long beating does much of the work butter would otherwise do, and why the finished cakes keep so well. Anise was one of the older European sweet spices, traditionally valued for digestion as well as flavour, and it remained associated with Christmas and keeping-cake baking. The baking powder here is a later addition to an older type of recipe; earlier versions relied on the eggs alone.