Dish Twenty-One: Germany

This was the dish that fell at Christmas, and of course it therefore had to be a Christmas dish. For that reason, and that reason only, Germany was not randomly picked like most of the others. It was very carefully picked for this particular Christmassy recipe.

Germany

 

Germany

Germany, whose capital city is Berlin, is playing a massive role in our family life at the moment. Dawn got a letter out of the blue at half-term from the daughter of an old German friend of Neil, asking if she would like to be her pen-friend. Daft question – of course she did! They have written to each other several times since then, and Dawn has decided she wants to learn German. So we’ve found her an old mobile phone to use just so that she can run a language learning app, and she is doing some every day. She’s got a bigger vocabulary in German by now than she has in French, which she’s been learning since Reception. It was her birthday in December, and I made her a Germany birthday cake.

Dawn’s interest in Germany came in handy when it came to this recipe. She got a book out of the library about Germany for her geography reference book that she needed for her Silver Award reading scheme at school. And within that book, I found this recipe for Lebkuchen. Lebkuchen are a traditional German ginger biscuit that you find particularly at Christmas. And they are very nice, so I thought I’d try to make some for myself. The recipe can be be found in the book “Germany” by Mary Colson.

So, baking lebkuchen is what we spent some of our Boxing Day doing. We left it till right at the end of the day, because we were just too busy doing Star Wars Lego, watching Happy Feet and reading the Guinness Book of Records. Dawn helped me out, Daniel did Lego. Dawn’s job was making the dough balls. She didn’t really get what she was doing at first I think, and if I hadn’t’ve intervened our lebkuchen would have looked more like giant chocolate buttons. Fortunately I showed her how big they actually needed to be.

Daniel trying lebkuchen

My only downfall was that I put them in the oven after I had cooked the dinner, so the oven was already hotter than it needed to be for the lebkuchen baking. I didn’t take that into account, and so  although I kept them in the oven for the right amount of time, they got cooked a little bit more than they should have done. So they were a little bit overcooked, almost burnt. Nevertheless, they were a hit. I took them to Grandma and Grandad’s house the next day and they both loved them, as did Auntie Sarah, Dawn and I. A week later, there were still some left, and even Daniel had a taste, once he realised they were only special biscuits. He was very proud of his braveness, as was I. He ate half a biscuit and declared that he liked them, but only in half biscuit doses it seems.

 

Lebkuchen

Lebkuchen

Ingredients

250g plain flour

185g ground almonds

2tsp ground ginger

1tsp ground cinnamon

1tsp baking powder

200ml clear honey

85g butter

finely grated zest from 1 lemon

100g icing sugar

1 egg white, beaten

 

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180C.

2. Put flour, almonds, ginger, cinnamon and baking powder into a large bowl.

3. Melt the butter and honey in a pan then pour into the flour mix along with the lemon zest.

4. Mix well to make a dough and leave in the fridge for a bit to cool.

5. Roll the dough into a ball, about 3cm wide.Flatten each ball a bit.

6. Place the flattened balls onto a greased tray and bake for 15 minutes.

7. To ice the biscuits, mix together the icing sugar, egg white and 1-2 tbsp of water.

8. Dip the top of each biscuit into the mixture and leave to dry.