Ingredients
- 6 cups flour
- 3 teaspoons baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 pound lard (a must, no substitutes)
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 2 teaspoons anise seed
- 2 eggs
- 1/2 cup sweet table wine
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1 tablespoon cinnamon
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Sift flour, baking powder, and salt. Cream the lard with sugar and anise seed on medium speed. In a separate bowl. beat eggs until light and fluffy. Add beaten eggs to creamed mixture. Mix together well, adding wine to form a stiff-like dough, add more wine, if necessary.
Refrigerate dough overnight.
Remove dough from refrigerator and let stand for a while, until dough is soft enough to roll. Divide dough in quarters and roll to about 1/16 to 1/8-inch thickness. Cut with cookie cutter and place on cookie sheet. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes or until bottom of cookie is golden brown. Remove from oven. In a bowl mix together sugar and cinnamon. Drop baked cookies into sugar and cinnamon mixture and set aside to cool.
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By Smedley67
on December 19, 2011
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This recipe produces a tender wonderful cookie. I added an additional teaspoon of anise seed and replaced white wine with brandy which my family traditionally used. I will grind ansie and cinnamon as recomended in a previous review with my next batch. I know that some folks recall these cookies as hard, dunking types but in my family they were tender, delicate and elegant
By IDigFilm
Covina, CA
on December 11, 2010
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This recipe is perfect as is!! The one thing I can recommend is to use whole anise pods (2 and whole cinnamon sticks (1 small [available in most spice sections or Latino sections of the grocery store]. Grind them yourself in a coffee grinder or molcajete specifically used for grinding spices. It make s a HUGE difference in the authenticity of the taste and counterbalances the supposed overly sweet cookie. Since it's a two day process, I usually grind the anise for the dough and put it in the fridge, then I grind the cinnamon and make about 4 cups of cinnamon sugar since I bake so many of these. The essential oils have a chance to get into the sugar and create this wonderful earthy spicy sweetness. Since the cinnamon is markedly stronger than the pre-ground stuff, you get a much more aromatic cookie than you would ever get with dried and ground anise powder and cinnamon. My 70 something year old Aunt and Uncle say it tastes just like their Mom's!!
By CiaoHound
Phoenix, AZ
on November 13, 2010
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GREAT! Traditional Mexican Christmas cookie I used to make with mi abuela!
I made a few slight changes: (1 Use anise extract instead of seed so flavor spreads more evenly & subtlely throughout the cookie; (2 use 1/4 c of brandy; (3 put cinnamon-sugar mix or red sprinkles on top of the cookie before baking; (4 use only 1 c of sugar in the recipe... the other 1/2 c is for the cinnamon-sugar topping. My aunts & uncles like these even better than my grandmother's biscocitos!
Agree with the author... you MUST use lard. Don't substitute Crisco, butter, margarine or oil as they won't taste authentic. The lard keeps the cookies light like shortbread.
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