Beautiful things

Just in time for the Easter long weekend, the weather in Sydney has swapped from idyllic stained blue skies and summer heat to drizzle and chill. I really don't mind - it's better weather for chocolate etc. Yesterday morning I decided it was a good day for baking and did a little cookbook trawling before settling on Pfeffernusse in a version from Margaret Fulton - low fuss, no drama. You'll have to excuse me as I now drift into the food equivalent of a tree hugging hippie monologue because this was such a beautiful, sensual process. This recipe starts with honey - a long slow pour of pale gold syrup into the saucepan. Next, you add golden syrup - darker, denser with that slightly burnt undertone - and stir them slowly together. The pale and dark golds stay separate at first but in close, fine curves like a hair-colourist's dream. Sugar now - as the syrups combine to a tawny colour they're now intricately laced with tiny white crystals. On the back of a spoon, the sugar almost looks bubbles through the mix. As it is heated, a creamy foam forms on the top adding another colour to the mixture and it starts to feel quicker as it's stirred. And the kitchen smells of all the degrees of sweetness involved. To top it off, a small amount of butter is melted into the syrups - the smell picks up the richer, dairy undertones and the yellowy cream of the butter spreads out in spirals through the pan. It seems almost a shame to add the flour and cloves and cinnamon and allspice and black pepper at that point - things get stiffer and stickier very quickly - but it finally resolves into plump biscuits with a slight crunch on the outside and soft, chewy centre. Not sure if that's intentional or a result of my endlessly frustrating oven. No, No.... I see from my extensive research via google that they're meant to be hard all the way through. Like nuts. Oh well. On the upside, a lot of people online seem to be complaining about how hard they are...