Elaine's Anise Cookies

You can amaze your family and friends with these tasty (if you're a licorice fan) Christmas cookies, brought to you courtesy of my dear friend Elaine Winter, who shared her treasured family recipe.  

Everyone will ask, How did you get those caps on the cookies?  It can be our secret: they simply create themselves during the baking process.  

These are easy, albeit time-consuming cookies -- after they're formed on the cookie sheet, they must rest there for eight hours before baking which, incidentally, takes but 10 minutes. 

Elaine's mother Ruth and Gramma Millie (born in the U.S., but of German extraction) started their Christmas cookie baking (eight to 10 varieties!) right after Thanksgiving. They'd bake every night after the dishes had been washed.  "Such a delicious time of year," recalls Elaine who, even after she moved to Rome, would still receive huge boxes of cookies in the mail from her mother and grandmother.  She says there was some not-too-subtle competition about the anise cookies caps, whose were better...."Batches without caps my brother and I could eat right away -- they were deemed not good enough to save," she said.

Please, won't you try your hand at these unusual and delicious cookies?  The first step is to grind some anise seeds (though if you're too busy, you can dispense with the anise seeds -- the cookies get their real flavor from the anise extract in the batter).

Let three eggs come to room temperature.

Mix up the batter. You will definitely want to use a standing mixer for this, unless you have way more patience than me.

Although the recipe calls for dropping the batter by teaspoon onto the baking sheet, I found it more efficient to pipe them using a pastry bag and round tip.  The batter is a bit thin.  I sprinkled the cookie sheets with the crushed anise shortly before baking.