COLUMBUS, Ohio — The month and a half between the beginning of Thanksgiving week and New Year’s Day represents the busiest time of year for Columbus-area bakeries.
Debbie Smith and her two daughters make more than 2,000 of their beloved springerle cookies at the Original Goodie Shop in Upper Arlington, not to mention many other sweet treats.
Because of her busy hours at her bakery, Sweet Tooth Cottage in Powell, Sue Bissonnette never gets to properly celebrate her husband’s birthday on Dec. 12.
“That’s the busiest week of the year,” Bissonnette said. “It gears up around Halloween and doesn’t stop.”
Still, these bakers delight in their work that brings so many people joy during the holiday season, whether it’s customers or family and friends. Yes, these busy bakers still find time and energy to make the favorite recipes of their spouses and children.
“Baking — I really think, it’s about togetherness, no matter who you’re baking with, whether that’s girlfriends or family,” Bissonnette said. “You create this love in the air with fun and laughs and drinks.”
This year, The Dispatch asked four local bakers to share their favorite holiday dessert recipes, no matter if it’s baked in the shop or at home.
Husband’s love of pecan pie leads to quest for perfect recipe
Pecan pie always seemed like a rudimentary dessert to Juana Williams, one she didn’t feel the need to make often.
That was, until she got tired of her husband Vance “ranting and raving” about the ones he got at another bakery during the holidays. (Pecan pie is his favorite sweet.)
As a lifelong baker, Williams knew she could do better.
Admittedly, she started too fancy with her efforts and failed epically, she said.
“But that only fueled me to make the perfect pecan pie,” said Williams, who opened J’s Sweet Treats and Wedding Cakes in 2016, first as a pop-up shop and then leaving a corporate job to run two brick-and-mortar bakeries (one on the South Side and one on Polaris Parkway). “I wasn’t going to be defeated and watch him go to another business to get one.”
It only took her a few more tries to get her recipe just right.
In her trials and errors, she learned that even though the ingredient list is short and they simply need to be added in the correct order, there are a few tips to follow.
“The key is it make it with high-quality pecans,” Williams said. “Sometimes I’d run to the store and get some no-name pecans, but the taste of the pie — the nuttiness — is not as good if you aren’t getting quality pecans.”
Williams, who runs the two bakeries with her two adult daughters, said she’s partial to the pecans from www.nuts.com and Sam’s Club’s variety that comes in a green bag.
She also said she prefers to use light corn syrup, and adds that ingredients should be room temperature when mixing, and the oven should never be opened while the treat is baking.
Now, the pie is a mainstay in her bakery during the holidays — and because it’s much easier to make than other pies on the menu, such as the labor-intensive sweet potato pie, she wonders why she hasn’t been making it all these years.
“Ironically, people drive from all over for it,” Williams said. “I had a guy come in here from Georgia and he’d never had a pecan pie from me before. He said it was the best one he’s ever had.”
And now her husband agrees.
CLASSIC PECAN PIE
Makes 8 servings
1 cup Karo Light Syrup
3 eggs, room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons butter, melted
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1½ cups (6 ounces) coarsely chopped pecans
1 (9-inch) unbaked OR frozen deep-dish pie crust
Heat oven to 350.
Mix the syrup and eggs together. Pour in sugar and once that is mixed well, add melted butter and drop in vanilla. Stir really well with a rubber spatula or whisk. Stir pecans in lightly so they do not break.
Bake for one hour, but do not open the oven while it is baking to prevent cracking. Must cool to room temperature (at least two hours) before it is cut. Chill in refrigerator, if needed.
Powell baker’s children still ask for chocolate chip scones every Christmas
If all of Sue Bissonnette’s adult children are in the same house, she knows she’s baking chocolate chip scones.
And typically, that happens frequently during the holidays.
She’s not sure really when or why she started making them, and the recipe, she said, is cobbled from a few she’s read over the years.
