Vanillekipferl, Delectable Vanilla Crescent Moon Cookies
Vanillekipferl are delightful German crescent shaped shortbread cookies. Lightly sweet, nutty, and melt-in-your-mouth tender. A fantastic afternoon coffee or teatime cookie and a must on your Holiday cookie platter.
Equipment
- Grainmill
- Rotary grater, blender, coffee and spice grinder, or food processor
- Baking sheet
- Parchment paper
- A few bowls
- Hand mixer or Whisk
- Sieve or sifter (optional)
- Knife of bench knife
- cutting board
Ingredients
- 200 g butter (14 tbsp)
- 40 g powdered evaporated cane juice crystals (3 tbsp) or turbinado sugar, panela sugar (sucanat), coconut sugar, or commercial powdered sugar
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- pinch sea salt
- 240 g fresh milled einkorn flour (2 cups loose) or pre-ground einkorn flour or all-purpose flour
- 100 g finely ground almonds (1 cup) or hazelnuts, pecans or walnuts
For The Vanilla Sugar Dusting
- 1 vanilla bean, scraped (optional)
- 80 g evaporated cane juice crystals or turbinado sugar (½ cup)
- 1 tbsp arrowrood flour (optional)
- 80 g powdered evaporated cane juice crystals (½ cup)
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 375 ℉.
- Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
- Beat the softened butter with a hand mixer or a whisk until smooth and creamy.
- Add the powdered sugar, salt, and vanilla extract and cream till smooth.
- Lastly add your flour and nuts and mix just till incorporated, do not overmix. It will be like crumbles.
- Give it all a quick knead, just enough to make a dough come together.
- Now form a two long rolls and wrap them each in a piece of parchment or plastic wrap. Place into the refrigerator until it firms up well for an hour or a whole day.
- Take your first roll out of the fridge and leave the other in the fridge to remain chilled. Cut into 15 small portions.
- Form small sausage shapes with your hands. Bend them into a crescent shape, careful not to point the tips too much or they may burn.
- Place each crescent on a parchment lined cookie sheet. At this point put the cookies right on the sheet into the refrigerator until the cookies are well chilled.
- Then bake at 375 degrees until they just start to turn golden at the edges, about 15 minutes. Careful, they brown quickly once they are baked through.
- While the cookies are baking, you can mix your vanilla sugar for dusting. (To make it easy you can just use powdered cane sugar without flavoring)Add the scrapings of a vanilla bean and half a cup of cane sugar to a coffee grinder and give it a quick whirl. Be sure to keep some texture. Mix this with a half cup of the powdered cane sugar. Add a 1 tablespoon of arrowroot flour to keep it from clumping if you like.
- When finished, let them cool for two to three minutes on the sheet.
- Then dust with a light coating of vanilla sugar while warm. Some of the sugar will melt and be absorbed at this point, don't add more sugar now, let them cool completely and just before serving give them another light dusting of vanilla sugar.
Notes
Tips For The Best Vanillekipferl and substitutions
- These cookies taste fabulous without the final sugar coating, so feel free to omit that if you’re trying to cut back on sugar. But the white sugar crust is a signature finish for these cookies and kind of important for a perfect and traditional final presentation if that matters to you. Here is a tip for reducing sugar! Only dust them lightly once after they cooled. If you're dipping them, dip only the tops and leave the bottoms plain, which looks nice, and reduces the sugar content.
- If you’re grinding your own sugar, you might not get as bright of a white snowy coating and homemade sugar tends to fade away quicker than the commercial. So be sure to add some arrowroot or cornstarch to your sugar and if presentation matters, you’ll want to use commercial powdered sugar as your base for the decorative dusting.
- Be sure your nuts are finely ground. I use a Geedel cheese grinder for grinding my nuts, but they end up pretty coarse. This makes the cookies more prone to breaking and it adds lots of chewy bits. So it’s best to use a coffee grinder to give them another quick whirl, but don't make them super fine! Add part of the flour to keep them from turning to nut butter.
- Chilling your dough will make it easier to handle, and chilling your cookies before baking will keep them from spreading too much and getting all flat.
- Keep the points blunt to avoid burning at the tips.
- If you're allergic to nuts, this may not be an ideal recipe for you, though you could make them by replacing the nuts with flour or a kind of nut or seed that works for you, I'm thinking hemp seed maybe. Just remember that each substitution will change the end result quite a bit.
Variations
- Try adding almond extract instead of vanilla, and roll the cookies in slivered almonds or ground almonds before baking.
- Try cinnamon as a flavoring and roll in cinnamon sugar after baking.
- Use any nuts or seeds you fancy for variety.