Christmas Calendar 2016 - brown cakes

Brown cakes are a very traditional Danish Christmas cookies. It is very easy to make this cookie dough, and when place the dough in the freezer, so you can defrost a roll of dough and bake a new portion, when the cookie jar is empty. You can even use the cookie dough as a hostess gift, when invited out for various social event during a busy Christmas time.

I made a few modification to the recipe of Frøken Jensen on brown cake, as I did not exactly the same ingredients as needed in that recipe.

Brown cakes:

• 150 g dark syrup
• 160 g brown sugar
• 65 g dark muscovado sugar
• 275 g butter
• 500 g (cake) wheat flour
• 4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons ginger
• 2 teaspoons cloves
• 1 teaspoon all spice
• 1 pinch of salt
• 2 teaspoons potash
• 1 tablespoon of cold water
• 100 g finely chopped bitter orange peel
• 100 g finely chopped almonds

1. Add the syrup, sugars and butter into a medium cooking pot, and let the butter melt over low heat.
2. Add the flour and spices into the mixing bowl of a stand-alone mixer, and mix everything together on speed 1 for less than a minute.
3. Add the potash in the cold water.
4. Add the melt butter and sugar into the mixing bowl together with the water-potash, chopped bitter orange peel and almonds.
5. Mix everything into a homogeneous mass on speed 2 for 4-5 minutes.
6. Divide the cookie dough into 4-5 portions.
7. Place each portion on piece of cling film, and roll the dough in a roll with a diameter of 5 cm.
8. Place the dough rolls in the refrigerator night over or in the freezer.
9. Heat up the oven to 200'C.
10. Cover the baking tray with baking paper.
11. Slice the cookie dough thinly, and place the cookies on the baking tray.
12. Bake the cookies at 200'C for 5-6 minutes (depend on size of the cookie slice).
13. After baking place the brown cakes on a wire rack to let them cool down.
14. Store the brown cakes in airtight containers.