“I probably made them one time and they kept asking for them,” Bissonnette said of her three children ages 20 to 24. “When they were young, they liked to cut them. I used a pizza slicer to cut them into the pie shape. Then, they brushed the egg wash or milk over the top. They were great at those tasks.”
Never mind that this time of year, she’s also making hundreds of dozens of iced sugar cookies, plus cakes, cheesecake bars and other desserts at her Powell bakery Sweet Tooth Cottage, Bissonnette still relishes in making these annually for her family. (She already made a big batch for Thanksgiving morning.)
Plus, the scones are easy, with a pretty cut-and-dry recipe, she said.”You want your butter to be really cold when you blend it in — that’s where the flakiness comes in,” she said. “And it doesn’t have to be chocolate chips. You can use nuts, cranberries or whatever you like.”
Her children, however, were always partial to the chocolate chip versions.
Another nice feature of this recipe is the dough can be made ahead of time and refrigerated so it’s a great breakfast item to take on vacation or while traveling this busy season.
Bissonnette doesn’t sell the scones — nor coffee cake or other yeasty favorites — in her bakery; those are reserved for family and friends.
“The scones are really only kind of good out of the oven,” she added.
The time in her own kitchen away from the bakery gives her extra quality time with her children, too.
“I’ll still spend the holidays baking at home, making anything and everything,” Bissonnette said. “It just reminds me of when my kids were little and I’d have them at the counter with mixers dumping everything in. Even though my kids are older, we’ll still do that.”
CHOCOLATE CHIP SCONES
Makes 8 to 10 large scones
2 cups all-purpose flour
¼ cup granulated white sugar
1¼ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup cold unsalted butter, cut into pieces
½ cup mini semisweet chocolate chips
2/3 to ¾ cup cold buttermilk
1 teaspoon Madagascar vanilla
Heat oven to 400 degrees.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
In a large bowl, whisk the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Cut the butter into this mixture with a pastry cutter or two knives. The mixture will look like coarse crumbs. Stir in chocolate chips.
Add the buttermilk and vanilla. Mix until the dough just comes together. Add more buttermilk or flour if needed to make a soft dough.
Transfer to a lightly floured surface and form dough into a 7-inch round. Cut the circle in half, then cut each half into 4 pie-shaped wedges. Place the scones on the baking sheet. Brush tops with a little milk or egg wash.
Bake 18 to 20 minutes or until golden brown. A toothpick will come out clean.
The scones are always best the day they are baked. They can freeze well for one month.
New recipe for honey pudding delights Thanksgiving guests
Even with all the baking she does at the bakery and her home during the holidays, Jenny Voll can’t help but try new recipes this time of year, especially when they come so highly recommended by one of her employees.
“One of our newer employees — we had a potluck and she brought this in,” said Voll, manager of the Golden Delight bakery in Gahanna. “She’d been talking about it for months. We all went crazy for it. I’ve already made it two times and my sister has made it, too.
The honey pudding definitely lived up to the hype.
All 10 people Voll hosted for Thanksgiving loved the dish and it’s already on the menu for Christmas festivities, but she said she’ll most likely double the recipe then.
“One time around for everybody is just not enough,” she said with a laugh.
The recipe is pretty simple, especially for a homemade pudding, as it just requires constant stirring and making sure the consistency is right. Voll recommends making sure the mixture thickens on the stove and if it’s still a little watery, bakers can add a little more cornstarch.
Plus, she said the sweet honey flavoring is a great addition to the holidays.
“It goes well with Christmas,” she said. “I feel like the honey pudding is very comforting.”
She added that it could be used as a topping on cake or ice cream, but her family prefers it by itself.
“We really like honey in our family — it’s a natural sweetener,” she said. “When we travel, we like to try to pick up different honeys.”
The cookbook the recipe comes from — “The Elder Scrolls: The Official Cookbook” by Chelsea Monroe-Casse — says the taste can vary slightly depending on what kind of honey is used.
