Discover the enchanting world of Befanini cookies as you step into the sweet embrace of this sweet Italian tradition. As the Epiphany season approaches, these delightful little cookies take center stage in Italy's festive celebrations. Bake your own batch to infuse your own kitchen with the scents of an Italian holiday.
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Befanini Cookies
Ingredients:
4 cups flour
1/3 cup unsalted butter, softened and cut into pieces
1.5 cup sugar
¼ cup milk
Zest of 1 lemon or orange
3 eggs
2 teaspoon baking powder
1 pinch of salt
1 tablespoons rum (or sub 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract)
3 tablespoons milk (only add if needed to soften the dough)
1 egg yolk
Nonpareils
Instructions:
Sift flour and baking powder into a bowl. Make a well in the center and add the butter, sugar, and eggs.
Using your hands, mix everything together. Add the zest, the rum (or extract) and knead. If dough is stiff add milk, 1 tablespoon at a time until the dough is smooth.
Wrap in plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for 30 - 45 minutes.
Preheat oven to 350F/180C.
Roll out the dough with a rolling pin to about 1/3 inch (4mm) and cut into various shapes using cookie cutters.
Place the cookies on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and brush them with egg yolk sprinkle with nonpareils.
Bake for about 12-15 minutes, not letting them get too dark.
Now is a great time to begin curating recipes to develop into your own Christmas traditions. Sonlight has some simple recipe cards where you can record your favorites and create your own Christmas Cookie Collection.
Growing up in a home influenced by German roots, I looked forward to Christmas treats that spoke of that heritage. Lebkuchen (“leben” - favorite food, very sweet and “kuchen” - cake) is a soft and chewy cookie that is reminiscent of gingerbread. The combination of warm spices, honey, and sometimes nuts, makes it perfect for an after-meal treat, or an accompaniment to morning coffee.
Lebkuchen goes back to 14th century Germany where Catholic monks prepared the treat in monastery bakeries. The cookie was valued both for its symbolic religious meaning and its healing properties. Over the years many variations on this cookie recipe have emerged. Feel free to play with the flavors to find your favorite combination.
This PDF file is formatted to print the same size as Sonlight's Recipe Cards so you can easily add it to your recipe collection!
Lebkuchen
Preheat your oven to 350°F (180°C). Put butter out to soften.
Ingredients:
For the Cookies
2 1/4 cups (280g) all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (115g) unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup (100g) granulated sugar
1/2 cup (120ml) honey
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup (75g) chopped candied citrus peel (optional)
1/2 cup (60g) chopped nuts (such as almonds or hazelnuts, optional)
For the Glaze
1 cup (120g) powdered sugar
2 tablespoons milk
1/2 teaspoon lemon zest (optional)
Instructions:
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
In a medium-sized bowl, whisk together sifted flour, baking soda, the spices, and salt. Set aside.
In a separate large bowl, cream together the softened butter and granulated sugar until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.
Add in honey, egg, and vanilla extract, beating until well combined.
Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, mixing until a soft dough forms. If you’re using the optional candied citrus peel and nuts, fold them into the dough at this point.
Scoop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls and roll them into 1-inch balls, spacing them about 2 inches apart on the baking sheet. Flatten each ball slightly using the bottom of a glass or with your fingers. (Note - I didn’t bother with rolling the dough into balls, I just dropped a tablespoon full at a time onto the cookie sheet and flattened the dough slightly with my fingers).
Bake for 10-12 minutes, or until they are just set and the edges start to turn golden brown. Don’t overbake; lebkuchen should remain slightly soft.
While the cookies are baking, prepare the glaze by mixing the powdered sugar, milk, and lemon zest (if using) in a small bowl until smooth. Feel free to add additional milk to make the glaze “spreading” consistency.
Remove the cookies from the oven and let them cool on the baking sheet for a few minutes. Then, using a pastry brush or a small spoon, glaze the tops of the cookies with the icing while they are still warm.
Allow the glazed lebkuchen to cool completely on a wire rack. Once the glaze has hardened, store them in an airtight container. Flavors will continue to develop over the next couple days.
This recipe will yield approximately 2 dozen cookies.
Now is a great time to begin curating recipes to develop into your own Christmas traditions. Sonlight has some simple recipe cards where you can record your favorites and create your own Christmas Cookie Collection.
These spiced Dutch cookies are a holiday favorite, with each bite carrying the aromatic essence of the season. Whether you're savoring these cookies with a warm cup of tea or sharing them with loved ones, Speculaas is more than a recipe–it's a heartwarming tradition waiting to be savored. With a warm, spicy flavor, they’re perfect for the holiday season, especially St. Nicholas Day, but can be enjoyed year-round.
In the Netherlands, these cookies are shaped with intricately carved molds. This is a simplified version that requires no mold.
