Forrest Taylor
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Almost here
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The BladeForums.com 2024 Traditional Knife is ready to order! See this thread for details: https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/bladeforums-2024-traditional-knife.2003187/
Price is$300$250 ea (shipped within CONUS). If you live outside the US, I will contact you after your order for extra shipping charges.
Order here: https://www.bladeforums.com/help/2024-traditional/ - Order as many as you like, we have plenty.
Happy Thanksgiving
- Thread starter Forrest Taylor
- Start date
Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith
ilmarinen - MODERATOR
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Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.
I created a new Pfeffernusse recipe a couple days ago to have some ready for Thanksgiving.
Here is the recipe and directions I wrote up. I'll stick it in the ATG Cookbook, too.
This is a new type of pfeffernusse I created for the holidays. It is a little less sharply spiced and a bit softer, but still has nice spice flavors. The biggest change is using honey instead of molasses and removing most of the ginger found in older recipes. The result makes great holiday Keks (cookies). But, they are good year round. It takes longer to get out the ingredients than to make these easy cookies.
INGREDIENTS:
Flour – 2 1/2 cups flour. I used 2 cups all-purpose flour and ½ cup of oat flour. I made the oat flour from ¾ cup oatmeal in the spice grinder when grinding the whole spices. Another good flour to use would be almond flour. Again, make your own from some almonds.
Baking Soda – 1/2 teaspoon ( ¾ tsp for softer and lighter cookies)
1 egg (2 if you like richer cookies)
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
Butter – 8 tablespoons softened butter. I melted it in the microwave and let it cool on the counter while measuring the rest of the ingredients.
Sugar – 1 cup sugar - I used Demura sugar. Turbinado or light brown sugar would work just as well.
Confectioners’ sugar for dusting – 1 to 2 cups
Honey – 1/3 cup raw honey – any type will do, but wild has more flavor. This replaces the molasses in other recipes.
Spices – Here is where you can get creative. Use what you have around. Don’t go buy a bottle of something just for 1/2tsp if you will rarely/never use again.
I used:
½ teaspoon each of – allspice, cardamom seed, fennel seed, nutmeg
¼ teaspoon each of – cloves, cinnamon, Chinese five spice, ginger, coriander seed, fresh ground black pepper, finely ground white pepper (I used whole peppercorns and ground them in the spice grinder along with the oats and other spices)
Other spices that can be used are – anise, caraway, mace, cumin, etc. Be creative!
Directions:
You need a large mixing bowl. While an electric kitchen mixer is nice, I did it with a large wooden spoon and my greased hands. The important thing is to mix the ingredients well until a smooth slightly sticky ball.
Grind all non-powdered spices in a spice grinder or small processor. The oatmeal worked well to keep everything moving. Grind and sift through a strainer sieve, then grind the coarser remnants again, repeat until almost all is ground fine. The rest of the coarse pieces can be dumped in the bowl to provide nice spicy bits.
Put the dry ingredients, including spices, in the bowl and add the butter and egg. Mix thoroughly. Add the honey and mix well again until it forms a good ball. Grease the ball with buttered hands, put back in the bowl or wrap in plastic wrap, and set in the refrigerator for 1-2 hours to chill. If making the dough one day and cooking the next, roll the ball up in plastic wrap and put in the refrigerator.
Get a large cookie sheet out and put parchment paper on it. Pre-heat the oven to 350°F. You can grease the cookie sheet, but parchment paper makes cooking and cleaning a joy … get a roll.
Take the dough out and form balls in your butter greased hands … about one to two tablespoons of dough per ball depending on how large you want your keks.
Place the balls on the parchment paper covered cookie sheet spacing them well apart. DON’T flatten the balls! They will spread out to 2” to 3” cookies in baking.
Bake at 350° for 16 minutes. If they feel too soft, bake for 2-3 minutes more. When done they should be soft, but not mushy. The bottoms should be just slightly brown.
Remove pan from oven and let cool for 3 minutes. During that time, set up a cooling tray. I use a large flat cardboard box with a sheet of parchment paper on it. Put a cup or two of powdered sugar in a bowl.
