Vanillekipferl (Vanilla Christmas cookies)

 

More cookies coming your way! I've never been much of a cookie baker, to be honest, but this year I've baked quite the selection of sweet treats. The main reason is that being unemployed I actually have the time to bake cookies. Also, being unempoyed means that this year I don't have the money to spend on Christmas presents, which led me to the idea of baking cookies and giving them to my friends as gifts. The third factor that tranformed into a cookie baker is the fact that when the weather outside is snowy and cold, warming up the kitchen with the oven sounds like a good idea. So here's the recipe for some vanilla cookies that are popular in Austria —where they originally come from— Germany and Switzerland. 

VANILLEKIPFERL

For the cookies:

2 oz. ground almonds 

3 1/2 oz. cold butter

6 1/2 tbsp. icing sugar

1 egg yolk

the pulp scraped from 2 vanilla beans

2 1/3 cups flour

A pinch of salt

For the finishing

1 to 1 1/2 cups icing sugar

vanilla powder

1. Brown the ground almonds in a hot skillet and allow to cool.
2. Quickly knead the butter, icing sugar, egg yolk, vanilla pulp, flour, almonds and salt into a smooth dough. Let the dough rest in a cool place for 2 hours.
3. Form the dough into about 30 crescents and place them on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper. Bake in a preheated 200°C / 400° F oven for about 10 minutes.
4. Roll the still-warm crescents in the vanilla icing sugar. Store the crescents in a cookie tin, each layered separated by parchment paper.