This PDF file is formatted to print the same size as Sonlight's Recipe Cards so you can easily add it to your recipe collection!
Speculaas
Ingredients:
1 cup brown sugar
½ cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 large egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ teaspoon ground cardamom
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
Instructions:
In a mixing bowl, combine the butter and brown sugar. Cream together until the mixture is smooth and fluffy, about 3 minutes.
Add egg and vanilla and beat until blended.
In a large bowl, sift together flour and cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves, and baking soda. Then whisk in the salt.
Slowly add the flour mixture to the wet mixture, one up at a time, until just incorporated and dough forms.
Lay out a large piece of plastic wrap on a work surface and scrape the dough onto it, shaping it into a log. Wrap the log in the plastic wrap, and using the palms of your hands flatten the log until it is about 15 inches long and 2.5 inches in diameter. Refrigerate it for a minimum of 30 minutes, but preferably overnight. Chilling the dough makes it easier to work with and helps the cookies hold their shape during baking.
Preheat oven to 350°F (180°C). Line cookie sheets with parchment paper.
Traditional speculaas cookies use molds that feature windmill or Sinterklaas designs. In order to simply things, you can simply cut the dough into ¼ inch think slices using a sharp knife.
Place the cookies on the baking sheets, spacing them evenly. If desired, drag the tines of a fork lengthwise to form lines.
Bake in the preheated oven for about 12-15 minutes, until firm to the touch and the cookies turn a golden brown.
Allow cookies to cool on the baking sheet for a few minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.
Now is a great time to begin curating recipes to develop into your own Christmas traditions. Sonlight has some simple recipe cards where you can record your favorites and create your own Christmas Cookie Collection.
These cookies are the most traditional Christmas cookie in Sweden. They date back to the Middle Ages when spices such as cloves and pepper were rare and expensive. They were used for special occasions. It’s a spice cookie similar to other countries’ spice cookies such as Pfeffernüsse or Speculaas.
This PDF file is formatted to print the same size as Sonlight's Recipe Cards so you can easily add it to your recipe collection!
Pepparkakor
Ingredients:
4 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
1 ½ teaspoons baking soda
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 ¼ teaspoon kosher salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
¾ cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
2/3 cup golden syrup (or sub light corn syrup if you can’t find golden syrup)
2/3 cup heavy cream
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
Instructions:
Sift together the flour, baking soda, ginger and cloves into a bowl. Whisk in the salt and pepper.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream the butter and sugar until soft and creamy, about 3 minutes.
Add the syrup and beat until combined, then add in the heavy cream and lemon juice and beat until blended.
Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture, one cup at a time, beating until blended.
Divide dough into 4 equal sections, shaping each quarter into a ball, then flatten to form a disc. Wrap each disc with plastic wrap and refrigerate for a minimum of 12 hours or up to 2 days. (You can also freeze up to 3 months. Let thaw to room temperature before rolling out.)
When you’re ready to make the cookies, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Line several baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.
Place one dough disk on a clean, floured work surface. Using a floured rolling pin, roll out the dough to 1/8 to ¼-inch thickness. (Since this is a sticky dough, leave the other discs in the refrigerator until you are ready for the next batch of cookies. Otherwise the dough can stick to the rolling pin, work surface, and cookie cutters.)
Using cookie cutters, cut out the cookies and place them one inch apart on the baking sheets.
Bake for about 6 minutes or until golden brown. You might need to switch the baking sheets between racks midway through. You may also need to refrigerate any prepared baking sheets you cannot bake right away.
Allow the cookies to cool slightly on the cookie sheet before moving them to wire racks. Let cool completely before storing them in an airtight container.
Now is a great time to begin curating recipes to develop into your own Christmas traditions. Sonlight has some simple recipe cards where you can record your favorites and create your own Christmas Cookie Collection.
Timelines are an essential part of teaching history. This valuable—yet simple— tool helps students understand the chronology of historical events and make connections between individual events and people. In addition to providing big-picture context to your history studies, here are 5 more benefits to using a Timeline in your homeschool.
Timelines offer children a visual representation of what they are studying in history. Students can quickly see how events and historical figures relate chronologically. Sonlight's Timeline Book paired with program-specific Timeline Figures make creating your own timeline easy and delightful.
1. Timelines help kids make connections.
Your kids might be surprised that Catherine the Great and George Washington lived during the same time period. Or that Christopher Columbus and Leonardo da Vinci were contemporaries.
Over the years using your Timeline, students will form connections between the events and people they’ve read about in past years and people they’re currently studying.
In addition, if you encourage them to research and plug-in dates related to family members from previous generations, they gain a whole new perspective on how their family fits into the flow of history.
