Advent 2013: 20: Das grosse Buch der Weihnachtsbaekerei

Das grosse Buch der Weihnachtsbaekerei

Clearly, I am now nearly out of English-language cookbooks I bake from regularly. Most books in my collection have a recipe or two I've tried and even return to again and again, plus many more I mean to bake some day. There just aren't enough hours in the week for me to bake every enticing recipe. Don't ask why I buy more books.

For German Christmas cookies and breads, I return again and again to this volume published by the editors of the magazine Essen und Trinken, which has always impressed me as the German equivalent of our Food and Wine. It truly is a Big Book of Christmas Baking, and covers Plätzchen (cookies), Kuchen (cakes), Stollen (varieties of Christmas bread), Basteln (crafts — gingerbread treasure chest, trains from cookies and candies), and baking for diabetics. There is a nice mix of traditional and modern.

Years that I am at all organized for Christmas (this year was not one of those years), the baking starts with stacking all the baking books and magazines on the table, leafing through them, and planning which cookies and breads will be baked which weeks. The pictures! The seven different ways to bake Christmas breads! The nearly identical recipes from neighboring countries! And the plans for dozens of cookies and loaves of bread!

I've re-worked a number of recipes from the book for the American kitchen, like the new-favorite-this-year Heidsand (at right or below) and marzipan stollen. The langues de chat, or cat's tongues, are still too cakey, but perhaps next year. I haven't even tried the sesame moons.

The recipe: Browned-butter cinnamon sandies

"Heidesand" is a traditional German cookie that is sometimes translated as shortbread, but is really closer to a pecan sandy. As someone who could eat half a bag of pecan sandies in one sitting as a child, reveling as each cookie crumbled into my mouth, these have become a new favorite recipe.