It's that time of year!

"Busy" has been the key word of late, which is more than fine with me, as I would entertain just about any kind of distraction from really noticing the increasingly shorter days and pitch blackness before dinnertime. 

It turned out that my union OK'd the Danish class.  I was looking forward to it as an opportunity to network with employed Danish people, for a change, but wouldn't you know it - all but one of the other classmates is also foreign!  And we are all unemployed except for the German nurse.  (My nurse sister got all the ability to deal with germs.)

In any case, this is an interesting class, and I have learned a few things so far.

That aside, I have been invited to five social events over the weekend, one of which is Christmas cookie making!!!!!!!

This year also will mark the fourth Christmas away from Ohio/in Nyborg at the in-law's.  The first year my mom sent a lovely care package filled with my favorite Christmas cookies.  Each year, she gets together with her friend and they bake up a storm!  Among the many types of cookies, gingerbread men with meringue icing is my FAVORITE! Here is a link to the recipe.

The last two years I have attempted to recreate this recipe on my own, but with limited success.  I remember it was quite a chore just to find the ingredients at the stores!  Here is a cheat sheet:

1. shortening = butter. Ain't no such thing as Crisco here, folks (not sure if that might be due to some kind of rules about partially hydrogenated oil, but that's another story).  And ALWAYS use organic butter. It has a much better taste, and you feel less guilty about eating desserts, if you know there are not any pesticides or hormones in those fat cells.

2. molasses = mørk sirup (dark syrup).  This can be found at your bigger stores, such as Kvickly and Bilka.

3. white vinegar = klar eddike.  While one-liter bottles of colored vinegar are everywhere, the white stuff costs about three times as much, and therefore can be found at the 'nicer' stores, such as Kvickly.  I wonder why it costs more than the other kind, because they had to add coloring to the cheaper kind!

4. ground cloves = nelliker.  At your typical discount stores, such as Netto, Fakta, and Rema 1000, you can find a small array of baking goods, such as flour, sugar, baking powder and soda, salt, pepper, powdered sugar, cinnamon, and vanilla pods.  But for anything more exotic than cinnamon, it is once again necessary to go to a bigger store that carries the vast assortment of Santa Maria spices.  Thank GOD for Santa Maria's spices! 

5. confectioner's sugar = flormelis (powdered sugar).  These come in boxes of 500 grams, and I have discovered that each box is 2 cups.

6. meringue powder = ?  This one I have yet to find here in Denmark.  So I save valuable suitcase weight and bring some back each year. 

Another baking ingredient I have yet to find here is cream of tartar.  It is called "vinsten" (lit. wine stone), and I have found it only on a Dutch website.  Last summer I had trouble finding it in Walmart and Kroger (why isn't it next to other products that make things rise, like baking soda and powder?).  So my mom and SIL presented me with several containers of it before I left.

While Denmark is known world-wide for its pastries, the art of baking desserts is not a big "thing" here.  For example, little kiddie birthdays are celebrated with a layered whipped cream and apple dessert, topped with crushed macaroons and presented in a big clear bowl (it is called "lagkage", lit. layer cake, but the only cake I've seen in it is a thin round that you can buy pre-packaged).  The kiddies also have "boller" (buns) with hot chocolate.  These buns are more like something I'd eat with soup.  But hey, it all reminds me of hot buns Daniel Craig in the film "Layer Cake". And that is a welcome daydream in the midst of high-pitched children's shrieks and yells (which are never, ever absorbed by carpet or furniture in these wood-floored, minimalistic Danish homes with very tall ground-floor ceilings).

The "boller" are also split in half and buttered beforehand.  That is to say, before the guests arrive.  I suppose it is a nice traditional thing to just be able to sit at the table and grab a buttered bun, but my germophobicness is triggered, and I have trouble wanting to eat something that was cradled in another person's hand.  Not to mention the forced eating of another person's ideal serving size of butter (or worse, non-organic butter, or at the very worst, margarine!)  I mean, do they have any idea how much work on a treadmill it will take to burn off those calories?!

While there are plenty of pastry shops here called "bageri" (bakery), I have yet to see a bakery that fits  my definition of the word.  Without any such thing as sheet cakes covered in delicious butter cream frosting, cupcakes, donuts, or cannolis, I cannot get too excited about the bakeries here.  Oh how silly I was to have taken the many Italian-inspired bakeries for granted in the Ohio River Valley!  And while there are a few boxed cake mixes, they aren't any comparison to Pillsbury's or Duncan Hines'.  I have been forced to learn how to make cakes from scratch!

Cake making and decorating in Denmark seems to have a good following online with other bloggers.  While several websites exist for baking ingredients and supplies, I have not seen an actual storefront with these products.  Isn't that interesting?  Once again, thank goodness for IKEA, which has very inexpensive baking tins, cookie sheets, cookie cutters, and a cake decorating set.

As far as Christmas cookies go here in DK, check out this website, which shows the "brunkager" (lit. brown cakes), "pebornødder" (lit. pepper nuts), "vaniliekranser" (lit. vanilla wreaths) and more.  The Danish Christmas cookie is thinner, drier, flatter, and unfrosted, compared to American Christmas cookies. 

So this weekend I am really looking forward to making some real Christmas cookies and candy!  I really thank my friend for inviting me over to do this.  It should be a lot of fun.  And if she or I had a cookie press, I would most certainly try to make the "vaniliekranser", which are one of my husband's favorite Christmas cookies.