#136: The Vanillekipferl
Christmas traditions old and new
Last year, Katie celebrated her last day in Durham by making Christmas cookies. This year, a few days before I too go home for the holidays, I have also reached inside my baking cupboard. While Katie — with her American heritage — made American sugar cookies, I made Austrian vanilla biscuits with my Austrian boyfriend.
I had never baked these before, and in all honesty was more of an observer than the master baker, but since Wikipedia claims
‘It takes a skilled pair of hands to create the “kipferl” or the horse–shoe shape without breaking the biscuit,’
I feel slightly less ashamed at my painstaking efforts.
Vanillekipferl are crescent-shaped biscuits with a flaky melt-in-the-mouth texture. They are flavoured with nuts (ours were almond) and, as you may have guessed, vanilla. Usually you would use vanilla sugar, a popular ingredient in Dutch, German, Polish, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Austrian, Norwegian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian and Turkish desserts. In other words, not in English. Shopping at the small supermarket just round the corner from me, it was no wonder we didn’t find it.
A little google, though, and we had the substitution — one part vanilla extract to one part sugar. Once we figured out ‘powdered sugar’ was the same as icing sugar, vanilla sugar was the only ingredient we didn’t manage to get for the simple recipe.
Our other difficulty was overcome by the magical appliance called a microwave. We waited two hours for the dough to cool, but when we took it from the fridge we discovered we had accidentally made a bowling ball. The dough was slightly frozen, but a blast in the microwave set us back on the right track.
After some hand-rolling and shaping, the half-moons were laid out on a baking tray. Fifteen minutes in the oven and we had fresh hot biscuits that only needed a snow shower of icing sugar before they were complete.
But what is the point of me telling you about these delicious little objects, apart from to make you hungry?
Christmas is a time for tradition. A time when you return to the same objects you surround yourself with every year. For me, that’s a three foot Tesco Everyday Value tree I have had since I was a child.
But traditions change. Though we hold onto them, the time will come when I have the money and space for a full-size tree. And in the place of abandoned traditions come new ones. One new tradition is that now I look forward to physically ‘coming home for Christmas’. Another, perhaps, is the baking of Vanillekipferl, the introduction of someone else’s tradition into my own Christmas.
