This is another belated Christmas recipe (although generally a wintery one so I don't feel too bad. Leckerli ( Swiss German for Little tasties) are a Basle gingerbread which is especially prevalent around Christmas time. It is quite chewy, sometimes with candied orange peel or nuts, always spiced. I love them. Always have. They are sweet, but not overwhelmingly so, and I find it hard to have only one or two squares. This year there was a ridiculously large bag on sale in the store for a ridiculously good price, so we got it. We were making good progress on the bag (Little Bit's reaction on trying leckerli for the first time was "Mmmm. Mmmmm. Mmmmm"), but then the 12 Days of Christmas Cookies started, and we stopped eating the leckerli because 1 type of cookie a day coming out freshly baked negates the need for store bought sweets, no matter how good. Fast forward to day 9 of the 12 days of Christmas Cookies, and we celebrated a rather belated Thanksgiving dinner (working around work schedules and Covid made planning interesting). Somehow the subject of Eggnog came up with one of my sisters, and when I said I had never tried any, she sent me a recipe. We tried it after Thanksgiving dinner and I really liked it. Somehow while cleaning up, the idea of a bread and butter pudding using leckerli for the bread occurred to me, and then it occurred to me to do this using eggnog as the egg mix. So we tried it.
Ingredients:
2-3 c (ish) of leckerli, enough to fill a small baking dish
4 egg yolks
1/2 c cream
1 1/4 c milk
1 tbsp honey
1 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp cinnamon
Fresh ground nutmeg, A lot.
1 tbsp butter
1) Grease a baking dish with the butter and line it with leckerli, layering them to about the level of the top of the dish.
2) Place all other ingredients in a mixing bowl and whisk until it froths.
3) Pour this over the leckerli until almost the rim of the dish, and leave to soak for an hour or two until they have a chance to absorb some of the liquid.
4) Bake at 180°C for 20-30 minutes until it is set.
5) Serve with cream, whipped cream or eggnog, perhaps spiked with a little rum.
This came out well on the leckerli side of things but I was a little disappointed to find that the delicacy of the eggnog didn't come through. Perhaps this is because it is too similar in composition to the regular make up of the egg portion of a normal bread pudding. The spicing of the eggnog didn't come through either, unable to stand up to the stronger flavour of the leckerli. . I will certainly be making this again, but keeping it simply to a leckerli pudding rather than a leckerli and eggnog one. Perhaps to be served with eggnog alongside it though?
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