Palle’s Brown Cookies: A Christmas Story
My grandmother is the kind of woman who traveled to Iran for a month when she was 65. She raised a daughter alone while working full-time as a nurse, which is to say she didn’t have time for nonsense or mediocre cookies.
This is her recipe for brunkager, though it wasn’t always hers.
The story goes like this: One Christmas Eve, my grandmother was working the night shift, driving out to patients while most of Denmark was home with their families. She arrived at the home of an elderly man named Palle, who had been a baker his entire life. He asked if she didn’t have family to be with. She told him she had a daughter being looked after by her mother. He asked if she’d baked Christmas cookies yet that year. She admitted she wasn’t much good at baking.
Palle found this recipe and sent her out the door with it, telling her she could now bake the best brown cookies in Denmark. Which she has done, more or less, ever since. These days her grandchildren do most of the baking, but we’re all using Palle’s recipe.
I like that they’re a bit rustic looking, not perfect. They’re also enormous, these cookies. But that hardly matters when they taste this good.
Last year I baked 1,200 of them for friends and family. I started in mid-November and made 400. They were gone before December arrived. I made another 400 in early December. Gone by mid-month. I had to bake a third batch just to have some left for Christmas Eve.
The good news is they’re remarkably easy to make and bake. You can make a large batch of dough and keep it in the freezer, baking cookies as you need them, which is how you survive baking over a thousand cookies without losing your mind.
My grandmother keeps all her recipes in a notebook, old ones and new ones together. There’s apparently a wild layer cake recipe in there too that I’m trying to get my hands on.
Palle’s Brunkager
Makes approximately 60-80 large cookies
You’ll need:
- 250g sugar
- 500g flour
- 250g golden syrup (or dark corn syrup)
- 250g butter
- 3 teaspoons baking soda
- 1 teaspoon hartshorn salt (or substitute with additional baking soda)
- 1 teaspoon ground cloves
- 1 teaspoon ground cardamom
- 3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
- 125g chopped blanched almonds
What you do:
Melt the butter and syrup together in a pot until combined. Let it cool slightly.
In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, hartshorn salt, and all the spices. Add the chopped almonds.
Pour the melted butter and syrup mixture into the dry ingredients. Work it together into a dough.
Shape the dough into a log, roughly the thickness you want your finished cookies to be. Wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and freeze until completely solid. This can take several hours or overnight.
When ready to bake, preheat your oven to 175°C (350°F).
Slice the frozen dough into thin pieces, about 5mm thick. No thawing needed.
Place them directly on parchment-lined baking sheets. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes until golden at the edges but still slightly soft in the center. They’ll firm up as they cool.
Let them cool completely before storing in tins. They keep for weeks.
The frozen dough log keeps in the freezer for months, so you can bake fresh cookies whenever you need them without the stress of starting from scratch.
A note on baking ahead: The dough freezes beautifully. Make it in November, bake through December, and you’ll have warm cookies appearing like magic whenever you need them.