Piparkakut

Among the traditional holiday cookies in Finland are the piparkakut. They are commonly cut into a round scallop shape but pigs and little boys are the traditional holiday shapes for these delicious cookies.

There are a lot of different recipes out there for piparkakut. The most common variations in the US omit the orange zest and add nuts and/or cardamom. One yankee recipe online had margarine instead of butter. Blech. The Finnish variations seem to all have much the same ingredients but differ in the amounts.

The most important and curious omission is in preparation of the dough. The sugars are brought to a near boil along with the spices and then allowed to cool. Afterwards, the dough is chilled for 8-12 hours. Both of these steps are omitted in all the US variants I found either online or in cookbooks. The sugars in the corn syrup are complex and long so heating allows them to breakdown as well as have the spices mix with the butter. The chilling firms up the dough and gives the dough much more time to develop the complex spice flavours.

If you're not familiar with cooking sugars it's not terribly hard, but you have to be on top of it. It is interesting that the cooking of the sugars is just not present in many recipes and perhaps it is a result of a difference in baking culture or laziness. Corn syrup is generally used to make cookies browner and surface crisper. The acidic orange peel is likely added for aroma as well as to keep the sugars from crystallising into granite hardness. If you want a softer cookie, you could replace the white sugar with brown sugar. Since the cooking of the sugars also involves the butter, don't crank up the burner to 10 as the butter will form solids and burn. Start with a low-medium heat and a whisk and stir it until it looks a bit bubbly then remove it from the heat.

I should make a batch of both the boiled sugar and the non-boiled sugar recipes and see if there is as much a difference in taste as I expect there would be. The recipe is translated and converted from the Finnish classic cookbook, Kotiruoka :)

Piparkakut, Finnish Ginger Cookies

Ingredients

• 250g or 2.5 sticks salted butter
• 2 dl or 1 cup sugar
• 1.5 dl or 3/4 cup dark corn syrup
• 2 eggs
• 3 teaspoons cinnamon
• 3 teaspoons ground ginger
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon allspice
• 3 teaspoons orange peel zest*
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 8 dl or 5 cups all-purpose white flour

Instructions

1. In a saucepan, bring the corn syrup, sugar, butter and spices to a boil. [ The text in the original recipe doesn't say anything more than boil. This likely doesn't mean the same as a sugar boil for candy. I'd suggest a slow heat, while stirring constantly, until it looks close to boiling. ] Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature. Add in eggs, slightly beaten.
2. Mix flour and baking soda and sift into bowl containing wet ingredients. Mix well and roll into a ball. Cover bowl and place in refrigerator for 8-12 hours or overnight.
3. Split the dough into two parts. Roll dough to about 1/4-inch or 2-3mm thickness. Cut into shapes and bake at 175C/350F until golden brown, the cookies feel firm to the touch or about 10-15 minutes, whichever comes first. :)

* - Jarkko points out that orange peel in Finland is not from the usual Florida orange, but from the smaller and thinner Moroccan kind of orange. Florida orange peel will likely be fine as well though. :)