Name: Honey Cookies
Prep time: 15 min
Cook time: 15 min
Total time: 1 h 30 min
Ingredients: 1/2 cup sugar; slight 1/2 cup honey; 1 1/2 cup butter; 2 eggs; 4 cups flour (may need more to reduce stickiness); 1 teaspoon cinnamon; 1/2 teaspoon ginger; 1/2 teaspoon cloves; 1 teaspoon baking soda

Prior to our Slovenia Unit, I might have thought Slovenia was an invention of comic books or various fictional creations that wanted a European sounding country but didn’t want to actually learn about said real country, or have to have the events in their fictional work make sense for any fictional country. And yes, I am aware that was a horribly confusing sentence. But, let’s dive into our Slovenia Unit as we frantically tried to finish our sprint through Europe for our geography lessons.

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Slovenia resources

Let me just say, I want to go see the castle in the cave I found out about in the Geography Now video.

I also want to visit the island church.

Slovenia recipe: Potica Honey Cookies

At first I was going to cook a main dish (this ham and potatoes dish using leftover Easter ham), but after watching the Geography Now video, I had to make a dessert. I couldn’t find one with lots of honey, which is a shame because it looked like they had some great honey cookies from the video. The potica looks like a fun dessert, and it’ll be interesting to make another try at a pastry dessert like the Croatian nut bread.

Okay, and then I changed my mind again, I still want to make that recipe, but I wanted to try one of those honey cookies, and I was late getting the Potica recipe created, so final switch to honey cookies (or if you’re British like the guy who wrote the post I found it at, honey biscuits)

Honey cookie ingredients

4 cups flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup sugar
light 1/2 cup honey (slightly less than 1/2 cup)
1 1/3 cup butter
2 eggs

Let’s make those honey cookies

Cream together the sugar, honey, and butter. Once those are all mixed together, add the eggs one at a time.
Slowly add the rest of the ingredients, folding them in. (I found the recipe was a little sticky, so I added in about 1/2 cup extra flour so it could roll out)
Let the dough rest for 1 hour, then roll it out and cut out cookies.
Set the oven to 350 and bake for 13-15 minutes.
Take out and let cool.

Overall, we were rather indifferent to these cookies. They didn’t have the strong distinctive flavor of gingerbread cookies, and they were horrid to roll out, so this was not added to my recipe box.

Honey Cookies

Prep Time 15 minutes

Cook Time 15 minutes

Additional Time 1 hour

Total Time 1 hour 30 minutes

Ingredients

1/2 cup sugar
slight 1/2 cup honey
1 1/2 cup butter
2 eggs
4 cups flour (may need more to reduce stickiness)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon baking soda

Instructions

Cream together the sugar, honey, and butter. Then add in the eggs one at a time.
Slowly add in the dry ingredients and knead for a couple of minutes.
Cover and let the dough rest for 1 hour.
Then roll out the dough and cut out the shapes.
Bake at 350 for 12-15 minutes until golden brown.

Slovenia Notebooking pages

We used our Europe Notebooking pages

The tricky part of learning about a smaller country is finding information. As you’ve seen, we have been using Geography Now videos to give us actual information beyond a Wikipedia search. This means I frequently have lots of quirky fun facts, like a dragon bridge.

I love the idea of a dragon bridge, or finding out the Lipizzaner stallions are actually from Slovenia, not Austria where they’re famously associated with.

So, my favorite part of this all is the fun facts, which led me to switch my recipe three times.