After the 3-minute cooling is up, dip each warm cookie in the sugar, making sure to coat it well top and bottom. Place on the cooling tray. When all are coated with sugar, set the cooling tray aside in a cool place for at least 3 hours. Overnight is even better. Place in a covered container and let sit for 3 to 5 days in a cool and dry place (OK, you will want to taste a few, but put the rest aside to age). They are ready in 3 to 5 days, and last up to a couple months. If keeping for more than a few weeks, store in the refrigerator. The longer they sit the harder they get. I like them somewhat softer. My Großmutter’s baked her pepper nuts before Octoberfest, and by Weinachten they could break a tooth.
Enjoy – Stacy Apelt
I created a new Pfeffernusse recipe a couple days ago to have some ready for Thanksgiving.
Here is the recipe and directions I wrote up. I'll stick it in the ATG Cookbook, too.
Not your Großmutter’s Pfeffernusse Recipe
This is a new type of pfeffernusse I created for the holidays. It is a little less sharply spiced and a bit softer, but still has nice spice flavors. The biggest change is using honey instead of molasses and removing most of the ginger found in older recipes. The result makes great holiday Keks (cookies). But, they are good year round. It takes longer to get out the ingredients than to make these easy cookies.
INGREDIENTS:
Flour – 2 1/2 cups flour. I used 2 cups all-purpose flour and ½ cup of oat flour. I made the oat flour from ¾ cup oatmeal in the spice grinder when grinding the whole spices. Another good flour to use would be almond flour. Again, make your own from some almonds.
Baking Soda – 1/2 teaspoon ( ¾ tsp for softer and lighter cookies)
1 egg (2 if you like richer cookies)
¼ teaspoon kosher salt
Butter – 8 tablespoons softened butter. I melted it in the microwave and let it cool on the counter while measuring the rest of the ingredients.
Sugar – 1 cup sugar - I used Demura sugar. Turbinado or light brown sugar would work just as well.
Confectioners’ sugar for dusting – 1 to 2 cups
Honey – 1/3 cup raw honey – any type will do, but wild has more flavor. This replaces the molasses in other recipes.
Spices – Here is where you can get creative. Use what you have around. Don’t go buy a bottle of something just for 1/2tsp if you will rarely/never use again.
I used:
½ teaspoon each of – allspice, cardamom seed, fennel seed, nutmeg
¼ teaspoon each of – cloves, cinnamon, Chinese five spice, ginger, coriander seed, fresh ground black pepper, finely ground white pepper (I used whole peppercorns and ground them in the spice grinder along with the oats and other spices)
Other spices that can be used are – anise, caraway, mace, cumin, etc. Be creative!
Directions:
You need a large mixing bowl. While an electric kitchen mixer is nice, I did it with a large wooden spoon and my greased hands. The important thing is to mix the ingredients well until a smooth slightly sticky ball.
Grind all non-powdered spices in a spice grinder or small processor. The oatmeal worked well to keep everything moving. Grind and sift through a strainer sieve, then grind the coarser remnants again, repeat until almost all is ground fine. The rest of the coarse pieces can be dumped in the bowl to provide nice spicy bits.
Put the dry ingredients, including spices, in the bowl and add the butter and egg. Mix thoroughly. Add the honey and mix well again until it forms a good ball. Grease the ball with buttered hands, put back in the bowl or wrap in plastic wrap, and set in the refrigerator for 1-2 hours to chill. If making the dough one day and cooking the next, roll the ball up in plastic wrap and put in the refrigerator.
Get a large cookie sheet out and put parchment paper on it. Pre-heat the oven to 350°F. You can grease the cookie sheet, but parchment paper makes cooking and cleaning a joy … get a roll.
Take the dough out and form balls in your butter greased hands … about one to two tablespoons of dough per ball depending on how large you want your keks.
Place the balls on the parchment paper covered cookie sheet spacing them well apart. DON’T flatten the balls! They will spread out to 2” to 3” cookies in baking.
Bake at 350° for 16 minutes. If they feel too soft, bake for 2-3 minutes more. When done they should be soft, but not mushy. The bottoms should be just slightly brown.
Remove pan from oven and let cool for 3 minutes. During that time, set up a cooling tray. I use a large flat cardboard box with a sheet of parchment paper on it. Put a cup or two of powdered sugar in a bowl.
