Elisenlebkuchen

Method

1. Chop the Orangeat and Zitronat until there are no pieces left bigger than a grain of rice. If yours are hard and dry, pulse them with a spoonful of the sugar, which stops them balling up in the blade. Lumps of candied peel in the finished Lebkuchen are the difference between homemade and good.
2. Beat the eggs with the sugar and salt for 6 to 8 minutes until pale, thick, and roughly tripled in volume. This is the only aeration the recipe has, so give it the full time.
3. Warm the honey just enough to make it pourable and beat it in.
4. Dissolve the Hirschhornsalz in a teaspoon of cold water and stir it in now, if you are using it.
5. Fold in the ground almonds, ground hazelnuts, candied peel, lemon zest, and spice. The mass will be thick, sticky, and spreadable, somewhere between a batter and a paste.
6. Cover the bowl and leave it at room temperature for 12 hours, or overnight. Up to 24 hours is fine, and in a cool larder up to two days is traditional.
7. Next day, set the Backoblaten on parchment-lined trays. Wet your hands, take about 45 g of the mass per wafer, and mound it on, then smooth it into a low dome with a wet palette knife or the back of a wet spoon, leaving 2 mm of bare wafer around the rim. Rinse your hands whenever the mass starts sticking rather than sliding.
8. Heat the oven to 160°C top and bottom heat, or 145°C fan.
9. Bake 20 to 25 minutes on the middle shelf. They are done when the surface is dry and matte, the edges have set, and the centre still gives under light pressure. They will look distinctly soft. That is correct; they set as they cool, and anything baked to firm in the oven will be dry in the tin.
10. Cool completely on a rack.
11. For the chocolate glaze, melt the couverture with the oil to about 32°C, hold each Lebkuchen by the wafer, dip the domed top, let the excess drip off, and set it down to harden. For the white glaze, stir the powdered sugar with the liquid to a thick pouring consistency and brush it on, then leave it to dry for an hour.
12. Store airtight. See the notes on the apple.

Notes

• What makes an Elisenlebkuchen an Elisenlebkuchen is a legal definition, not a family secret. Under the German Leitsätze für Feine Backwaren, the food code that the Deutsche Lebensmittelbuch-Kommission maintains, an Elisenlebkuchen must contain at least 25 percent almonds, hazelnuts, and/or walnuts, and at most 10 percent cereal products or 7.5 percent starch, or an equivalent mix of the two. The tiers below it are set the same way: feine Oblatenlebkuchen need at least 12.5 percent oil seeds, and einfache Oblatenlebkuchen only 7 percent. This recipe has 350 g of nuts in about 890 g of mass, which is 39 percent, and no flour or starch at all. The high nut load is not showing off. Nuts are what carries the fat, and fat is what keeps the thing moist in a tin for six weeks. The versions that fall back on flour go dry.
• Backoblaten are thin round wafers baked from nothing but flour, starch, and water between hot irons, the same product as a communion wafer. They are not decoration and not a liner. This mass has no gluten and no structure, so it would spread flat and weld itself to the tray without a base. The wafer holds the dome, absorbs some moisture from the underside during baking, and comes off the tray in one piece. German supermarkets sell them from late September in 70 mm and 90 mm rounds; 70 mm is the standard Elisenlebkuchen size. In Canada, look for them at a German or Polish grocer, or order them online where they are sold as baking wafers or Lebkuchen wafers. Without them, pipe the mass into greased 7 cm crumpet rings on parchment and accept that they will spread a little more and be slightly harder to lift.
• Zitronat is candied citron peel, made from the Zitronatzitrone, a thick-pithed citrus grown for exactly this. Orangeat is candied bitter orange peel. Both are sold diced in 100 g tubs in every German supermarket from October and are also available whole in halves at markets, which are far better. If you cannot get them, candied mixed peel from a Canadian supermarket is the closest thing, though it is usually sweeter and softer. Do not swap in dried apricot or raisins; the whole point of the candied peel is the bitter oil in the pith, which cuts the sugar. If you have to substitute, use the finely grated zest of two oranges and one lemon plus 80 g of the sugar cooked briefly to a syrup with the zest in it.
• Hirschhornsalz is ammonium bicarbonate, sold in 15 g sachets under exactly that name, and it is what gives flat, dense honey and nut doughs their lift. It only decomposes above about 60°C, so unlike baking powder it does not start working in the bowl during the overnight rest. It gives off ammonia in the oven, which you will smell and which is normal; it disperses as the biscuits cool, and it only works properly in thin, flat bakes where the gas can escape. Pottasche, potassium carbonate, is the other traditional Lebkuchen leavener. It also needs heat, it is close to flavour neutral, and it drives the dough sideways rather than upwards, which is why classic Lebkuchen doughs use the two together. Neither one is required here: the beaten eggs do most of the work and 2 g of Hirschhornsalz just opens the crumb slightly. Leave both out and the Lebkuchen are a little denser and chewier, which some people prefer. Do not substitute baking powder in a dough that rests overnight, because it will have spent itself before the tray goes near the oven.
• Lebkuchengewürz is a fixed supermarket item in Germany and a perfectly good one. To mix your own, use 5 g cinnamon, 1.5 g cloves, 1 g cardamom, 1 g mace or nutmeg, and 0.5 g each of aniseed, coriander, ginger, and allspice. That is about 10 g, the right amount for this batch, and it works out at roughly one teaspoon per 250 g of dough as a general rule. Grind whole spices if you can; pre-ground cloves and cardamom lose most of their character within a few months. A knife tip of dried orange peel ground into the mix is a good addition.
• The overnight rest is not slack scheduling. Ground nuts absorb the egg and honey slowly, the sugar finishes dissolving, and the spices, which are mostly oil soluble, spread into the fat in the nuts. A batch baked immediately tastes thin and grainy and dries out inside a week. A rested batch bakes to a smoother, denser, more even crumb and keeps for two months. Twelve hours is the minimum, twenty-four is better, and traditional Franconian practice runs to several days in a cold room.
• They are supposed to get softer, not staler. Put them in an airtight tin with a thick wedge of apple, skin on, sitting on a scrap of parchment so it does not touch the glaze. The Lebkuchen draw moisture from it and go from firm to properly yielding over about a week. Swap the apple every three or four days before it moulds, and stop once they are as soft as you want them. They keep two months in the tin and are at their best somewhere between weeks two and six.
• They are gluten free provided you leave out the wafers or buy gluten free ones, which exist. Say so before serving, because most people assume a Lebkuchen is a flour biscuit.
• Nuremberg’s Lebkuchen guild dates to the fourteenth century and the city built the trade on being a hub for the spice routes. The story that the name comes from a baker’s daughter called Elise is repeated everywhere and there is no evidence for it. The name is protected in practice only through the Leitsätze definition above; Nürnberger Lebkuchen as a geographical term is separately protected, and only bakers within the city can use it.

Sources used

• Lebensmittelklarheit: Nussanteil von Elisenlebkuchen
• Wikipedia: Lebkuchen
• Wikipedia: Oblate
• Brotwein: Elisenlebkuchen Rezept, saftige Lebkuchen backen ohne Mehl
• Rezeptschachtel: Elisenlebkuchen Rezept
• Cookie und Co: Rezept für saftige Elisenlebkuchen
• Smarticular: Lebkuchengewürz selber machen
• Stiftung Warentest: Hirschhornsalz und Pottasche, für Lebkuchen und Printen