Christmas Cookies - Nana’s Sandbakkels

The Barritt’s are not from Scandinavia, although there are a couple of fair-haired blondes in the group. Regardless, every Christmas, we always looked forward to Nana’s signature treat, “sandbakkels,” a crumbly Norwegian almond cookie baked in delicate fluted tins.

Nana’s ancestral roots were primarily German. So how did she end up known, among other things, for a Scandinavian Christmas cookie? Ruth Barritt (pictured below, a little before my time) was a bit of a recipe hoarder (could we surmise that this is a genetic trait?), and when she tasted something she liked, she usually made a point of getting the recipe and trying it herself.

Perhaps she had a friend who was Norwegian who passed along the recipe, or maybe the fluted tins were a gift? Did she find the recipe in the newspaper or a magazine? I think she probably appreciated the ease of the recipe, and the delicate results produced by the gleaming little cookie tins.

We’ll probably never know exactly how sandbakkels became a family tradition, but although Nana’s been gone for a number of years, we still remember her enormous, affectionate hug, her snowy white hair, and her plate of “sandy" and buttery almond-flavored sandbakkels, particularly at Christmas.

My brother Jim has kept up the practice at Christmastime, but I’d never made sandbakkels until now, and didn’t honestly know if they really had any direct association with the Christmas season beyond our family memories. I did a little investigating and turned up the book “Keeping Christmas” by Kathleen Stokker, which looks at Norwegian Christmas folk traditions and their evolution in the United States. Stokker mentions a seminal Norwegian cookbook, written by a minister’s wife named Hanna Winsnes in 1845, where recipes for sandbakkels and other traditional Norwegian cookies can be found.

Sandbakkels were one of many cookies prepared during the Advent season. Norwegians would serve cookies with a glass of wine at midday or with after-dinner coffee. Stokker notes that cookies such as sandbakkels became popular among the professional class around the time the Winsnes book was published, and were adopted by the peasant class much later in the 19th century. The Winsnes book was hugely popular and carried by Norwegian immigrants to the United States where many of these baking traditions took root, as the sandbakkel tradition did in Nana’s kitchen in Laurelton, New York. And, in that same tradition of passing good recipes along, I offer her version here:

Nana's Sandbakkels

One cup of sugar
One cup of soft butter
One egg
½ teaspoon almond extract
2 ½ cups sifted flour

Cream the sugar and butter. Add egg, flavoring and flour. Pinch off small pieces of dough about the size of a walnut. Press them into the center of a sandbakkel tin, and press thinly and evenly into sides and bottom.

Put the tins on a cookie sheet and bake in a preheated 375 degree oven for about 12 minutes or longer.

When cooled, tap gently on the bottoms of the tins and the tarts will drop out easily. (Caution – cookies are very fragile, so remove them carefully)

I’m submitting Nana’s Sandbakkels to “Eat Christmas Cookies – Season Two” the annual, worldwide cookie swap hosted by Susan at Food Blogga. You can check out the details here, and check out the selection of cookies from around the world here.

Merry Christmas, Nana!

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