Piernik

It was a Saturday morning and I had a craving for cookies. But it went beyond just ravaging a package of Oreos from the 7-11. I wanted to MAKE cookies. As I mentioned before, I’m an aspiring children’s book writer (both middle grade and young adult). I’m currently working on a young adult novel where my seventeen-year-old main character, Tess, who loves cooking, receives a family cookbook for her birthday and decides to cook her way through it as a way to uncover/connect family history/secrets. Her family is Polish-American (they immigrated in the early 1900s) so what she’ll be cooking is predominantly Polish and Polish-adapted food. I figured to get a real sense of some of her potential recipes I would buy a few Polish cookbooks and turn my kitchen into Tess’ test kitchen.

With that in mind, I figured I would throw caution to the wind and not whip up a batch of classic chocolate chip or sugar cookies –- I would be adventurous and try something new. I picked out Piernik (which I knew nothing about) but the ingredients of honey and sugar intrigued me (as in they are both delicious ingredients).

The first thing I remembered once I started to make the dough was that I don’t have a rolling pin and it’s pretty hard to roll out dough without one. I substituted a rolling pin for a wine bottled that I wrapped up in wax paper – it did the trick, all be it sort of sloppily. (I went out and bought a rolling pin a day later.)

I lack any kind of Polish vocabulary (and I thought a google search for "Piernik" would be cheating) so I knew that whatever was going to pop out of my oven would be a total surprise. Well, it turned out to be a good surprise… apparently Piernik means gingerbread!

Unlike thin gingerbread (the kind you think of when you picture of gingerbread houses or those crispy gingerbread men whose arms you can snap right off when you’re have a fit of man-hating rage), these Polish cookies were a bit thicker and had a nice, hearty consistency and feel. Even though the recipe didn’t call for it, I iced a few of them and let the icing harden which I think made them all the better (let’s get real, icing improves everything. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of the iced cookies so you'll have to settle for seeing them naked.)

These were definitely a nice fall/winter cookie, but since I love cookies I enjoyed them for the spring, too. They aren't a candy-like, sugared-up, kid-friendly cookie, but they ARE a perfect accompaniment to tea or coffee and for people who don't like sweet-sweets.

Overall rating: 7 out of 10.

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Recipe-- Pierkink (Compliments of Old Warsaw Cookbook)

Ingredients --

4 cups flour

2 eggs

1 cup sugar

1 cup honey

2 t. baking soda

½ t. cinnamon

¼ t. ginger

salt

powdered sugar

1 t. vanilla

1 T. water

Directions --

Beat the eggs well. Add sugar and blend in honey and vanilla. Then add the soda dissolved in 1 T. of water. Slowly stir in sifted flour, salt, cinnamon and ginger. Mix all the ingredients together well. Roll dough to a thin layer on a floured board and cut into large heart shapes. (I did stars since I didn’t have a heart cookie cutter.) Brush with egg white and dust with powdered sugar. (I also only did this for half of the cookies, the other half I iced with pretty pink icing.) Bake in a moderate oven for 15 minutes, on a greased floured baking sheet.

Almond Macaroon Failure

I did title this blog “(Mis)Adventures with Food” so you’ve probably been asking yourself, “where are all these mis-adventures anyway? This girl seems like a damn fine cook!” Well, here you go. 

Failure number one: I tried to make almond macaroons today. It seemed simple enough with just three ingredients: sugar, egg whites, and ground almonds. The only successful thing here was grinding up the almonds in my food processor. For starters, the recipe calls for five egg whites. Really, one egg white probably would have been sufficient. The “dough” was really more like a runny goop. “Spoon out ping pong ball-sized bits of dough and put them on the pan” the cookbook instructed. What happened here were NOT balls of dough, but rather a runny mess all over my pan. I tried to add a little flour to help out the so-called “dough”, but it really didn’t do anything to make the mixture less of a liquid. My first batch of cookies came out of the oven nearly taking over the whole pan in a burnt, crispy disaster.

Try number two: Add more flour to the batter and cook on tin foil. Hmmm. I suppose it helped A LITTLE. Of course, the cookies did not want to remove themselves from the tin foil after cooking. So what I have are hard, broken cookie bits.

Try number three: More flour, more flour, and (you guessed it) MORE FLOUR. These ones actually came out of the oven looking like cookies. And they actually removed themselves from the tin foil! Medium success!

Try number four: Much more of the same. (Oh yeah, this picture is of batch 4. What I like to call "The Good Ones".)

Try number five: More flour. Oh yeah, now it's actually starting to resemble dough! And these one's aren't flat. (That's the picture of the blobs/rocks sitting on tin foil.)

Well, overall this was pretty much a disaster that ate up three hours of my time this afternoon. Someone please explain to me the art of making macaroons because I clearly was not successful. I still can't believe there wasn't any flour in this recipe. Anyone want some chewy macaroon rocks? I don’t have the patience for any more kitchen time today… I think I will be eating out for dinner.

Score: 1 out of 10.