Traditional Baking Accessoiries

It's baking season again! For a few years now, I have been tweaking a recipe for Spekulatius, and I think I'm getting there now. 

The reason for all this, well... in Germany, one of the traditional seasonal sweets for winter and Christmas are Spekulatius. They are crunchy cookies with some spices, the spice mix resembling that used for gingerbread, but not quite the same. They are sold in packages big or small, but, of course, inevitably including plastics. So the quest to avoid as much single-use plastic in our lives (which obviously includes plastic packaging for foods), the logical step was to bake them at home, no plastics required.

The thing about Spekulatius, though, is that traditionally they are made with forms so they are shaped, and show something. Like, very typical, a man, or a windmill, or a donkey carrying something, or an elephant. Which means they are only half the fun without this.

Very obviously, my next step (after picking a recipe to try) was to take out the box with old dentist drill bits and buy a rolling pin and look for easily draw-able medieval marginalia (knowing both my drawing and my woodworking skill limits) and go for it. 

There were issues with the dough, and with the handling of the pin, and with the depth of the motif "carvings", but after a few years of tweaking (because you can only eat so many test pieces per year), I have something that I would consider fairly satisfying.

In case you are wondering, yes, the motifs go heavy on the axes and less heavy on realism.

This year, however, a friend pointed me to a website of someone making forms for another very traditional German baked good: Springerle. They are, in their original form, very much aniseed flavoured so there's those that love them, those that hate them, and those that eat one or two and have enough for the rest of the year (that would be me, by the way). The way the forms are carved, though... it's really beautiful to watch. And the best thing? You can have a look at it yourself here: