Wednesday Baking | How to Make Pfeffernusse
Every Wednesday (ok, most Wednesdays!) I share a baking recipe. And lots of pictures of said baking recipe. I don't call this Wednesday Baking because I bake solely on Wednesdays...no, my oven gets a workout much more frequently than once a week! Wednesday just happens to be the day I share baking recipes with you. All the past baking posts are archived in the Wednesday Baking category.
I showed these little cookies to you all on my 365 page and today, I'm sharing the recipe.
My German grandmother, who's been gone since Lisey was a baby, used to make these at Christmastime. I first remember eating them on an extended family skiing vacation, and I was hooked.
These little cookies, which are Peppernuts in English, are flavored with multiple spices, but the strongest flavor comes from the anise extract. Anise sort of tastes like black jelly beans to me, so if you loathe those, you probably won't be in love with this cookie. My siblings all hate Pfeffernusse, but Mr. FG and my kids adore them.
Here's the small army of spices and extracts you'll need.
The dough-making process is very simple, though.
First, cream butter and sugar together. My grandma used lard, but since I don't usually have lard around, butter it is.
Add milk (my grandma used half and half, I think, but I've used skim milk and everything in between with similar results), corn syrup, vanilla extract, almond extract, and anise extract.
In a separate bowl, mix the flour and spices together.
Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture, and mix it up until the two are thoroughly combined. Place the dough in an air-tight container and refrigerate overnight (or two days, if you're like me and can't get around to baking the cookies on the appropriate day!).
On the day you want to bake the cookies, heat your oven to 375 ° F. Then take a portion of the dough and roll it into a pencil-like strip with the diameter of a nickel, like so.
You'll need to make lots of dough logs.
I find these to be too soft to slice even if they're refrigerated, so I like to put my logs into the freezer for about 15 minutes before I try to slice them.
If you've got kids who want to help in the kitchen, this is a good time to bring them in. Joshua and Lisey, who can be trusted with a knife, cut the logs into slices, and Sonia and Zoe helped put the slices onto the cookie sheets.
These don't expand a lot while they're baking, so you can put them pretty close together on the cookie sheet.
Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until the cookies are lightly browned.
If you remove the cookies right away, the bottoms of them tend to get kind of torn up, like the ones on the right. But if you let them cool a bit, the bottoms will be much neater.
Of course, if you line your sheet with parchment paper, removing the cookies is a total piece of cake.
Once the pfeffernusse have cooled completely, you'll want to store them in an airtight container so that they retain their crunchy quality. I love this glass and stainless steel container I found at Goodwill...the only plastic is a flexible ring that sits on the outer neck of the glass part, so no plastic ever even touches the food.
Sweet.
Oh, and I should add that I usually make a half batch of these because if I make a whole batch, I grow very weary of the rolling and cutting process. One time when I was a teenager I made a double batch, and that just about did me in. Never again!
Grandma's Pfeffernusse
2 cups sugar
¾ cup lard or butter
1 ½ cups white corn syrup
½ cup milk
2 teaspoons anise extract
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ teaspoon almond extract
7-7.5 cups flour
¾ teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon allspice
½ teaspoon nutmeg
¼ teaspoon cloves
¼ teaspoon pepper
¼ teaspoon cardamon
¼ teaspoon baking soda
Cream butter and sugar; beat in corn syrup, milk, and anise, vanilla, and almond extracts.
In a separate bowl, combine flour and the remaining dry ingredients.
Add dry ingredients to butter mixture, and mix until thoroughly combined. Place dough in an airtight container and refrigerate overnight.
Heat oven to 375. Roll portions of dough into pencil-like logs with the diameter of a nickel. Cut into ⅜ inch
slices and place on a baking sheet (you can line the baking sheet with parchment paper if you like). Bake for 8-10 minutes, or until lightly browned.
Let cool thoroughly, and store in an airtight container.
The best thing about pepper nuts is that you can totally tweek the spices, my family recipe has less anise extract, and tons of cardamum, which is my fav. Ours also has honey instead of most of the sugar.
My family's recipe doesn't have any of the extracts, but it does have honey and sour milk instead of regular milk. All of the grandkids would carry around/eat these by the fist full when we were little. I think we liked how small they were!
My mom would love these! Maybe I can whip them up as an additional last minute Christmas gift 🙂
Thanks for the "receipt". I have to try them. We love anise seed cookies and so these sound very interesting.
Wow. You read my mind. My mother-in-law was just talking about how she missed eating the pfeffernusse cookies her grandmother made her as a kid, and I was wondering how I could get my hands on a traditional recipe for it. And here it is! Thanks!
