Lembas

You don't have to be a Tolkien fan to enjoy this light and flaky bread. It is so delicious, I wonder if maybe it is the actual elvish recipe after all. Actually, these are so good that you wouldn't want a small bit to fill your stomach - five or six would do much better.

For a recent dance party, I tripled (or perhaps quadripled) the recipe. It actually works quite well to mix these up the day before, and then cook them right before you plan to eat them. They taste a lot better slightly warm, fresh from the oven, lightly golden brown, no butter. ;-) My only tip would be to check the fridge temperature - apparantly our extra fridge gets a little too cold and the dough slightly froze! They still turned out quite well, though it pushed my cooking behind so where I still was working on baking them when the first guests arrived.

Just a slight warning to any cooks venturing to try this recipe - go ahead and plan on doubling it, for it is highly likely that about half of them will be gone before you can say "Rivendell". I won't say whether it would be due to the cook or cloaked travellers. ;-) Also, the recipe calls for squares, but if you are like me and either run out of time or weary of rolling out dough, I found that golf ball size pieces of dough, flattened out, worked quite well too.

Many thanks to Zachariah for directing me to this recipe, and ending my ignorance of the existance of such a recipe. The original site which listed the recipe I used appears to not be available at this moment, but I did find what appears to be the same recipe on the bottom of this site. Enjoy!

Lembas Bread

2 1/2 cups of flour
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
8 Tablespoons cold butter
1/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon lemon extract

Preheat over to 425 degrees.

Mix flour, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl. Chop butter into mixture with a pastry cutter or knead in with your fingers until you get a crumbly mixture. Add sugar and mix. Add milk and lemon extract and stir with a fork until dough forms.

Roll the dough out about 1/2 inch thick. Cut out 3 inch squares and transfer to a cookie sheet. Criss-cross each square from corner to corner with a knife. Bake for about 12 minutes or until set and lightly golden. Makes 10 to 12.