Kringler

To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into with this Kringler recipe from Cookies by Bess. I’ve never heard of Kringler cookies, but the name reminds me of the traditional Kringle, a butter layered Danish pastry introduced in Racine, WI in the late 1800’s. Reading the history, you will learn that Kringle’s are traditionally shape is like a pretzel.  The Kringle’s I know from Racine are oval shaped and filled with fruit, cream cheese or nut pastes and frosted.

When looking at the ingredients for the Kringler recipe, I realized quickly I wasn’t going to get anything similar to the Kringle’s I am used to.  Kringlers have no sugar, no filling, no frosting…just a lot of butter and flour. I was curious how this cookie was going to turn out, so I got started on making the cookie dough.

I rated this cookie recipe  4-stars for cookie difficulty.  4-stars is our most difficult rating and is defined as:  Complicated and requires multiple steps/processes and practice to get the cookies just right.  As you’ll see when you read on, there are multiple challenging steps that are pretty darn time consuming!  Lots of practice is needed to perfect this Kringler recipe!

I pulled all my ingredients together and started mixing.

To start with, the blending of the flour and butter, “as you would for pastry”, really means that the butter should be cut into the flour.

First, I measured my flour and then cut my butter into chunks.  It’s best to use chilled or room temperature butter to start with.  Too soft butter will end up blending together, which isn’t what you are looking for.

Next, I used a fork to break a part the butter to combine with the flour.

After the butter and flour are “cut in” together, the consistency should be fine, but not blended.  It should be well mixed with the butter broken up into tiny bits.

I’ve cut in butter several times now baking Grandma’s cookie recipes, so I’ve got it down, but it is still time consuming and not easy with just a folk! I need to invest in a pastry blender before I do this again!

Next, adding the cream and egg yolks helped to blend everything together, but the dough was so dense it was hard! Once the liquid was absorbed, I could barely get everything mixed together. Definitely needed the “elbow grease”!

And then, sticking the dough into the refrigerator for an hour or two made it hard as a rock! I was barely able to break apart a piece to roll. Once I got a piece broken off the dough ball, I kneaded it together to soften it just enough to roll with the rolling pin. I put a little flour on the wood cutting board and on the rolling pin. It didn’t need too much as the dough wasn’t sticky.

I used a measuring tape to determine the right thickness of the dough and then to measure the length and width of the strips.

The ¼ inch thick, 4 to 5-inch strip wasn’t easy to form into the pretzel shape so I ended up going with a 6-inch long strip. I tried to shape the strips into the traditional pretzel shape, but wasn’t able to without the dough tearing or the shape looking well out of shape. I ended up taking a little different “twist” on the shape by twisting the dough into a pretzel stick. This seemed to work well with the dough configurations, so I went with this shape for the rest of the batch.

Next, the recipe calls for sprinkling the cookies with sugar and nuts. I decided to use pecans, only because my memory of the Kringle has pecans sprinkled on top of the frosting. You can also use walnuts or even almonds, it’s really your preference.

I tried to sprinkle the sugar and nuts on the strips before twisting them. But just about all the sugar and nuts fell off the dough when I picked the strip up. I ended up twisting the cookies and sprinkling the sugar and nuts on after they were shaped.

In this case, because I wanted these cookies to look festive for the holidays, I sprinkled the cookies with a little granulated sugar, then with the chopped pecans, and then with red and green colored sugars. The mixture looked great! Too bad most of the nuts and sugars fell off the cookies when I moved them! ☹

To help, I placed the cookie twists on a separate wood cutting board before sprinkling the nuts and sugars, so I could collect what didn’t stick and use it for the next batch. I ended up using the left overs to sprinkle on the cookies again after I took them out of the oven. They stuck a little better, but there was still enough that didn’t stick to use with the next batch.

The shapes of some of the cookies changed while baking. The dough didn’t expand too much when baking.  Depending on the thickness of the strips and the amount of twisting, some came apart and some stayed twisted.

Either way, the end result cookie is very pretty! Double sprinkling the nuts and sugars helped to keep enough on the cookies so they look festive! Adding both the granulated sugar and the colored sugars helps with the taste and sweetness.

It’s interesting to me that these cookies are not super sweet like a Kringle pastry.  These Kringler cookies are more bland and a little dry…almost the opposite of the Kringle! The sugars add a bit of sweetness and the nuts add a bit more flavor.

Make sure you plan your time accordingly when deciding to make this recipe. You can break the time up a bit after putting the dough into the refrigerator.  But once you start rolling, cutting, shaping, sprinkling, and baking, you are in it for the long haul!

These cookies will be a great addition to your holiday cookie assortment! The twisted shape, nuts, and color sugars will draw lots of oooooh and aaaaaahs from your family and guests!

XXOO,

Janet

 

 

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