Thank you for sharing your recipe for Pfeffernusse Cookies! I have been searching for one for several years. They remind me of my husband's dear, sweet aunt who would make them for me every Christmas. Her recipe went to Heaven with her, so I have done without for awhile. I can't wait to whip up a batch. Just the thing to keep all the little hands at my house busy during their Christmas holiday!
I've made these (once) before; the version I made didn't need to a sharp knife to cut. A dull knife or cheese slicer worked just fine. If that would work for your recipe as well then Sonia and maybe even Zoe could help up.
Myself, I find the rolling part to be the most tedious. There are a lot of cookie recipes I make that could be rolled (and frozen) but I don't like doing it. I'd rather scoop out each one with a cookie scoop (like a spring-driven ice cream scoop but smaller; they come in many sizes) than roll the darn stuff. But looking at your logs I suddenly wondered if a sausage stuffer or even a Play Dough hot dog maker could do the job.
I promise to take a picture if I use a Play Dough toy to make cookies.
When we made these as kids, we just rolled the dough into "snakes" and then cut them with butter knives, they ended up looking like little pillow shapes instead. And if we got lazy we made them bigger and then they would be soft when baked, like a butter cookie of sorts.
And I may actually try it with my kids play dough toys! It seems only fair as they have commandeered all my cookie cutters for play dough.
Thanks so much I must try them. With practice maybe I can get them, as good as, yours.
great pic of the kiddos. love that little hand reaching up for or with the cookie dough.
A tip I read somewhere recently for something similar was to use thread to cut small ring from a dough sausage like that. You pass the thread underneath the dough and then pull the two ends of the thread up and cross them over and pull tight so that they go through the dough. Usually the thread is soft enough to not distort the shape too much while strong enough to cut through the dough.
I am German but I've never liked these cookies due to the anise. How great that your kids are adventurous enough to like their "unusual" taste. Allow me to put my B.A. in German to use here for the first time in ages: there is an umlaut (2 dots over the vowel, in this case the "u" ) on "nusse" {nuts} which I was always taught to replace with an "e" when typing on an English keyboard, so it would be "Pfeffernuesse". (If you want to be an anal German about it, and apparently, I do. 😉
Keep the recipes coming, I just made your white sandwich bread yesterday and as always, it was a big hit and will keep our small family of 3 in bread (stored in the freezer) for quite some time!
I can't wait to try these...
Oh my gosh Kristen, this post brought tears to my eyes! My Great Granny (who turned 94 this year, and is one of the relatives I'm closest with) is French and married a German man in Kansas, and she always had these little cookies around Christmas. I'm going to make some and mail them to her, she'll be over the moon. I have fond memories of the unusual taste of these cookies all throughout my childhood. Thanks again!
These are great cookies! You can leave out the anise if you don't like that taste. But we enjoy them.
Thank You,
Christine
I stumbled upon this while looking at some of your other recipes and I must say that they are 100% different than the ones that my German grandmother made. Everything German that my grandmother made seems to involve long periods of letting things set. Her cookies used only sugar, eggs, cinnamon, lemon extract, ground cloves and a lot of flour. Then they beaten for quite a long time and are rolled and cut with the center piece of a donut cutter, left to dry out on a cookie sheet for 8-12 hours, flipped over and dotted with a drop of brandy before baking. they puff in the middle but they are still the hardest cookies I've ever eaten. lol
You also mentioned liking the anise flavor, have you ever made Anisscheiben? (German Anise Drops, often called Self-Frosting Anise Drops)
I have a SIMILAR recipe and once made a quad batch in one day...about 4500 cookies!
I pinned a Peppernut recipe to Pinterest which has walnuts and citron listed in the ingredients, if you're interested.
can the dough or the cookies be frozen to help with the Christmas cooking frenzy
I believe so. But the other bit of good news is that pfeffernusse stay fresh for a long time, since they're a hard cookie. So you can make them a week or two ahead of time and they'll still be great.
They keep for ages. My family is mixed, Scandinavian and German, and both sides make pepper nuts. In Scandinavia, there is no anis or vanilla, but they are more peppery, meaning there is literally more pepper and cardamon in them. Also, there can be ginger, which I love.
Can this be made in a pan & then sliced up in small pieces to serve?
I'm not sure. My gut feeling is that baking it in a large piece would make it harder to get it to cook to a nice crispy, hard texture.
Oh my gosh, thank you SO much for this recipe!! MANY years ago, probably close to 20 years, i found a recipe for these cookies in a Taste of Home magazine. I made them only once, and they were so good!! Before I could make them again for the next Christmas, I had lost the recipe, and was never able to remember the name of it. I just came across the name while searching cookie recipes, but they didn't look the same, they were larger, and covered in powdered sugar. I searched Google images, and found your photo with the tiny cookies I remember. I can't wait to make a batch!! I can still remember the yummy flavor of them, and how tedious it was to roll the little logs and cut them....but it was SO worth it!!