Mennonite Monday - Peppernuts

Mennonite Monday started because I wanted to make recipes from the Bethesda Mennonite Church Cookbooks (both the yellow and the white cookbook for those of you who own them). I also wanted to take pictures of each recipe that I made, so I would know for future reference what the recipe should look like. I am by no means a great cook, but I think it will be fun to try new and different recipes each week. Not all of these recipes are for ethnic Mennonite food, but the women from Henderson know how to cook, so I can safely say that these recipes will be good. Check back each Monday for a new recipe and feel free to leave a comment if you have a favorite recipe from these cookbooks, or if you have some tips on what I should make and how I should make it.

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Okay this recipe is not in either of the church cookbooks, but I wanted to make Peppernuts for Christmas because it is a German tradition. The recipes in the church cookbook have chopped up dates and nuts, which I didn't really want to mess with, so I opted for this recipe.

Peppernuts

1/2 cup butter 1 1/2 tsp anise oil

1 cup sugar 1 tsp cinnamon

1 egg 1/4 tsp nutmeg

1 cup syrup 1/4 tsp ginger

1 cup sour cream 1/2 tsp soda

7 1/2 cups flour

Dough should be quite stiff. Shape into rolls (snakes?) about the size of a nickel and chill or freeze. Cut into thin slices and bake at 350 for 8-10 minutes.

I mixed the egg, sugar and butter first.

Then I mixed in the syrup and sour cream.

I added half of the flour and then the rest of the ingredients before I added the rest of the flour. This is because the batter gets really stiff and I wanted the flavor ingredient to mix all of the way through.

This is what the Anise Oil looks like. I found it at our local pharmacy. While it is a little pricey (around $18), it is a key ingredient to make the peppernuts taste right.

I mixed in the rest of the flour and as you can see the mixture is very stiff. You would not be able to mix this by hand.

Roll the dough into snakes (bottom of the picture) and then place in the refrigerator or freeze to chill. Then cut the snake into little pieces (middle of the picture) and space theme around the pan so they don't touch (top of the picture). They don't grow much, so you can put them fairly close together.

Mike even agreed to help me with this part as long as he could watch a football game at the same time.

Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes. When the time goes off, they will look under cooked, but they will harder as they cool. We learned that the hard way with our first batch. Since they didn't look done we kept adding more time and the peppernuts were very hard when we finally took them out, so stick to the 8-10 minutes.