We made some cookies this week, in keeping with the German tradition of "Plaetzchen machen". I helped my guest family make a couple kinds of cookies, and tried to impress them by making some of the Christmas cookies my family always makes at home: Candy Cane cookies.
Unfortunately, they don't have peppermint flavoring here in Germany, which is an essential ingredient that keeps the candy cane cookies from tasting like.. dough. I looked all over for the flavoring, but couldn't find it. I was only able to find candy canes at the KaDeWe, claimed to be the second biggest department store in Europe. But even they didn't have peppermint flavoring.
We thought about crushing up a bunch of tic tacs, but as we were preparing the cookies, our guest family told us they had "peppermint elixir" which might work. The peppermint elixir said it was used for curing coughs, lung cancer, helping you breathe underwater and all sorts of stuff. Our guest father is actually a doctor, and determined that it was ok to use for flavoring because the maximum dose was 2 drops twice a day, and as long as you didn't eat too many cookies, it should be ok. He prescribed two drops four our dough. Our guest mother was concerned about the flavor baking out, so we put in 3 drops of elixir into our dough which was the size of two fists.
When the cookies were done, they certainly looked very colorful, due to the red food coloring that I successfully found in the local grocery store. Unfortunately, you could still feel some of the decongestional properties of the peppermint elixir when you ate the cookies, so they weren't the biggest hit.
However, it's going to be a great Christmas.
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