New Year's Cake

The New Year!  A time for fresh starts!  And, speaking of fresh starts, to my great delight I discovered that The Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge has been revived.  Having a prompt and a challenge not only keeps you on your toes but it makes cooking historic food even more pleasurable.

The Challenge:  One Last Hurrah.

 Pick a holiday, any holiday, and start the New Year with some in- or out-of-season merriment.

I decided to attempt New Year's Cake.  New Year's Day was a day of festivity and social visits.  The normal pattern seemed to be that the women stayed home to receive callers and well-wishers throughout the day while the men circulated from house to house.  Each hostess would give her callers some type of refreshment.  In the middle Atlantic states, particularly those of Dutch origin, the traditional pastry was New Year's Cake, but not a cake such as we think of.  New Year's cakes of this type are actually a cookie, normally a printed cookie.   The Hesperian of January 1839 gives us a glimpse of New Year's Day calls in New York City

I have long wanted to try making this type of cookie for several reasons, the first being that I, like members of my immediate family, have collected wooden printen cookie molds for years.  Springele, hard anise cookies made with a carved rolling pin, have long been part of my Christmases. (Yes, inmy family "springele" not "springerle.")   But these large cookie boards intimidated me. 

As a further incentive, I had the opportunity to visit my aunt and uncle over the Christmas holiday.  Living halfway across the country, I find such chances to come very infrequently.  A number of years ago, when the extended family was collecting family recipes, my uncle contributed a cookie recipe from his side of the family  (he married into our family).  One side of his family is Dutch, and, after emigrating to America, found work in a Dutch bakery in New Jersey.  The bakery made New Year's cookies in large quantity since a New Year cookie was a common gift.  My uncle owns some of the printed cookie boards and I was able to photograph them during our visit.  

The Recipe:  New Year's Cake

Source, Year, Region:  

Miss Leslie's New Cookery Book, by E. Leslie
1857, Philadelphia

Method

INGREDIENTS
The first challenge in recreating this recipe is figuring out the ingredients.  Butter and flour are straightforward, of course, but powdered sugar is not quite so easy.  Commerical powdered sugar of modern-day is not the same as period powdered sugar since it has cornstarch added.  To recreate a more period taste, I ground my own powdered sugar.  Since I am blessed with modern appliances, I ground a pound and a half of white granulated sugar in a small mini chopper until it resembled powdered sugar.   I then measured out one pound for the recipe and set the rest aside for later.

 My powdered sugar

Soda is baking soda and tartaric acid is cream of tartar.  
A salt spoon is 1/4 t by volume, so the recipe asks for 1/8 t cream of tartar.   
A teacup contains roughly 6 oz, so I opted for 4 oz or 1/2 c  as my small teacup volume

WHAT I DID

After letting the butter come to room temperature, I creamed it with the pound of powdered sugar, then gradually stirred in 3 pounds of flour.  In a separate container, I stirred 1 t baking soda into 1/2c of milk until it dissolved, then added it to the dough.  I next dissolved 1/8 t of cream of tartar in 1 T of warm water, adding the liquid to the dough and mixing well.  The last ingredient added was 3 T of caraway seeds.

TIME OUT FOR SOME THOUGHTS

This recipe already intrigued me because it called for caraway seeds, a common enough flavoring, rather than the anise seeds I am used to in this type of cookie. 

After I finished mixing the dough, I was seriously concerned.  As I mentioned earlier, I am accustomed to making rolled springele each year.  While I knew this was a different recipe, I am familiar with the desired consistency of the cookie dough.  The dough that resulted from this recipe was as soft and loose as that of a drop cookie.  I was alarmed.

You can see how overly soft this cookie dough is!  

Since Miss Leslie is as cheerily dismissive of the finer details of baking, not even giving us the clue of a fast or slow oven, I was on my own.  Here I turned to the internet and blogs on printed cookies. A fairly common temperature seems to be 350 deg. F, so that was my choice.

A bigger issue for me was the lack of drying time. Springele and many other printed cookies require over-night drying at room temperature so that the dough doesn't rise and distort the printed image.  "Trust Miss Leslie," I told myself.  "This is a different recipe, so you need to follow her directions." 

Other internet forums recommend chilling the dough before rolling out and then before baking.  My dough was SO soft that there was no human way it could be rolled.  Chilling was going to be a necessity, so I wrapped my dough in waxed paper and set it in the refrigerator to become more solid.

Remember the extra powdered sugar I set aside?  A number of internet sites recommend dusting the pastry board, dough, and especially the inside cavities of the mold with powdered sugar.  Flour is said to clump up and blur the crisp details of the mold.  Having had some of these same issues with my annual springele, I was more than excited to try powdered sugar instead of flour.

  

BACK TO BAKING

After an hour or more, I took the dough out of the refrigerator and cut it in half, returning one half to the refrigerator to keep it cool.   I liberally sprinkled the pastry board with powdered sugar, thoroughly rubbed the wooden molds with the same, and put the dough on the board.  It became immediately evident that the dough was FAR too soft and sticky to roll.  I decided to hand press it to 1/2" thickness and pressed the molds, one at a time into the dough.  To my great joy, the molds released cleanly.  I used a fluted pastry cutter (a jagger) to cut each one out, then transferred each to a baking sheet by using two pancake turners to hold the cookie.  Once all the dough was used, I had a grand total of 4 printed cookies and one hand-pressed leftover rectangle.  

Miss Leslie said to bake immediately.  I realized if I tried to let these sit at room temperature, they would become even softer, so into the preheated 350-degree oven they went.  I set the timer for 5 min. and waited. 

At 5 minutes I could still see the print detail, but the cookies were spreading alarmingly.  They were also definitely not baked.  

Peering into the oven.  Uh oh!

Set the timer for 5 more minutes.  Still not done, so five more, for a total of 15 minutes.  By now I had a large sheet pan of giant merged cookie.  The imprinted figures were utterly gone; only the division lines between each cookie remained.  I removed the pan from the oven and let it cool.   These simply couldn't be correct.

Definitely NOT what I hoped for!

TIME TO COMPLETE

Roughly 2 hours

Total Cost: 
No idea, since everything is a staple in my kitchen.

HOW SUCCESSFUL WAS IT?

That IS indeed the question, isn't it?   I consider my attempt to be a failure.  Once cooled and removed from the pan, the cookie simply wasn't firm enough to retain a shape when picked up, instead becoming a mass of crumbs.

My diagnosis?  I needed MORE FLOUR.  All my instincts shouted it back when I was mixing the dough, but I decided to trust the recipe and Miss Leslie.  I am determined to try this again, but not today.

How Accurate Was It?

Good question.  I followed the recipe to the best of my ability, BUT something is off with the result.  There is NO way anyone could or would gift these to anyone - one can barely eat the finished cookie itself.  Something is wrong....and a repeat try may give us the answer.