Let’s grab our passports today and see how the holiday’s are celebrated around the world! I opted to stop over quickly in Germany where my family is from for this around the world bake. Germany is well known for it’s holiday traditions: Christmas Market, Advent Calendars, and of course the FOOD!
One of my favourite Christmas memories is sneaking my Oma’s Spritzgebäck (which translates squirt cookie as they come out of a cookie press, or spritz because you know spritz!) from the table before dinner. Spritzgebäck is a very traditional German fluffy butter cookie which looks oh so fancy so I had to try my hand at it.
I found this recipe from Dinner at the Zoo. The recipe is very simple: only butter, flour, sugar, salt, vanilla, and an egg. You then take the mixture and put it in a cookie press, and squirt each one out onto a cookie sheet and bake. The recipe is for chocolate spritzes, but I ended up doing half in chocolate, and half without.
Unfortunately my cookie press (a 60+ year old thing that my Oma passed on to me in which you actually have to crank the press like a stuck jar of pickles to get the cookies to come out) wasn’t really a fan of this recipe. The dough tastes absolutely amazing, but might be too dry for this particular press (or maybe I need to work on my arm muscles!) So instead I opted to roll out the cookies and do cut outs – which worked spectacularly!
I then dipped half of each cookie in melted dark chocolate (the half dip is a very German thing) and added sprinkles – and wunderbar!
Christmas Treats Elsewhere!
I absolutely love seeing how people elsewhere celebrate! Here’s some of the goodies that come from around the world that I would love to try:
- The Czech Republic has Linzer Cookies
- The Dutch have Speculoos – or Windmill Cookies!
- France has oh so pretty Madeleines
- Italy has colourful deep fried Christmas Struffoli
- Russia eats up Tea Cakes
- The UK enjoy these gorgeous Stained Glass Cookies