Christmas Cookies from Switzerland - Vanilla Crescent Cookies aka “German Vanillekipferl”
Christmas is cookie baking time! I love to bake these sweeet little treats and give them as gifts, but also eat them myself. I particularly like vanilla crescents or Vanillekipferl, as we call them in Switzerland. These cookies are easy to roll by hand without using cookie cutters. I will also show you two variations of this delicious cookie.
Mix
250 g white flour
100 g peeled and ground almonds (you can also use unpeeled ground almonds)
80 g powdered sugar (you can also use normal white sugar, the crescents just won't be as refined)
1 sachet of vanilla sugar (or a scraped vanilla pod)
1 pinch of salt
in a large bowl. Add
200 g cold butter in pieces and
1 egg
and knead everything into a dough. Cover and chill the dough for about two hours.
Shape the dough into little crescents, place them on a baking tray lined with baking paper and chill for 15 more minutes. Wash your hands in between if too much dough sticks to your hands, which makes it difficult to shape the crescents nicely. In the meantime, preheat the oven to 160° C. Bake the crescents in the middle of the preheated oven for approx. 15 minutes, place on a baking rack and dust the warm crescents with a mixture of powdered sugar and vanilla sugar.
Watch the recipe as a short clip by clicking here.
Cinnamon crescents
Instead of peeled almonds, simply use unpeeled almonds for the dough and add a teaspoon of cinnamon. Instead of vanilla sugar, mix cinnamon into the powdered sugar and dust the vanilla crescents with it.
Crescents with chocolate
Use ground, unpeeled hazelnuts instead of almonds. Leave the crescents after baking to cool completely and dip both ends briefly in dark chocolate cake icing and leave to dry well.
Fancy some more Christmas cookies?
Did you try my Cinnamon Stars recipe yet?
Did you try my Mailänderli recipe yet?
Did you try my Chocolate Cookies Balls yet?
Did you try my Spitzenbuben yet?
Did you try my Totenbeinli yet?