2. Timelines help kids grasp the overlapping or concurrency of seemingly unrelated events or cultures.
A timeline acts to tie history together. As students add people, events, discoveries, and inventions to their timelines, they discover how these smaller puzzle pieces fit together into the bigger picture of history.
For example, a timeline can help students understand that the Holocaust was a progression of events, decisions, actions, and inactions, not a singular inescapable fate. The Timeline Book makes history a living subject.
3. Timelines help kids situate newly encountered events and figures in relation to those they've already studied.
For example, students may think that the only thing happening in the world in 1862 was the Emancipation Proclamation, but the U.S. Mint was established in Denver, CO that same year and the bowling ball was invented!
Use this as a prompt to have your students consider “How did people from around the world contribute to this event, idea, etc.? Does this event remind you of something else in history?"
4. Timelines enhance comprehension.
Every time you place a new timeline figure, you’re cementing the learning from your history reading and tying each character into the bigger picture of history. Instead of just memorizing dates and facts, your children now have context for the events they’ve studied.
BONUS: with a timeline, students have the opportunity to look back over what they have learned and review it. Adding a visual resource to what they’ve learned from a book further cements that knowledge and improves retention.
5. Timelines help kids develop critical thinking skills.
Timelines help students discover patterns in history. Rising tensions, war, times of economic depression, times of prosperity—these tend to cycle in almost every developed nation around the world. When students look back over their timelines, they can find specific types of events more easily and compare them to current events.
TIP: Instead of simply adding a person or event to your timeline, ask your student if they’ve noticed any patterns. For example, “Have you noticed any similarities about events before a war begins?”
You can order a Timeline Book (just once!) that you’ll use throughout your entire homeschool experience.
Timelines are such a valuable tool to make your study of history visual and cohesive that we schedule Timeline Activities in our History / Bible / Literature Instructor's Guides and include Timeline Figures in every History / Bible / Literature package.
"Already they are making connections when we add new stickers to our Timeline Book, and they notice what else is already on the page!" —Cynthia H. of Champaign, IL
Your Sonlight Instructor's Guides tell you exactly where to place your timeline figures and how to do the mapping activities. Learn more about Sonlight's guides here.
When you picture a positive homeschool day, how does it look in your imagination? Are you frantically searching for “the good” pencils, trying to remember which lesson you’re on, and not sure which book to read first? Or are you heading into your homeschool day, confident and ready?
Spelling tests on Friday, language tests every other Friday, math tests after each unit (usually landing on Friday somehow), science test after each unit (also on Friday)....
If your school experience was like mine, Fridays were usually test days.
In addition to regular, routine tests and quizzes, public schools administer yearly standardized testing, too. In some schools, teachers can spend significant time teaching how to take standardized tests, how to get high scores on those tests, and how to manage stress and anxiety during testing times.
Public school students become accustomed to plenty of testing.
Why Do Public Schools Test So Much?
In a class of 25, it's impossible for a teacher to constantly monitor which skills each student knows without widespread testing. Routine assessments allow teachers to pinpoint exactly where a child is on the learning spectrum. If her class is consistently low in a particular skill, she will be able to adjust her instruction to cover those weak skills. Testing also allows teachers to concretely communicate with parents about how their child is performing in class.
On a larger scale, standardized testing can give schools a picture of how they are doing in comparison to other schools in the nation. This can help schools to identify weak areas and address them. Standardized testing can also help a student’s parents to see weaknesses and strengths and stay informed on their child’s progress without being right beside them all day.
These are a few valid reasons that public schools use a lot of traditional testing methods.
Why Should Homeschoolers Shift Their Mindset on Testing?
Homeschoolers should shift their mindset on testing methods because homeschooling is a totally different method of educating.
Homeschoolers have significantly lower teacher-to-student ratios. In addition, homeschool parents are even more invested than teachers in the endeavor of educating because they are educating their own child. Finally, most homeschoolers use a curriculum that is already developed from beginning to end, so they are constantly building on concepts. If homeschoolers stick with one curriculum company throughout their schooling, they can be fairly certain that there will be minimal, if any, gaps in their child’s education.
Because of this unique combination, homeschoolers simply don’t need testing in the traditional sense. Most homeschool parents work closely enough with their children each day that they will know their child’s weaknesses and strengths. We also don’t have to test masses of children at one time. We are able to assess what a child knows in a one-on-one setting. This is what makes assessing different for homeschoolers.
So If I Don’t Do Traditional Testing, What Should I Do?
When you think of testing, the picture in your mind is probably a child sitting in a desk with paper and pencil and a little anxiety mixed in.
I want to challenge you to shift your mindset from testing to assessing.
Assessing means to evaluate or estimate one’s ability. This is what we are doing constantly, and we usually don’t even know it.
