Wilhelmina Bread - Wilhelmiinaleipä

First of all, this is not a bread, but cookies. Wilhelmina bread has a caramel taste and a nice crunch. The secret lies in the dark syrup used. Dark syrup was produced in Finland already in the 1800 in Töölö in Helsinki to avoid the expensive import of sugar for the sugar-loving Finns. The first time I tasted Wilhemina bread was in Turku and I did not rest till I found out the name and the recipe. Since then, it has become one of my favorite cookies: Fast, good and easy. Not every Fin knows this cookie, if you don’t know it, give it a try. It’s super easy and tasty. Just remember to keep the cookies very dry, but actually not such a big issue, they vanish usually quite fast....

Ingredients (for about 40 pieces):

200 g Soft butter

2 dl Sugar

3 Tbsp Dark syrup

1 Egg yolk

5 dl Wheat flour

1 Tbsp Vanilla sugar

2 tsp Baking soda

Instructions:

Warm up the oven to 175 C without convention air. This recipe needs a hot oven to start with!

With a mixer whip the butter, sugar, vanilla sugar and sirup foamy. Add the egg yolk and mix well.

Mix in a different bowl the soda and flour. Add slowly to the butter mix.

The dough will be a bit on the sticky side. Resist the temptation to add more flour!

For two long “sausages” in the length of the oven tray (the long end of the tray, not the short).

Put them on the oven tray and leave A LOT OF SPACE between the two sausages. Bake for 12-15 minutes. The sausage will flatten out substantially and get those cracks like too dry earth. When you pull them out of the oven, cut the flat sausages into lengthy pieces while they are still hot (a wooden spatula is perfect for that). Let them cool on the tray.

Enjoy with hot coffee.

Note: One can tinker a bit with the taste e.g. Adding a spoon of cognac or instant coffee or some orange aroma.