Vanillekipferl

Method

1. Split the vanilla pod, scrape the seeds into the powdered sugar for the dough, and rub them through with your fingers so they separate. Keep the empty pod.
2. Put the flour, ground almonds, vanilla sugar mixture, and salt in a bowl. Add the cold diced butter and rub or pulse it in until the mixture looks like coarse damp sand with no butter lumps bigger than a pea.
3. Add the egg yolks and bring the dough together with as few movements as possible. Press, do not knead. Stop the moment there are no dry patches left. The dough will look slightly underworked; that is correct.
4. Flatten it into two discs, wrap them, and chill at least 1 hour. Overnight is better.
5. Heat the oven to 160°C top and bottom heat, or 145°C fan. Line two sheet pans with parchment.
6. Work with one disc at a time and leave the other in the fridge. Roll the disc into a rope about 2 cm thick and cut it into 12 g pieces, roughly 1.5 cm wide. Roll each piece under your palm into a short log about 6 cm long with tapered ends, then bend it into a crescent and set it on the tray with 2 cm between them. They barely spread, so you can pack them fairly close.
7. If the dough starts to feel greasy or the ropes crack and smear rather than roll cleanly, stop and put everything back in the fridge for 15 minutes. This will happen at least once in a warm kitchen.
8. Chill the shaped trays for 30 minutes before baking. This is the difference between a crescent and a puddle.
9. Bake 12 to 15 minutes. They are done when the tapered tips have just taken a light biscuit colour and the body is still blond. The centres will feel soft. Do not wait for all-over golden; two minutes past that point and the almond oil has gone bitter and the vanilla has baked out.
10. While they bake, sift the 100 g of powdered sugar with the vanilla sugar into a wide shallow bowl.
11. Let the tray stand 3 to 5 minutes. Hot from the oven they break in your fingers; cold they will not take the sugar. When they are warm but liftable, roll each one in the sugar, coat it all over, and set it on a rack.
12. When they are completely cold, give them a second roll in the sugar for a thicker coat.
13. Store airtight. They are good on day one and better on day three. They keep 4 weeks in a tin.

Notes

• The dough is 200 g of butter to 250 g of flour with another 125 g of ground almonds, which means it is close to half fat by weight and has almost no gluten to hold it together. The almonds are there to interrupt what little gluten there is. That gives you the short, sandy break that makes the biscuit, and it also means the dough has no elasticity and no tolerance for warmth. Warm butter stops behaving as solid particles suspended in flour and starts behaving as an oil that coats the starch. Two things follow: the crescents slump into flat ovals in the first four minutes of baking because there is nothing solid holding the shape while the starch sets, and the biscuit bakes hard and greasy instead of short, because the fat has smeared into a continuous film rather than melting into separate pockets. If the dough is soft enough to smear when you roll it, it is too warm. Fridge, 15 minutes, carry on.
• Rolling them in the sugar while warm is not a nicety, it is the only window that works. A warm crescent has a thin film of just-liquid butter at the surface and is still giving off steam, and the sugar sticks to both. On a cooled biscuit the surface is dry and set, and the sugar slides straight off into the bowl. Too hot is also wrong: below about three minutes out of the oven they have not firmed up and they snap when you pick them up. Aim for warm enough that you would not want to hold one for long.
• Almonds or hazelnuts, both are traditional. Blanched almonds give the cleaner vanilla flavour and the paler biscuit. Hazelnuts, ideally toasted and cooled before grinding, give something rounder and more roasted that stands up better to coffee. Do not use shop almond flour meant for macarons; it is too fine and the biscuit goes pasty. You want gemahlene Mandeln, which is coarser.
• German flour Type 405 is the standard soft white flour, roughly equivalent to Canadian pastry flour and slightly weaker than Canadian all-purpose. If you are baking these in Canada, use all-purpose and hold back 10 g of it, or use pastry flour straight across.
• Vanillezucker in Germany comes in 8 g sachets and is usually flavoured sugar rather than real vanilla. Bourbon-Vanillezucker is the one with actual vanilla in it and it is worth the extra. To make your own, bury two scraped pods in 250 g of sugar in a jar for two weeks, then blitz and sift.
• A few German terms that come up across this collection, so you do not have to look them up: Zitronat is candied citron peel and Orangeat is candied bitter orange peel, both sold diced in German supermarkets from October; Backoblaten are thin round wafers of flour, starch, and water used as an edible base under Lebkuchen; Hirschhornsalz is ammonium bicarbonate and Pottasche is potassium carbonate, two old leaveners that only work above 60°C and are used in dense honey and nut doughs where baking powder would react too early. None of them appear in this recipe. They all appear in the Elisenlebkuchen.
• Do not bake these on two levels at once unless you are running fan heat. At 160°C top and bottom the lower tray browns underneath before the upper one colours at all.

Sources used

• Tastybits: Der ultimative Vanillekipferl-Ratgeber
• Einfach Kochen: Vanillekipferl nach Omas bestem Original-Rezept
• Zucker, Zimt und Liebe: Bestes Vanillekipferl Rezept