Christmas time in Germany part TWO – Plätchen

Christmas has it’s traditional food in all countries. In Germany, they like to bake cookies, known as Plätchen. Basically they’re flat butter cookies in various shapes, all decorated nicely.

My host sisters and some of the girls from church decided to bake Plätchen with the little kids / actors in the Christmas play. I’m sure it was great fun for the kids, but it became pretty tiring in the end for us “big kids”.

We ended up making 5 different types of dough, and the kids stuck out the cookies with cute christmas cookie cutters. The decorating part was the most fun for them, but also the messiest.

The cookies and cake were for after one of the sunday services, where we would sell it all and hopefully earn a lot. I even made Drømmekage, cause people here love it, even though they don’t actually have the right sugar (I can’t find any “Brun Farin” anywhere!).

Messy, messy, messy

I also baked “Drømmekage”

Lisa – hard at work. Also, don’t be confused by the ketchup – we had sandwiches for lunch.

Host sister and friend – not so hard at work

My two little helpers

German cookies are good, but I’ve gotta say, nothing beats danish cookies. (Except for American Chocolate Chip cookies, maybe ….).

My host family and I also went to a little Christmas market in our neighborhood, Elisabethmarkt, were we drank punch (I’ve never had punch before?!) and it tasted really weird, I didn’t really like it. My host parents both got a “feuerzangenbowle”, this punch type-a-thing, with a spoon full of sugar and alcohol, and it burns into this weird, sweet drink. It doesn’t really taste that great either, but it was pretty cozy anyhow.