These Kipferl are the quintessential taste of Vienna. A perfect bite, they offer sweetness, crunch, and a pleasing nutty texture all wrapped up in a playful crescent moon shape. Nothing goes better with a cup of Vienna’s legendary coffee.
Makes about 6 dozen
Ingredients:
2 sticks (1/2 pound) unsalted butter
2/3 cup sugar
1 ¾ cups all purpose flour
¾ cup (4 ounces) almonds ground in a food processor or chopped by hand. (some very small nut pieces are fine, just make sure it’s mostly ground.)
Vanilla sugar (see note*; must be made in advance, or purchased)
Cookie sheet(s) with parchment (my preference) or foil, lightly greased
The Recipe
First prepare the dough. Cream butter and sugar together until well blended with a kitchen or hand-held mixer in a large bowl. Add the flour and almonds together to the butter/sugar mixture. Using either an electric device (I use a KitchenAid for this) or your hands, blend until the dough comes together in a unified mass. Shape a large ball of dough and wrap this in plastic wrap. Place in refrigerator for at least 60-90 minutes. The dough must be cold when you work with it otherwise you risk the Dreaded Spread – when cookies flatten out too much. And flat Kipferl are not desirable Kipferl! The best ones have some height, sort of like a mini Austrian alpine range.
When ready to shape and bake cookies, preheat the oven to 325 degrees and line the cookie sheet.
Remove half the dough and place on a counter, keep remaining dough cold (or freeze for a later batch).
Pinch off about a walnut size ball of dough and roll it in the palms of your hands just enough to get the dough malleable. Then roll this piece into a 3 inch sized “snake” with slightly tapered ends. Shape into a crescent. Place on cookie sheet. Repeat with remaining dough, leaving about an inch of space between kipferl. Try to keep your kipferl roughly the same size to ensure even baking. (They will grow and spread a bit in the oven.)
Bake at 325 degrees for 12-14 minutes. You will probably start to smell them around 10-12 minutes. They will smell good. Very, very good. It’s ok to have slightly browned edges but you don’t want them to bake beyond that.
Remove from oven, let cool for 5 minutes. Next, coat all over with vanilla sugar. I like to fill a Tupperware container with the vanilla sugar and then ever-so-gently toss the cookie right in the sugar, sort of like you’re giving it a nice, quick bath. Be gentle, the kipferl, when warm, will crumble easily and you’d be surprised how many of these broken bits you will consume, since we all know there are no calories in broken cookies. Finish by placing the Kipferl on a rack to cool.
A Word About Vanilla Sugar
Vanille Zucker, as it’s called in German-speaking countries, is so popular that you can purchase it in most German, Austrian, Swiss grocery stores (as well as elsewhere in Europe). I’ve seen it in the US at some German food stores and occasionally at IKEA. If you find it, grab some. But if not, it’s easy to make and once you get the hang of it, you’ll find a myriad of uses for it. I make a batch and leave it on my baking shelf for months.
Take a vanilla bean, cut it in half lengthwise and moving from one end of the bean to the other, scrape the seeds out with the edge of a sharp knife. Add the seeds to a half a cup of sugar. Then cut up the remainder of the vanilla bean into several pieces and add that to the sugar as well. The more time these flavors can hang out together, the better the vanilla flavor will be. Ideally you want this to sit for at least 2 weeks. It won’t be the end of the world if you use it earlier, it just won’t pack the same vanilla punch.
An alternative and faster method is to use powdered sugar. Scrape the seeds from a vanilla bean and add to 1 cup of confectioner’s sugar. Cut up the remainder of the vanilla bean into several pieces and bury that in the sugar as well. Store in container overnight and you can use this sugar the next day (remove vanilla pieces first).
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