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Chocolate Cookies
Take a scant cup of butter, a heaping cup of light brown sugar, two eggs, a teaspoon of cinnamon, half a teaspoon of cloves, a cup of almonds, cut fine, without blanching, a cup of currants, cleaned and dried, two ounces of unsweetened chocolate dissolved in half a cup of milk, and flour enough to roll; before adding the flour, put into it a heaping teaspoon of baking powder.
Mix in the order given; roll out about one-eighth of an inch thick; cut with any preferred cake cutter and bake in a moderate oven. Make a rather thick syrup of half a cup each of granulated sugar and water boiled together, and brush the cakes with this syrup as soon as they are taken from the oven.-Amelia Sulzbacher.
A rolled spice cookie in the Central European mould, closer to a thin lebkuchen than to an American drop cookie. Two things decide whether it works: how much flour you add, and how thin you roll.
- "Flour enough to roll"Probably in the region of 3 to 3 1/2 cups, added a half cup at a time until the dough is stiff enough to handle but still soft; the recipe gives no figure, so this is a matter of feel. The baking powder goes into that flour before it is added, so hold back a little flour rather than a little of the leavening. Chilling the dough an hour before rolling helps; it is slack when freshly mixed.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as about 350F, though the recipe names no temperature. At one-eighth inch these will bake quickly, in the region of 8 to 10 minutes, and can overbake before they look done, since brown sugar and chocolate hide the browning.
- Roll it genuinely thinAn eighth of an inch is the point of the recipe. Rolled thicker, the almond and currant load makes the cookie heavy and cakey instead of crisp.
- Chocolate "dissolved" in milkMelt the 2 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate and stir the warm milk into it gradually, or warm the two together over low heat. Unsweetened chocolate is still sold as such; do not substitute cocoa powder without adjusting fat.
- Scant and heaping cupsA scant cup of butter is a little under 8 oz, so around 200 g. A heaping cup of light brown sugar is roughly 8 oz packed. Neither needs to be exact here.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisin, not fresh red or black currants. "Cleaned and dried" refers to washing out grit and stems, unnecessary with modern packaged fruit.
- Unblanched almondsThe skins are deliberate: they add colour and a faint bitterness that suits the spice. Chop by hand or pulse briefly rather than grinding to flour, or the dough turns oily.
- The syrup glazeBoil the half cup each of sugar and water until it thickens slightly, a few minutes, and brush it on while both syrup and cookies are hot. It sets to a thin shine and keeps the cookies from drying out. Let them dry fully before stacking.
- YieldAround five dozen with a 2-inch cutter. They keep well in a tin for a couple of weeks and improve after a day or two as the spice settles.
The combination of cinnamon, cloves, unblanched almonds, currants and chocolate rolled thin and glazed with sugar syrup belongs to the German and Swiss spice-cookie tradition rather than to the American cookie jar, and it is generally traced to the same family of Christmas baking that produced lebkuchen and the almond-and-chocolate Basler Brunsli. The syrup wash is an alternative to icing that gives shine and keeps a hard, dry spice cookie edible for weeks in a tin.