Lebkuchen

December 28, 2023

   

Michael had a driver's license for the first time in 2023, and we had access to a car for much of the year too. This ramped up our adventures outside of Melbourne and we did a lot of regional second-hand shopping. Two excellent acquisitions were a copy of The Australian Women's Weekly The Big Book of Beautiful Biscuits and some heart-shaped biscuit cutters.

My mum has had this book for decades and many of its recipes are very familiar to me. Lebkuchen are probably my all-time favourite, and I found time to bake and share them between on my summer holiday, just a smidge after the Christmas time that they're traditionally made for. They perfectly capture my own heritage - Germanic origins filtered through 1980s Australia. 

The biscuits use golden syrup instead of honey, a modest dose of warm ground spices and mixed peel in the dough, then they're embedded with a dot of raspberry jam and slathered with dark chocolate on the other side. The spice level is just as I remembered but I'm of the inclination to double them all now. My mum always skipped the mixed peel (I can think of a couple of family member who wouldn't've liked it) but I'm up for adding that to a future batch too. I consider the heart shape, raspberry jam and dark chocolate backing to be canon.

I notice now that Lebkuchen would be easy to veganise, and I can't imagine they'd taste any different. I'll report back! And hopefully I'll be reporting on many other recipes from the book, both nostalgic faves and ones that weren't a fit for my family of origin.

Lebkuchen

(a recipe from The Australian Women's Weekly The Big Book of Beautiful Biscuits)

60g butter

2/3 cup (160ml) golden syrup

1 3/4 cups (250g) plain flour

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

1/2 teaspoon cocoa

1 tablespoon milk

1/4 cup (40g) mixed peel, finely chopped (I haven't included this yet but I will!)

2 tablespoons raspberry jam

185g dark chocolate

2 teaspoons vegetable oil

Place the butter and golden syrup in a large saucepan over medium heat, stirring until melted. Bring them to the boil, then remove them from the heat and allow to stand for 10 minutes. Sift in the flour, bicarb soda, ginger, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves and cocoa, then the milk and peel. Cover the saucepan with a lid and allow it to rest for 1 1/2 hours. My mixture went from oozy to sticky dough in that time.

Preheat an oven to 180°C. Line two trays with baking paper.

Prepare a clean surface and lightly flour it. Drop the dough onto the surface and knead it until it's firmer and less sticky. Roll the dough out to 5-8mm thick. Use a biscuit cutter to cut shapes from the dough and place them onto the baking trays - a heart shape is the classic!

When your trays are full of biscuits, make a little indentation in the centre of each one (I used the handle end of a small sharp knife for this, and a wooden spoon is recommended in the original recipe.) Use two teaspoons to gently place a teensy portion of jam in each biscuit indentation. Bake the biscuits for about 10 minutes, until lightly browned.

When the biscuits have cooled, melt the chocolate using your preferred method and mix it together with the oil. Gently spread the non-jammy side of each biscuit with chocolate and allow them to set before serving.