From Sabrina Welserin's cookbook c 1553
151: To bake good Lebkuchen
Take first a pound of sugar, a quart of clear honey, not quite a third quart of flour, take two and a half ounces of cinnamon, one and a half ounces of cloves, two ounces of cardamom. Cut the other spices as small as possible, the cinnamon sticks are ground as coarsely as possible. Also put ginger therein and put the sugar into the honey, let it cook together, put the flour in a trough, pour the cardamom into it first, afterwards the ginger and the other spices.
My recreation of Lebkuchen
I cut the recipe down to a quarter of the original size
Pre-heat oven to 350, then turn down to 300 during baking.
Ingredients
1 cup honey 1/2 cup sugar 1 teaspoon ginger 1 Tablespoon cinnamon 2 1/2 cups GF flour or regular white flour 2 teaspoons cardamon 1/2 teaspoon cloves
Method
Add honey and sugar to a saucepan, heat to just a boil over low heat, stiring frequently. Add ginger and cinnamon to honey/sugar mixture. In large bowl, mix one cup flour with cardamon and cloves. Add hot honey mixture and mix well. Dough will be quite sticky. Add rest of flour 1/2 cup at a time until dough is stiff and forms into a ball.
Grease and flour a large cookie sheet which has an edge to it. Dump dough onto sheet and with well greased hands, spread dough evenly over sheet, leaving a gap between dough and sheet edge.
Place in oven and decrease temperature to 300 degrees. Bake for 15 minutes or until dough has a matte, not glossy appearance and is slightly browned (if you can even tell from all the spices!).
Let cool on sheet for about 5 minutes and then using a knife, cut into squares but don't take the cookies from the pan yet. When cookies are almost cool, then carefully remove them from pan. If the cookies are too hard to cut, put them back in the warm oven for 5 minutes to soften up, then try cutting them.
Comments:
These are a great traveling cookie and went over really well at a long weekend camping event this last summer.