Easy Bake Dreams
Please read to the end for a postscript
I was 4 years old when the Easy-Bake Oven was introduced to a generation of sweet little girls (clearly the target audience). The logo “Suzy Homemaker” on the front cemented it as the ideal gift for budding bakers-in-training, on their way to becoming perfect housewives. The irony of the timing in the 1960s, with the rise of women’s liberation, didn’t really affect the power of television advertising. And I really wanted that oven. So my 6 year old Christmas delivered my ardent prayers: a xylophone under the tree (not sure why I wanted this, but do remember being thrilled) and MY oven, hidden behind it, complete with some kid-size baking mixes and dolly-size baking pans.
I grew up in a family of cooks and bakers, learning to make scratch brownies with my grandmother early on and being the kid who helped with anything kitchen related. My new oven, which was either the original turquoise or yellow, got a workout until I ran out of baking mixes or the light bulbs that provided the heat burned out. I’m not sure which, but at some point my oven was abandoned and went to live at another little girl’s house. In the meantime, I moved on to helping my mom make the few family Christmas cookies we baked in her big girl oven. But my mother was a bread baker, with a dedication to a family sourdough starter. Cookies, cakes, and other desserts weren’t her bag, so my sister and I took up the slack. And the one cookie that was an absolute was a family secret—or so we were told by our maternal grandmother. It was a tiny cookie that was a mash up between German spiced pfeffernüsse and rich Scottish shortbread. The creator was my great-great grandmother, Anna Weber McIntyre, a Swiss German who married a Scotsman. So our family pfefferneusse (the family spelling) was uniquely ours, the recipe never shared, and always made exactly the same way as when Anna started baking them close to 100 years before.
Some of the ingredients aren’t easy to find these days, the recipe calls for a dough-making method that’s rather labor intensive, and a single batch yields dozens & dozens of bite-size cookies. My mother loved handing over the process of dough making to me, banking on my patient willingness to roll the dough into long snakes and slice them into hundreds of small pieces. We’d stir up the dough in a kettle the size of a baby’s tub, then kept it chilled in the fridge to be baked in batches over the weeks leading up to Christmas. They became a favorite teacher’s gift, filling empty cottage cheese containers (our huge dogs ate the cottage cheese), wrapped in colorful tissue and tied with curling ribbon. No chocolate truffles or festive cut-out sugar cookies for us—it was always pfefferneusse, fragrant with anise seed and toasted walnuts. Though sometimes my sister’s favorite gumdrop squares dusted with powdered sugar would make an appearance, if she felt like making them.
I don’t make pfefferneusse every year anymore but always feel nostalgic for them. My grandmother is long gone, but I’m sorry I just can’t divulge the recipe. This year I decided to make some straight up shortbread cookies, with a much smaller yield, that still offer a similar licorice-scented buttery flavor and tender-crisp-crumbly texture. I found some retro cookie stamps last year that have languished in my cookie cutter bin, just waiting to be used. But after playing with them for a while I decided to go back to the beginning—a slice and bake cookie. Larger three-bite cookies, rather than Anna’s one-biters that could sit in the bowl of a spoon filled with coffee. Shortbread that’s quick (or the logs of dough frozen, ready for last minute baking) and doesn’t feed an army—or gang of elementary school teachers.
Anise & Pistachio Shortbread
Makes about 28 cookies
Anna’s pfefferneusse was sweetened with both granulated sugar and pure sorghum syrup plus a combo of butter & lard. I’ve used brown sugar here for a toastier sweetness and used all butter. Chilling the dough for several hours allows the flour to become hydrated and the flavors to develop. The dough will be very firm (it will seem like a rock at first but softens enough to slice very quickly.) These are irresistible dipped into hot coffee as the finale to a holiday supper or paired with a pungent blue or aged goat cheese to start cocktail hour.
INGREDIENTS
1 cup salted butter, at room temperature
¾ cup packed dark brown sugar
1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract or paste
2-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
½ cup toasted & finely chopped pistachios
1-3/4 teaspoons anise seed, crushed in a mortar & pestle or rolled between sheets of waxed paper
About ½ cup turbinado sugar
DIRECTIONS
1. Combine butter, brown sugar, and vanilla in a large bowl (or in a stand mixer). Beat at medium speed, scraping bowl often, until creamy.
2. Add the flour in batches, beating on low speed, scraping often, until mixture forms a soft crumbly dough.
3. Beat in the pistachios and crushed anise seed. Turn the dough out (it may still be crumbly) and knead it, if necessary, until it’s smooth and hangs together.
4. Divide the dough in half. Shape each half into a log (about 7x2-inches).
5. Place each log on a long piece of plastic wrap or parchment; sprinkle with turbinado sugar, rolling the logs so the sugar presses into the dough. Wrap the dough tightly, twisting or tucking in the ends of the wrapping.
6. Chill the dough for at least 4 hours or up to 3 days.
7. Heat the oven to 375˚F. Line baking sheets with parchment or silicone baking mats. Let the dough stand at room temperature for 5 minutes. Cut the logs with a very sharp knife into 1/3-inch-thick slices. Place 1 inch apart on baking sheets. Bake 11 to 13 minutes or until just lightly browned on the bottom and around the edges of the cookies. Let stand 5 minutes before removing to a cooling rack.
Baker’s Tip: if the dough is a little crumbly on the edges, press and form the dough with your fingers.
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P.S.
My mother generously, but discriminatingly, liked to ship little tins of pfefferneusse to family who didn’t bake their own or to special friends. One year she sent a care package to someone she felt was deserving, a woman who had made my dreams of going to cooking school come true. I was the lucky recipient of the thank you.
Thank you! Writing it and making the shortbread assuaged my annual guilt of not making pfefferneusse!
What a wonderful story. And precious postscript!🩷 Merry Christmas.