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Christmas Pepper Nuts
2 cups brown sugar 2 eggs, well beaten 1 teaspoon soda 1/3 cup hot water 1 cup chopped nuts 2 teaspoons cinnamon 1 teaspoon nutmeg 3 1/2 cups sifted bread flour Mix sugar with well beaten eggs, add soda dissolved in hot water, nuts and spices, sifted with flour. Add more flour if necessary to make a dough stiff enough to roll. Roll about 1/8 in. thick, cut as large as a quarter and bake in hot oven (400 degrees F.) until brown. Roll at once in powdered sugar. This makes 100.
A stiff rolled spice cookie cut into coin-sized rounds, in the German Pfeffernüsse tradition. The original gives its own oven temperature, which is unusually helpful; what it omits is the baking time, and these are small enough that they go from pale to scorched quickly.
- Watch the clock, not the recipeAt 400F, rounds this thin and this small brown in roughly 5 to 8 minutes. Check the first tray at four minutes and use it to calibrate the rest.
- Bread flour is deliberateBread flour -- The high-protein flour gives a dough firm enough to roll at 1/8 inch, and tends toward a firm, dry, keeping cookie rather than a tender one. All-purpose will work, but the result is likely to be softer.
- "As large as a quarter"About a 1-inch round. A small aspic cutter, a liqueur glass rim, or the wide end of a piping tip all serve. This is what produces 100 cookies from the batch.
- The soda has little to liftBrown sugar and eggs supply only mild acidity, so expect a modest rise and a slight alkaline browning rather than a puffed cookie. Dissolving the soda in the hot water first, as directed, is what keeps it from streaking.
- Roll in sugar while hot"At once" is the hinge. The confectioners' sugar clings to the residual steam on the surface; once the cookies cool the coating slides off and you get bare cookies and a bowl of sugar.
- No pepper, despite the name"Pepper nuts" without pepper -- Only cinnamon and nutmeg here. Many German versions of the cookie do include ground black or white pepper, and a small amount added with the spices moves it toward that profile.
- KeepingThese are designed to store. Airtight, they hold several weeks and, like most heavily spiced sugar cookies, improve after two or three days.