Bananas.org - Improved Lebkuchen

Lebkuchen is a type of German Christmas cookie. You can find hundreds of recipes online:

https://www.google.com/search?ei=Ark....0.G1IUeJ1wT-o

You can improve the flavor of almost any of these recipes by:

1. Don't use oblaten (an edible paper). Just bake on ungreased parchment paper; the cookies won't stick to it.

2. Bake at a lower temperature for a longer period of time so that the cookies dry out slightly and are too hard (at this stage).

3. After glazing the tops, dip the bottoms of the cookies in a 1 millimeter pool of rum for about 10 seconds. A shallow pool is necessary to not disturb the glazing.

4. Put the dipped cookies in a zip locked plastic bag in just one layer.

5. Age for at least one week so that the rum soaks up and the cookies acquire the traditional soft texture. It is better to err on the side of too dry because you can correct this by dipping a second time.

This works well because the flavor of rum goes well with the flavors of spices in the cookie. The soak up method works better than simply putting rum in the dough before cooking because the volatile flavor constituents of rum are removed by cooking. I prefer to use Myers Dark Rum but, to save money, Bacardi works almost as well.