I grew up watching my grandmother bake tons and tons of austrian/german cookies during the Holidays to hand out to family, friends, acquaintances, and colleagues of my dad (doctors). I always thought that it was a really nice gesture so I’ve been carrying over the tradition and every winter I bake Vanillekipferl (almond crescents) and spitzbuben cookies. I know that spitzbuben are known as raspberry jam cut-out sandwiches, but this is just a slight variation of how you can present them 😉
Also, don’t limit yourself to raspberry jam, they taste really good with apricot jam as well!
What you need:
. 3 cups all-purpose flour
. 1 cup + 1 tbsp. butter (room temperature)
. 1 1/4 cups powdered sugar
. 1 1/2 cups ground hazelnuts
. 1 egg
. 1 packet of dr. oetker vanilla sugar
. Raspberry jam
What to do:
. Preheat oven to 350 degrees and prepare a baking try with butter and some flour.
. Combine all dry ingredients together.
. Whisk your egg and add to dry ingredients along with 1 cup of butter (reserve the 1tbsp. for later)
. Mix using your hands until well combined (it will be sticky at the beginning).
. Flour your surface and roll out your dough (I normally do it in 3 batches as I don’t have a big counter) and cut out your cookies using a cookie cutter. Use a sharp knife to take them out ad transfer to the tray. If the dough gets dry from all the rolling use that tbsp. of butter and mix it in with your hands to make the dough less crumbly. I find that I always need to do that for the last batch.
. Place them on a baking tray and bake at 350 for approx. 9 min or until slightly golden at the edges (don’t let them bronze).
. Let cool for 5 minutes or so and spread jam on one cookie and top it with another one to make a sandwich.
. Finish off with a simple glaze of powdered sugar and rum.
For the Glaze:
Mix 5 tablespoons of powdered sugar with 1
tablespoon of either water or rum (rum adds a really nice punch!) and
spread on top of each cookie. Or if you prefer, dust with powdered
sugar.
The taste of these cookies gets better and
better with time, you can easily eat them after a month they’ve been
made and they would taste amazing, I promise!
