Walking the Red Brick Road

A mound of freshly-baked peppernut cookies

In our family, Christmas just is not Christmas without peppernut cookies. I don’t know when Mother started baking them; I don’t remember a Christmas without peppernuts — at least peppernut dough.

I’ll tell a couple stories about these cookies, but first the recipe:

Peppernuts

Cream together:
3 C. dark brown sugar
3/4 C. butter (do not substitute)
1 1/2 C. sugar
1 1/2 C. Splenda
1/4 C. shortening

Add and beat in:
2 eggs
2 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. salt
1 C. chopped nuts
1 1/2 C. water
2 t. ground anise
1 t. ginger
1 t. ground cloves
2 t. baking powder

Mix in 10 C. flour, adding gradually.

Place on well-floured board and knead in 2 C. more flour.

CHILL THOROUGHLY.

To bake:
Take small amount of dough and roll into long snake about 1/2 to 3/4″ (about as big as your index finger).

Peppernut dough snake

dough prepared for baking

Cut into pieces about 1/2″ long and place onto lightly-greased cookie sheet, leaving a small space between each cookie.

rows of unbaked peppernut cookies

Bake 10 mins. at 400 degrees. For best flavor, let them rest overnight before eating them.

Recipe says that entire operation requires 4 1/2 hours. I wouldn’t know. We’ve never made them all at once.

I align those cookies in neat rows and columns, just as the picture shows. Until I was in college, I didn’t know why I was/am so meticulous about how I placed the cookies. One year when I was home for Christmas, Mother invited a friend, Maria, to help us bake. As usual, I neatly placed the cookies.

“Why are you so careful to place them so precisely?” Maria asked.

I had no idea; I’d just done it that way as long as I could remember.

Mother said, “When she was a little girl, I told her she had to line them up carefully so I could keep track of how many cookies we had made.”

My brother and I love cookie dough and peppernut dough is the best! We’d eat big chunks of peppernut dough, carving them out of the thick mass of dough in the large Tupperware mixing bowl she always used for that recipe. The recipe makes such a vast amount that we generally had plenty of cookies left over for whatever purposes my mother had in mind. She often used them as filler in Christmas gifts. One year, she gave my aunt a knitting needle container filled with peppernuts.

When I was in high school, Mother didn’t get around to baking any peppernuts for quite a long time after she’d made the dough. Kevin and I kept nibbling away at the dough while we awaited its inevitable conversion to baked goods. By the time she opened the bowl to bake them, the vast majority of the dough was gone. Oh, were we in trouble! We told her we’d make another batch, but she would have none of that idea. Not many peppernuts were baked that year and we remained in my mother’s doghouse for quite a long time.

Neither of us have been cured of eating cookie dough, though. When I told Stef, my sister-in-love, that we’d made peppernuts last night, she said, “It’s a good thing Kevin wasn’t there; you wouldn’t have had much dough left.”

If you want to know the truth, the peppernuts in the above photos weren’t baked either. I ate them. Yum, yum!

Tags: bake, baking, Christmas, cookies, eat, food, holiday, Kevin, recipe, Stef