Traditional Christmas Baking – Hard to Find Ingredients and Supplies

When people find out that my business sells cookies they immediately assume that I bake the cookies. I laugh (hard) because I could never bake that many cookies and I don’t bake at all – I barely make supper!!!

But I know a good cookie or pastry or confection when I see and taste one. Pair it up with a strong Americano coffee and I’m in heaven!!
But many of our customers enjoy baking the traditional European recipes they grew up with – the ones passed down from Omas and Grandmothers and Babbas. And many of our baking customers tell us that it is becoming harder to find some of the ingredients and supplies needed to create these recipes – especially if you live outside large cities.

So we’ve created a small Collection of baking ingredients and supplies for purchase in our European Ware Haus adding items as suggested by our customers and our suppliers. The Collection for 2020 is our largest ever and it is getting a lot of attention.

Some of the items you can find in our Baking Supplies for Traditional German Christmas Recipes Collection include:

• Fresh whole and ground spices
• Vials of Hirchhornsalz Ammonium Carbonate and Pottasche Potassium Carbonate
• Oetker extract flavourings – Vanilla, Rum, Almond and Citrus
• Citrus Zest and Candied Citrus
• Palmin Coconut Oil
• Marzipan for Baking
• Backoblaten – the thin wafer on the bottom of a Lebkuchen cookie
• Specialty Sugars

A great resource for German Christmas Recipes and Traditions is theSpruceEats.com website. They offer recipes for all the favourites – Lebkuchen, Stollen, Cinnamon Star cookie and more. Plus they link to interesting tidbits of history and explanations.

A girlfriend gave me a beautiful cookbook called Classic German Baking: The Very Best Recipes For Traditional Favorites, From Pfeffernüsse To Streuselkuchen (available at Indigo Chapters).It has some beautiful pictures (although I would prefer more pics of each recipe) and has a section on Pantry Ingredients. The author includes 3 different recipes for Lebkuchen in addition to so many other pastries and sweet treats.

Another cookbook I was given is called The German Cookbook: A Complete Guide To Mastering Authentic German Cooking (also available at Indigo Chapters). This is a weighty tome with not one picture but tons of recipes for both baking and German cooking. I found the preliminary chapters most interesting – the introduction to German eating and drinking, a chapter on Holiday Festivals and Foods and the chapter on The German Kitchen.

Of course if you’re like me and enjoy reading and talking about baking but not actually the baking itself our European Ware Haus has you covered for that as well! There are lots (and lots) of Lebkuchen options to choose from baked in three different bakeries in Nuremberg and available in classic, Gluten Free, Vegan and Organic varieties. There is Stollen, Dominosteine, Zimtsterne and Vanillekipferl plus Marzipan and Chocolate confections.

Many of our customers tell us that they create their Bunte Tellers (colourful plates of cookies and confections) mixing their own baking with the treats from our shop.

My children attended a German Bilingual public elementary schools here in Winnipeg Canada. One of the songs they sang during the Christmas Season was a celebration of German baking called “In der Weihnachtsbäckerei” or in English “In The Christmas Bakery”. Here is a video of this sweet song - it's a little corny but a lot of fun!:



Thanks for shopping at Gingerbread World’s European Ware Haus. Share your European baking adventure stories with us in the Comment section below.

Gut essen, gut trinken und gut backen! Good eating, good drinking and good baking!

Tamara
Owner @ Gingerbread World