Pepparkakor Recipe (Swedish Ginger Cookies) - Texanerin Baking (2024)

These pepparkakor (thin Swedish ginger cookies) are whole wheat and dairy-free and just as crisp and delicious as the more traditional kind!

Have you ever tried Anna’s Ginger Thins or the heart-shaped ginger cookies at IKEA? These pepparkakor cookies are just like those, but better! They’re thin, crisp and have lots of gingerbread spice. And cardamom! I don’t think I had ever had cardamom in anything before I did my first exchange year in Sweden, where cardamom is really popular.

Now that I’ve tried it, I enjoy it in most of my gingerbread-like treats. And my other Swedish treats, like this Swedish apple pie, which is actually more like a crisp and super delicious. I also added a tiny bit to my Swedish blueberry soup!

Pepparkakor (Swedish for “pepper cookies”) are enormously popular in Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia during the holidays. They’re relatively simple to make and don’t require any frosting or other decoration. And they come with an interesting history!

There’s one story about King Hans, the Swedish-Danish-Norwegian king around 1500, whose doctor prescribed him pepparkakor, which were sold not only in bakeries, but also in pharmacies. King Hans had a bad temper and obviously pepparkakor were the answer – it’s said that eating pepparkakor makes you a nicer person! Pepparkakor were also sold in monasteries, where nuns ate them to help with their digestion. So, these pepparkakor are miracle cookies and you need to make them. :)

The cookies pictured above are the dairy-free version made with coconut oil. I thought I’d try them with butter, just in case someone asked about using it, and you can see the difference below. But the thing is, I used 1.4 more tablespoons of butter, as I often need a little less coconut oil than butter when baking certain treats.

So instead of 2/3 cup, I used 3/4 cup. That was definitely too much. If you want to use butter, I recommend 11 tablespoons. Or even 2/3 cup! They came out delicious and perfectly crisp with 3/4 cup butter, but they spread quite a bit.

I made my first few batches with sugar beet syrup, which is similar to regular molasses. Then I made it with blackstrap molasses and for the first time ever, I have to recommend not using blackstrap. It totally overpowered the spices. Stick with regular molasses here!

Something I really love about this pepparkakor recipe is that the cookies stay fresh for a long time. I wrote one month in the the recipe, just to be safe, but in reality I’m pretty sure they last much longer (based off of past experience with pepparkakor). And the dough is pretty easy to work with and bake!

I made some intricate snowflakes and was worried about the edges burning before the center had browned, but they came out perfectly. I made the moose in this cookie cutter set and that was the only one I had issues with, probably because it’s so big. Instead of using a spatula to remove the moose to another baking sheet, I just peeled away the dough around the cookie cutter and baked the moose on the parchment paper I had rolled it out on.

For grain-free cutout ginger cookies, I recommend my soft and chewy gingerbread men. Note that they won’t get crisp like these Swedish cookies, no matter how long you bake them.

And if you don’t want to use cookie cutters and prefer traditional ginger cookies, these ginger cookies look great! I bet they’d work out great with white whole wheat flour.

I hope you’ll enjoy these pepparkakor! If you try them out, please let me know below in the comments. Thank you!

Want more Swedish cookies? Try these Crispy Swedish Cardamom Cookies from The Food Charalatan! These Swedish Heirloom Cookies from Shugary Sweets also look awesome.

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