When I watch my daughter work on a gymnastics skill like a cartwheel, I am assessing her ability to accomplish that skill. When she first starts, I will probably say something like, “That was a good try! Keep working on it!” As she keeps trying and progresses, I might say, “Oh, you’ve almost got it! I can tell you’ve been practicing!” When she finally nails the landing, we are going to celebrate, and I’ll probably say something like, “Yes! I knew you’d nail it this time! You’ve got it! Way to work hard!” I have just assessed her ability in that gymnastics skill. If I had handed her a pencil and a piece of paper, and said, “Okay, show me with this pencil and paper that you know how to do a cartwheel,” well, you’d probably call me crazy.
And yet, we tend to think of school only in paper and pencil terms.
If a child can spell a word correctly out loud, must I force him to write it down to know that he can? Of course not! He just spelled it out loud correctly. As homeschoolers, we need to shift our mindset past the traditional testing methods and move toward the methods that best suit our children.
So that’s brings us to the million dollar question:
How do I assess my child?
There are so many ways to assess your child that I couldn’t write them all down if I tried, but let me see if I can give you a short synopsis.
Assess with Oral Narration
Oral narration is an undervalued yet extremely effective and gentle tool.
After reading a passage from a novel or a science lesson, have your child narrate (tell back or summarize) what they read to you. In the early years, you’ll probably need to prompt their narration with some questions, but as your child grows accustomed to the practice, narration will come completely natural, and you and your child will both forget that you are assessing them.
Generally, the practice of oral narration leads to a life of rich discussionbetween you and your child. It also hits those speech and communication goals. In oral narration, you are asking your child to go above simple memory recall and move on to more mature levels of information processing, such as synthesizing, summarizing, and analyzing.
Assess with Projects
Many times after reading a book, I’ll have my daughter create a piece of art that reflects her reading. She has the heart of an artist, so this type of assessment is very exciting for her. She has created some gorgeous works of art as a response to her literature reading. Most recently, she painted a portrait of the award-winning racehorse, Sea Biscuit, after reading his biography. Her attention to detail was stunning, and it showed me so much more than a multiple choice test ever could. From her artwork, I could tell that she lived in Sea Biscuit’s world while she was reading his story.
Another example that comes to mind is when our co-op recently learned about adding money, so we opened a restaurant. The children designed and wrote out their menus. Then, they planned and prepared the opening of their restaurant. They each took turns being customers and waiters and all had plenty of practice adding up the customers’ tickets. They had the time of their life, and the restaurant business kept going long past my assessment time.
Other project-based assessments could include
science projects or experiments
opening a lemonade stand
creating a diorama for history
building a cardboard clubhouse to demonstrate measurement skills
writing a quick book recommendation for a friend
Your imagination is your sole limit when it comes to project-based learning. Most of the time, you’ll find that project-based assessments will cross into multiple academic areas, and you’ll be able to assess a few other skills too.
Of course, the best part about this type of learning is that there is zero anxiety. Your child will not even know that they are being tested. They will just think that Mom and Dad are the best teachers ever. (And you are!)
Assess by Trading Places
There is nothing that shows your knowledge on a certain topic more than having to teach it. Leverage this power of teaching with your kids. Trade places with them and tell them that you’ll be the student while they are the teacher.
If your child can explain a skill to you, you can be sure that they know it. This is a particularly great way to assess math, but it works for any subject.
You can also do this in a more organic way by saying, “Could you teach your sister how to multiply 3 x 4? I’m just so busy right now.” Teaching siblings is a great way to assess knowledge...that is, of course, if the younger sibling is a willing student!
Assess with Paper and Pencil Testing
Are you surprised that I included this method? Believe it or not, I’m not opposed to traditional testing, but I use it sparingly.
There is value in teaching your child how to test well, especially as they get in the upper grades. Your older student will need to know how to take tests, so it’s important to sprinkle in formal assessments as they get older.
However, I would give a little advice: Don’t beat a dead horse. If your child can do three problems correctly, don’t make them answer twenty. Testing with paper and pencil should be purposeful, not busy work, and it should challenge students, especially in higher levels, to think on higher levels, not simply recalling information over and over.
I listed traditional testing last, because I think it should be the last option on our minds, particularly in the younger years. While there is value in it, homeschoolers have the ability to make assessment as exciting as learning, and children should be thrilled by learning, not burdened by it.
If cramming for a test is necessary, your child probably hasn’t really learned the material yet, and I would recommend that you spend a little more time on it. The educational process should be a delightful time in a person’s life. It should be full of wonder and appreciation for all the wonderful things God has given us to marvel. Assessing doesn’t have to ruin that wonder and appreciation.
Imagine going to bed each night without worrying about what to teach in the morning. That's what Sonlight Instructor's Guides offer you!
