weihnachts ampelmännchen kekse

What better way to say 'Thanks for having us at Christmas', than to bake some homemade Christmas biscuits? This is precisely what Andrew and I did, very late at night, the day before we were due to fly to London for the festive season.

My track record for self-baked goods ain't flash. I tried to make choc-chip biscuits once, but added the choc-chips while the dough mixture was still warm from the liquid butter, so all the chips dutifully melted and left me with vaguely chocolate biscuits instead.

Anyway, we baked these biscuits in the shape of Ampelmännchen (East German trafficlight men) for our British hosts. The Ampelmännchen are famous in Berlin, as they were nearly made extinct when Germany reunified; when the homogenisation of East and West began. There was apparently much protest (Rettet die Ampelmännchen - Save the Trafficlight men!) from the Ossies, so that East Berlin is now a preserved habitat for this endangered species. And, of course, Berlin souvenir-purveyors wasted no time in producing an entire range of Ampelmännchen parafernalia. Including cookie-cutters.

Many biscuits somehow shattered in transit and we had to do a lot of Ampelmännchen-explaining (it seems no one outside of Berlin knows about them, and rightly so), but they all got eaten so I guess they were given the green light. Hoho.


Above: Andrew hard at work creating Ampelmännchen.


Above: The red Stop Men. Note how the icing appears to have applied by a five-year-old.


Above: Guten Appetit!