some you win...

Remember what I wrote last week about the slightly mishappen Pfefferkuchen?

That they were quite vile and only suitable for decoration?

Well, as usual in that case, I took a bunch of them with me to the office. Just to see if someone there liked them after all. They were lying in their tin box together with all those other cookies, and probably because I had warned everybody else, no one touched them. Actually two colleagues of mine shared one and precisely described that notorious, soapy-chemical aftertaste, just to tell you that I have witnesses and was not hallucinating.

Because (cue drumroll) - that taste is gone.

Kitchen chemistry will never fail to amaze me.

It was, I think, wednesday afternoon, during the usual 5 o'clock sugar crave (also known as the irrational afternoon feeding frenzy), that I was so low on sugar I ate a handfull of those Pfefferkuchen.

And much to my surprise, no soap, no chemicals. Just plain, lovely, if a little dry, Pfefferkuchen.

Back at home, I tried one of the vast batch that was still standing around in its corner, and they were still... heinous.

So after a long, head-scratching moment I decided that the only difference between the nice ones in the office and the vile ones at home was the fact that those in the office had been standing around in an open box for two days by then, whereas those at home had been constantly tightly lidded.

Consequentially, I openend the two boxes at home, leaving them open. They were doing a nice job as a room scent, actually, but that was not the point. Because, perfectly in timing four weeks after they were made, the Pfefferkuchen taste lovely now.

I am still a little dumbfounded.

But they are and seem to remain perfectly spicy and dark and sweet and everything. Apparently they just didn't have had enough time to rest, with the first of Advent being the last weekend of November this year. And leaving the boxes open to breathe did the trick of speed-aging them.

Actually, I couldn't have thought of a nicer gift for St. Niclas.