Springerle

I decided to get into baking this year, and (as is usual with me) I dove into the most complex recipe available. Springerle cookies—hard, anise-flavored German cookies with images imprinted in their faces.

My mother always made them, and my brother misses the things terribly. The cookies were a basic reason behind my purchase of a KitchenAid mixer, though I've found other uses for it too.

The recipe calls for "four cups of all-purpose flour," and I decided to be gourmet about it and shunned the store-brand flour. Instead, I bought something called White Lily All-Purpose Flour. That sounded gourmet.

All went reasonably well until the end of the mixing process. It just didn't look right. I called my sister, and she confirmed that Mom always complained that the dough was like cement. Mine was like soft frosting. I scooped it back into the mixer bowl, got out the flour bag, and then chanced to look at the side of the bag. There's a substitution. To use this flour in ordinary recipes, you have to use more—something like half a cup more in my recipe. I kept adding flour by the handful until I got something approximating cement and went forward with the process. They are out of the oven now, cooling. I wonder if I'll be able to get them off the cookie sheet.

It turns out, by the way, that White Lily is a Southern specialty, mainly used for their extremely light biscuits. It's not really a general-purpose flour at all. Who knew?