When I was a kid growing up in Denmark these little pepper nuts where a tradition to eat around Christmas. I remember when I was 5 years old we would play a game called mouse, which would start by laying out 10 pepper nuts on a table. One person would then close their eyes while the rest of the people would dedicate one pepper nut to be the mouse. The person with his eyes closed would slowly pick out and eat one pepper nut at the time until the mouse was chosen and everybody would scream out loud “MOUSE”. I freaking loved that game! (When I was 5 years old).
Despite the game and Christmas tradition, I always thought of pepper nuts as one of the most boring of all Christmas sweets, having only tried the store bought version. Recently, however, my Danish friend Louise inspired me to make pepper nuts myself. She passed the recipe on to me and they are DiepLicious – they cannot even be compared to the boring store bought ones.
INGREDIENTS:
- 250 g room temperature butter (cut into cubes)
- 250 g sugar
- 100g heavy cream
- 1 tsp. ground ginger
- 1 tsp. cinnamon
- 1 tsp. white pepper
- 1 tsp. cardamom
- 1 tsp. baking powder
- 1 tsp. soda
- 500 g flour
DIRECTIONS:
- Preheat the oven to 392 oF
- Combine butter and sugar and whip with an electric mixer until the sugar is whipped well.
- Whip the heavy cream into the mix on low speed to start with.
- Mix the spices, baking powder and baking soda into the flour and stir it into the batter until the dough can be rolled into a soft ball.
- Knead with your hands.
- Roll dough into sausages, approx. as thick as a little finger. Cut them into small square pieces (approx. 1/3” of an inch) I used a little plastic dough cutter (my tip is to place a lot of rolls next to each other and then cut them out all at once, as it can be time consuming)
- Place them on a baking sheet – they do not expand much so they can be spaced fairly closely together.
- Bake for approx. 10 min. (They should not be too brown and make sure they do not become overdone on the bottom)