Voll said she enjoys the creaminess and although the pudding needs to be refrigerated to harden, she definitely sneaks a few bites while it’s still warm.
“Pudding is a nice change of pace this time of year,” Voll said. “You can only eat so much pie.”
HONEY PUDDING
Makes 4 servings
2 cups whole milk
1 whole vanilla bean, or 1 teaspoon extract
½ cup honey
1 cup heavy cream or whipping cream
3 tablespoons cornstarch
3 egg yolks
Pinch salt
Pour the milk into a medium pot over medium heat. Split the vanilla bean down the middle with a sharp knife and scrape out the seeds. Add the seeds and the pod to the pot of milk, and bring to just under a boil. If using vanilla extract, just pour it in. Add the honey and stir for a few minutes to allow the vanilla to steep into the milk. Fish out the pod, scrape any remaining seeds from it and discard.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the heavy cream, cornstarch, egg yolks and salt. While still whisking, pour a little of the hot milk into the bowl to temper the mixture, then pour everything into the pot. Cook for about five minutes more, stirring all the while, until the mixture has thickened noticeably. Remove from heat, strain into a clean bowl, and cover with plastic. Chill for at least an hour to help the pudding set.
Customers wait all year for beautiful, puffy springerle
The requests for the Original Goodie Shop’s springerle start coming long before Thanksgiving, even though Debbie Smith and her two daughters make them only during the holiday season.
However, people are more than willing to wait for them.
“They’re something people seek out,” said Smith, whose father bought the Upper Arlington bakery in 1967. “People come in asking for them because they can’t find them anywhere else.”
She’s not sure where the recipe came from — whether her father got it from the man he bought the shop from, his mother or somewhere else — for the anise-flavored German cookies.
All Smith knows is they are a favorite of her family and customers, alike.
She suspects it’s because they have an embossed design on them created by a resin press (usually featuring depictions of olden days, such as gristmills or flowers), making them unique.
But it also could be their fluffiness as they “poof up like a pillow” in the oven. In fact, they are called springerle after the German word for “jump.”
“Some people like to dry them out and dunk them in coffee, others eat them right out of the oven,” Smith said. “My mother always sat them out for a week before she ate them.”
She said that although the recipe is fairly simple, the cookies can be time-consuming because bakers have to let them sit for 24 hours for the imprint to set and then, they’re baked in a low temperature.
As far as the press goes, people can buy them at a few online shops. (Smith knows as she sadly had to replace her decades-old one in 2009 after it went missing.)
She and her daughters are always thrilled to pull out that press each holiday season.
“I just saw a lady in here who said, ‘I’ve been buying these for 50 years,’” Smith said. “Food and goodies are some of our favorite things this time of year and they’re linked to memories. Like you eat Grandma’s cookies and it takes you right back to that kitchen. Those things do make you happy.”
GERMAN SPRINGERLE
Makes 150 cookies
1 pound, 12 ounces whole egg (roughly 14 eggs)
3 pounds, 4 ounces granulated sugar
½ ounce salt
6 ounces powdered sugar
¼ ounce ammonia bicarbonate
15 drops anise oil
¾ ounce anise (½ ground, ½ seeds)
2 pounds pastry flour
3 pounds cake flour
Heat oven to 335 degrees.
Whip eggs, sugar and salt in a large bowl. Then, incorporate powdered sugar, ammonia bicarbonate, anise oil, ground anise and anise seeds into whipped mixture.
Sieve the flours into a large bowl. Add whipped mixture to the sieved flour and mix by hand.
Flour your surface or baking sheet and place dough on top. Cover with a damp cloth.
Roll dough in workable amounts to about ½-inch-thick. Imprint with your springerle press. Cut the cookies. If the dough gets too stiff, mist with water and knead.
Let the cut cookies rest, uncovered, for at least 6 hours or up to a day.
Bake at 335 with door cracked open for 30 minutes. Then check for golden bottoms.
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