SOUTH PORTLAND — If you can tear your eyes away from the luscious raised doughnuts, the enticing meat pies and the adorable potato-crusted mini-quiches at Little Bigs bakery on Main Street, you might notice a short plank of wood stashed among the baking paraphernalia.
Take a closer look and you’ll see the wood is carved with elaborate, old-fashioned folk designs: There’s a lovebird fluffing its feathers encircled by swirls and flowers, two peasant women in quaint dress walking arm-in-arm, and a sizable heart embellished with carnations. These are springerle molds, used for centuries – still used today – to make traditional German Christmas cookies.
Little Bigs baker and co-owner Pamela Fitzpatrick Plunkett carved the molds 25 years ago, copying from designs she found in books on medieval history and art. At the time, she was an art student at Otis-Parsons in Los Angeles – and a new baker.
Though her nascent carving career ended years ago, Plunkett still uses the molds to make holiday cookies. Cookies that are almost too pretty to eat, which may be why some customers use them as Christmas tree ornaments.
Plunkett’s grandfather owned two bakeries in her hometown of Lancaster, Ohio, but that’s not where she got the idea. Plunkett’s mother was a whiz with the spritz press, famous in the neighborhood for her Christmas cookie production, but that’s not what inspired Pamela, either. Nor has Plunkett ever traveled to Germany.
She credits her one-time obsession with decorative cookies and breads to Nancy Silverton, her boss for five years at La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles and the proud possessor of striking, foot-tall king and queen springerle molds.
Pamela Plunkett with some of her hand-carved springerle cookie molds at Little Bigs in South Portland. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer
“She has a very rustic style, and she had a real love of decorative breads and molded cookies and biscuits,” Plunkett said of Silverton, now a well-known, James Beard Award-winning chef. “It just struck a bell with me.”
At her apartment (a “typical art student apartment,” Plunkett said. “All the walls had big canvases against them, and there were power tools and oil paints everywhere”), scraps of cherry wood lay about, fragments from art projects of one sort or another. One day, she picked up a pencil, a router and a dremel tool, and she began to fiddle. Over the next five years, she plugged away on the designs whenever she found herself with a few minutes.
Eventually, Plunkett carved roughly 20 springerle molds. She made rabbit molds for Easter and cupid molds for Valentines. She carved children in a funny, pointed shoe and a king and queen “because obviously I couldn’t take Nancy’s.”
Over time, Plunkett learned to angle the edges of the molds, which helps the cookie dough pop out. “You have to always think in reverse, which is hard,” she said. Each carving took her roughly 10 hours.
Today, but for a few stray ones lurking about Little Bigs, the molds live in storage – divided between her mother’s house in Ohio and a storage unit in Maine. What ended Plunkett’s woodworking career?
“Time. I didn’t have time anymore,” she said. “We opened this business 31/2 years ago. All we do is work, put out product. We don’t have time for anything, let alone carving molds.”
Plunkett sprinkles flour over a handmade springerle cookie mold while making cookies at Little Bigs bakery on Dec. 2. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer
But among the products she’ll put out this season, among the sweets she puts out every Christmas, are embossed cookies made from her own molds, as well as a few she’s purchased. She doesn’t use them to make springerle, a pale, dry, anise-flavored cookie she describes as “kind of an acquired taste.” Instead, she fills her molds with gingerbread. It’s the same dough she uses to build gingerbread houses because a softer dough won’t hold the carved designs, she says.
When Plunkett is ready to bake, she picks up a fine-mesh sieve and sifts flour generously over the molds. It helps give the patterns definition, she explained. She pats the dough out with her hand, places it over the mold and presses it in with a rolling pin. It’s a minute’s work, maybe less. The molded unbaked cookie flops out easily and Plunkett places it onto a cookie sheet. Sometimes, she dolls them up, affixing a whole star anise, a cinnamon stick, a dried cranberry or two.
She chills the cookies, if need be, another trick to help preserve the details of the design. Then the tray goes into a gentle 325 degree F oven for 12 minutes or so.
Over the Christmas season, Little Bigs sells them individually and among a boxed assortment of other delicious and decorative holiday cookies.
Plunkett gently quashes a suggestion that she unearth her carving tools and design a Maine-specific springerle cookie mold. How about a lobster? A moose? Maybe a lobster kissing a moose under the mistletoe.
“I think I’m done,” she said. “I think so.”
“You never know,” said her husband, Little Bigs co-owner and baker James Plunkett, while making smoked, barbecue brisket meat pies with pickles and cheddar at an adjacent counter. Maybe they could sell a mold like that to L.L. Bean, he joked – and then retire.
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