Melomakarona - Greek Christmas honey cookies

Μελομακάρονα - the ultimate Greek Christmas flavors

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I know, I know, you came here today for my recipe for Melomakarona that’s long overdue. Many of you have been asking for this recipe for years and let me assure you, you won’t find another as delicious as this.

For those unfamiliar with these cookies, they are one of the two traditional Greek cookies made during the Christmas and New Year’s holidays (the other one is Kourabiedes - find my recipe here).

They’re a delight to make and so easy. No mixer in sight!

They are made with olive oil, orange and spices, and they get soaked briefly into a honey syrup after baking. Once cool, they are drizzled with more honey and sprinkled with lots of chopped walnuts and cinnamon.

They’re slightly crispy around the edges, soft and moist from the syrup in the middle, full of intoxicating aromas from the honey, spices and orange that you can also taste with each bite, and the deeply nutty crunch of the walnuts gives them a beautiful earthiness.

Oftentimes, melomakarona tend to be overly sweet and saturated with spices. Not in this case. My melomakarona are as sweet as they need to be and the warming spices of cinnamon, clove and nutmeg, while making their presence known, will not overpower your palate.

Hope you enjoy them as mush as we do. And please share with me your photos when you make them. I’d love to see them.

Melomakarona (Μελομακάρονα) - Greek Christmas honey cookies

Use good quality extra virgin olive oil. I use a pungent one because I love the intense flavor of olive oil but a fruity one may suit you best if you prefer something milder or you’re just not used to the flavor of olive oil in your desserts or food in general.

Important note 1: The syrup needs to be at room temperature when you add the piping hot from the oven cookies to it, so you need to plan ahead and make the syrup a couple of hours before you start making the cookies.

Important note 2: The liquids in the recipe are weighed and indicated in g (grams), NOT ml (milliliters), which is a volume measurement. These are not the same, so weigh everything as indicated to avoid mistakes.

Yield: 38-40 cookies (these are 3-bites sized cookies, the best size in my opinion for melomakarona)

Ingredients

for the syrup

300 g granulated white sugar

250 g water

1 cinnamon stick

1-2 cloves

the peel from 1 large orange (only the orange part, not the white pith)

80 g runny, clear honey (preferably Greek thyme honey)

for the cookies

400 g all-purpose flour

100 g fine semolina

1 tsp baking powder

100 g white granulated sugar

120 g extra virgin olive oil

80 g sunflower oil

zest from 1 large orange, grated

1 tsp ground cinnamon

⅛ tsp ground nutmeg

Pinch of ground clove

Pinch of sea salt

170 g freshly squeezed orange juice

½ tsp baking soda

for the topping

90-100 g walnut halves, finely chopped

1 tsp ground cinnamon

70-80 g runny, clear honey (preferably Greek thyme honey), for drizzling

Special equipment: scale to weigh the ingredients and dough

Preparation

make the syrup

In a small saucepan, add all the ingredients for the syrup except the honey and bring to the boil over a medium-high heat, stirring continuously until the sugar has dissolved. When it comes to a rolling boil, immediately remove from the heat and stir in the honey.

Leave the syrup to cool completely. Once cool, remove the spices and orange peel.

make the cookies

Preheat your oven to 180°C (356°F).

Line a large baking sheet with baking paper.

In a bowl, add the flour, fine semolina and baking powder and mix well using a hand wire whisk. This fluffs up the ingredients and mixes them well together. Set aside.

In a large bowl, add the sugar, olive oil and sunflower oil and using a hand wire whisk, beat to mix well, about 4 minutes. Don’t expect the sugar to dissolve, it won’t, and that’s okay.

Add the orange zest, cinnamon, nutmeg, clove and salt, and whisk well to incorporate.

In a jug, add the orange juice and the baking soda. Stir, and when it foams up, pour it into the bowl with the rest of the wet ingredients. Whisk well to incorporate.

Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients and mix gently using one hand, preferably using your fingers rather than the palm of your hand because it’s a delicate dough, until there are no visible white patches of flour, for 10-15 seconds (yes, you read that right). You should have a rough dough that’s soft, pliable and glistening from the olive oil. It shouldn’t be a firm and smooth ball of dough. See the photo below.

Don’t be tempted to add more flour when/if you feel it sticking to your hand and don’t keep fiddling with it. If you mix it more, then lots of oil will seep out of the dough. Some will inevitably seep out anyway, it’s the nature of this dough, but if you overmix it, then it will be a mess you don’t want to deal with, trust me.

Scrape any bits of dough from your hand and wash up so the dough doesn’t keep sticking to your hands.

Use a scale to weigh 27-29 g of dough and shape into plump ovals. Again, don’t overwork the dough while shaping. Don’t be alarmed if your hands become oily while you shape them, it is okay. Use a small fork to pierce little holes at the top of each cookie which helps soak the syrup.

Place cookies on the prepared baking sheet and bake on the lower rack of the preheated oven for 25 minutes, until they’re crispy and golden brown, turning the sheet around halfway through baking time.

Have a station ready for when you take them out of the oven. You need the saucepan with the cold syrup and a wire rack placed over a baking sheet to catch the syrup from the soaked cookies.

When baked, add 4-5 hot cookies at a time in the cold syrup and soak them for only 10-12 seconds. Immediately remove them using a slotted spoon, draining them over the saucepan with the syrup, and arrange on the wire rack to cool. Continue doing this for all cookies.

Bake the second batch (and third, depending on the size of your oven) and continue as above.

make the topping

In a small bowl, mix together the chopped walnuts and cinnamon.

Assemble

When all cookies have been soaked in the syrup and have cooled down completely, prepare a large platter by drizzling some honey all over. Scatter some chopped walnuts and place cookies in a single layer. Drizzle some honey over them and sprinkle with the walnut-cinnamon mixture. Continue doing the same with a second layer or even a third, depending on the size of your platter.

Keep covered, at room temperature, for two weeks. If you’re anything like us, though, I highly doubt they’ll last that long. :)

They taste better with each passing day.