Saint Nicholas Cookies

To celebrate the Feast of Saint Nicholas, we made some special Saint Nicholas cookies! My wife received a special cookie mold for her birthday and a book about making cookies with molds. She searched through the book for a recipe, choosing a speculoos recipe.

Naturally, the first step was to make the dough. My daughter was glad to help as long as she received the usual compensation.

Beating eggs

Adding brown sugar

A fine lump of dough

The usual compensation

The recipe recommends chilling the dough before rolling out and stamping with the cookie mold. Of it went to the refrigerator.

After the cool down, the dough was rolled out to an appropriate depth and then stamped out. After trying several methods, the final conclusion was to roll the dough onto the mold in both directions (up/down and left/right) to get the best detail from the mold. The dough was also rubbed with a little flour to keep it from sticking to the mold. The mold was also lightly painted with oil to keep it from being sticky.

Hand stamping

Needs some trimming!

Cookie two

My daughter tries the roller technique

She just rotated the mold, so she did up/down then rotate then up/down again

Trimming off the extra (for use in the next cookie!)

The recipe also recommended chilling in the fridge after stamping to help retain the detail on the cookie.

Chilling in the fridge after stamping

Baking was a snap after all that work. Some very respectable cookies were the result!

Cooling on the rack

One closeup

Another closeup

If you are interested in doing all this hard work to get fabulous results, we got the mold from the Springerle Baker and the book on Kindle from Amazon.