Latvia has its own culinary tradition for the New Year and Christmas - it is piparkukas, or "cookies with pepper". Not spicy, but sweet, usually brown in color, it has a unique spicy taste. Cookies with pepper in the form of stars, hearts, animals can be hung on a Christmas tree, or they can be served on a festive New Year's table.
If you want to try piparcuas, we have two options. You can take a train and go to Latvia. In Riga and its surroundings, quality dough is sold in small shops and supermarkets. All that remains is to put it in molds, then grease it with an egg and put it in the oven. But you can also choose the second way: stay at home and cook the piparcuas yourself. And for this, take 1 kg of high quality wheat flour, half a glass of sugar, 100 g of honey and molasses (or whatever you can replace it with), 2 eggs, 5 tbsp. butter and another half glass of water.
Do not forget about spices: ground black pepper - on the tip of a knife, half a teaspoon of nutmeg, 3 teaspoons of cinnamon, 5-7 pieces of fragrant cloves (odd amount), a teaspoon of ginger. And add some baking soda, which is traditionally quenched with lemon juice. When all the ingredients are collected, you can start making the dough.
So, grind the butter with sugar, then gradually add the eggs, bringing the whole mass to white with a matte shade. Add a third of the cooked flour and knead the dough. Then take water and honey with molasses, heat to the state "almost hot" and, stirring gently, add to the dough. Pour the rest of the flour into the resulting mass and, while making the mixture, add more spices and quenched soda.
Some housewives believe that the most delicious peppercorns are those that are baked immediately, from fresh dough. And others, on the contrary, make the appropriate mixture in advance and at the same time leave it in the refrigerator on the lowest shelf so that it is well saturated with spices.
If you have molds, just grease them and fill them with a thin layer (no more than 1.5 cm) of dough. If there are no molds, you can cut out figures from the dough or mold them. It remains to grease with an egg and put in a hot oven for about 15 minutes.
