Slice and Bake Cardamom Cookies
with Dark Chocolate, Orange & Crystallised Ginger
This month here on ingredient we’re focusing on Green Cardamom: a sultry, aromatic and uniquely perfumed spice perfect for infusing the scent of elsewhere into dinners, desserts and bakes. It also happens to be my all-time favourite spice.
You can already find the recipe for my make-ahead friendly Cardamom Panna Cotta with Clementine Jelly which balances creamy perfume with acidic, zesty zip for the perfect pudding (if I may say so myself!) here. Something savoury should also be landing sometime before Christmas! Do upgrade your subscription to unlock every recipe in the ingredient archive, and of course to help fund the free part of what I post here! No creative likes asking for money, but without it ingredient can’t function.
In her Christmas Biscuit Bonanza, fellow recipe developer and Substacker
captured the difference between Britain and America’s seasonal biscuit offering perfectly:While, on the surface, the British 'biscuit' and American' cookie' have the same meaning, there's a gulf between them. British biscuits, at least at Christmas, tend to be more austere - a shortbread dipped in chocolate is plenty festive for us. This is, of course, compared to the standard American cookies, which are generous with sprinkles and whimsy. There's also the complexities surrounding the language - biscuits mean something very different between the US and UK, as do cookies. German Christmas biscuits, as far as I know, tend towards richly spiced and soft tender gingerbread, while the icing sugar-dusted crescent cookie, the vanillekipferl, is popular in Austria and Hungary and common in the surrounding countries.
No offence to my lovely American friends, but these differences in what sort of biscuit or cookie we want to eat in Europe, versus some of the ‘more is more’ cookies found across the pond mean that I’ve spent the past two month developing recipes for holiday cookies commissioned by American clients I don’t want to eat (especially if I’ve been asked to included peppermint extract in the dough!) Yes I’ll have one or two once the recipe is perfected, but mostly because I’m hungry or craving something sweet: none of the cookies I’ve baked recently are the sort of thing I’ll bother getting a tin out for and relish until the very last one. There is nothing wrong with these extravagant American bakes (I even like peppermint, I just don’t think it belongs inside the cookie, unless that cookie is also chocolate) - they’re just not the sort of taste I grew up with, and I’m therefore accustomed to.
As a result of this - and in mourning for the sheer amount of butter, sugar and flour that has died on dud batches in my kitchen of late - before I crack open Anja Dunk’s fantastic Christmas German baking book Advent and choose something for me to tackle once I’ve finished work for the year tomorrow and I’ll no longer have clients dictating my menus until January 2nd - I thought I’d develop a Christmas biscuit / cookie recipe (for these I’m not really sure which category they fall into?) I actually want to make and eat.
Because I’m done with rolling, cutting and shaping dough for the moment (I don’t want to roll and indent another thumbprint cookie until at least 2025 - the same goes for rolling yet more snowball cookies in multiple coatings of icing sugar!) I’ve chosen a slice and bake cookie which I think is perfect for these busy times: the dough *has* to be made ahead, and all you have to do to get them ready for the oven is wield a sharp knife. Once they’re out of the oven? No decoration necessary.
For flavourings, I’ve chosen literally everything I would choose as my favourite Christmas biscuit flavourings / fillings / add-ins, except for pistachios, because as discussed this is not quite a maximalist Christmas biscuit, and I think five different flavours would be taking things a tad too far. But we’ve got a pleasant mix of orange zest and ground cardamom in there for heady, seasonal perfume, dark chocolate to balance out the sweetness and to melt on your tongue in a hit of seasonal indulgence, and chunks for crystallised ginger for warmth, chew and a bit more spice.
It’s also a small batch bake making just 9 biscuits (11 if you bake the scraggy ends from where the baking parchment twisted the cookie dough log in to chill): I always think cookies (with the exception of a few Eastern European bakes like Zimtsterne which are designed to last the entire festive period) are best enjoyed within a few days of baking, so I always seek to cut down the big batch recipes I find online as much as possible. But, you can always scale up the recipe. Or even better, in a month where tens of thousands of new and exciting cookie recipes appear every year, bake a couple of different ones.
Slice and Bake Cardamom Cookies with Dark Chocolate, Orange and Crystallised Ginger
Makes: 9, Preparation time: 20 minutes, plus overnight chilling time, Cooking time: 15 minutes
These Slice and Bake cookies manage to be both decadent and wholesome in a deliciously festive way. I have almost zero experience baking with different flours such as spelt and rye, but if you’ve got the substitutions down I think a little of either would add an extra nutty element - do let me know if you experiment with this!