After the 3-minute cooling is up, dip each warm cookie in the sugar, making sure to coat it well top and bottom. Place on the cooling tray. When all are coated with sugar, set the cooling tray aside in a cool place for at least 3 hours. Overnight is even better. Place in a covered container and let sit for 3 to 5 days in a cool and dry place (OK, you will want to taste a few, but put the rest aside to age). They are ready in 3 to 5 days, and last up to a couple months. If keeping for more than a few weeks, store in the refrigerator. The longer they sit the harder they get. I like them somewhat softer. My Großmutter’s baked her pepper nuts before Octoberfest, and by Weinachten they could break a tooth.
Enjoy – Stacy Apelt
Happy Thanksgiving ya'll.
Stacy, when I read your "Großmutter’s pfeffernusse" recipe I had to look it up. Nope, I don't speak German - the German course I took in college.... well, the prof took me aside 3 or 4 wks into class and asked me to drop. Once I looked up "Großmutter’s pfeffernusse" I realized it was my Grandma's cookies. She called them molasses cookies. They were usually made with sorghum syrup that was grown on the farm made and made into molasses at the local sorghum mill. I can remember stripping the cane in the field, cutting 'n hauling the stripped cane to the "lassie mill" where we'd run the sorghum cane thru the grinder (not really a grinder, but squeeze), the juice would flow to the pan with a wood fire heating the pan. This would "cook off" the juice into syrup.
Stacy, you might remember my metal worktable just outside the door of the radio room - that's an old steel pan used for cooking syrup. When it went bad at a local lassie mill Dad got it for a work table. It's turned upside down, on bottom are the channels the juice would flow thru from the inlet side, and by the time the juice was allowed to get the other end, the syrup would flow out. There was a lot of skill involved in knowing how fast to allow the juice to flow, how long to cook the syrup.
Grandma's cookies - sure brings back memories.
Ken H>
Stacy, when I read your "Großmutter’s pfeffernusse" recipe I had to look it up. Nope, I don't speak German - the German course I took in college.... well, the prof took me aside 3 or 4 wks into class and asked me to drop. Once I looked up "Großmutter’s pfeffernusse" I realized it was my Grandma's cookies. She called them molasses cookies. They were usually made with sorghum syrup that was grown on the farm made and made into molasses at the local sorghum mill. I can remember stripping the cane in the field, cutting 'n hauling the stripped cane to the "lassie mill" where we'd run the sorghum cane thru the grinder (not really a grinder, but squeeze), the juice would flow to the pan with a wood fire heating the pan. This would "cook off" the juice into syrup.
Stacy, you might remember my metal worktable just outside the door of the radio room - that's an old steel pan used for cooking syrup. When it went bad at a local lassie mill Dad got it for a work table. It's turned upside down, on bottom are the channels the juice would flow thru from the inlet side, and by the time the juice was allowed to get the other end, the syrup would flow out. There was a lot of skill involved in knowing how fast to allow the juice to flow, how long to cook the syrup.
Grandma's cookies - sure brings back memories.
Ken H>
A.McPherson
Knifemaker / Craftsman / Service Provider
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- Jan 27, 2012
- Messages
- 2,870
Happy Thanksgiving everybody! I hope you're getting to spend it with people you want to spend time with!
My wife is very much a family lady. She always wants to spend more time with her relatives, and really misses them around the holidays, luckily both of our parents are coming to our place for Christmas.
Me, I love my family, but it'd really rather spend time with my friends. We get the best of both worlds this year. We are staying with friends for the week of Thanksgiving then home for Christmas.
Anyways, I hope you're having a great Thanksgiving day!
My wife is very much a family lady. She always wants to spend more time with her relatives, and really misses them around the holidays, luckily both of our parents are coming to our place for Christmas.
Me, I love my family, but it'd really rather spend time with my friends. We get the best of both worlds this year. We are staying with friends for the week of Thanksgiving then home for Christmas.
Anyways, I hope you're having a great Thanksgiving day!
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2001
- Messages
- 6,648
Happy Thanksgiving! Quiet day here, watching the Bears lose yet again. They're not even worth screaming at the TV. Then I'm going to finish painting the door I ran out of paint on. My wife likes cooking the big meal for us old folks every year despite the fact there's just us and two dogs. We'll have Thanksgiving dinner several times! 
Very best to all!
Very best to all!
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2009
- Messages
- 20,735
This dude is restoring a large mill like that
Selfe Made Knives
Knifemaker / Craftsman / Service Provider
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- Mar 1, 2022
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Happy thanksgiving to you all from the other side of the pond.