German Vanilla Christmas Cookies

The other weekend, something surprising happened. My husband ventured to the kitchen and started taking out ingredients to make German Christmas cookies. He said it reminded him of cooking with his grandma when he was a child. The cookies turned out nice, but a bit hard and could have used a bit more sugar. This prompted me to try my hand and making some German Christmas cookies for him.

The next weekend, I made these beauties. They were so buttery, crisp on the outside but soft inside, with powdered sugar for that delicious magic taste and a hint of vanilla. My husband enjoyed every bite and said it reminded him of the cookies his grandma used to make. Win! 

Original recipe from Julia at Plated Cravings

Ingredients

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• pinch of salt
• 1 cup vegan butter (I used Nutlex)
• 3/4 cup powdered sugar
• 3/4 cup almond flour
• 2 tsp vanilla extract

Sugar coating mixture:
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- 1 vanilla bean

Method

1. In a large bowl, combine flour, powdered sugar, salt and almond flour. Mix well. Then, add the butter and vanilla extract. Mix with a fork or your hands (I used my hands). The original recipe said to use a stand mixer, but I was too lazy to do so 😅. I will try it with a stand mixer next time.
2. Once the mixture comes together into a dough (it might be a bit crumbly - that doesn't matter, but you can add 1 - 2 Tbsp of water if needed; I didn't need to do that), make it into a ball, wrap it in cling wrap / plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for 1 hour.
3. After 1 hour, preheat the oven to 170 C (my oven tends to burn everything so I used a lower heat of around 150 C) . Take the dough out and roll it into a log with your hands. Divide the log into about golf ball sized pieces. Roll out each ball into a log shape, taper the ends to dull points and then bend each one into a crescent moon shape.
4. Line the baking trays with baking paper and place each cookie on the baking sheet, about 1 inch apart. I needed two baking trays in order to fit all the cookies.
5. Bake cookies for around 12 to 15 minutes, or until the edges start to get golden. The cookies shouldn't brown!
6. While the cookies are baking, make the vanilla sugar mixture by scraping out the seeds of the vanilla bean and mixing it with the powedered sugar in a small food processor.
7. Once the cookies are done, take them out and sift the vanilla sugar mixture over the hot cookies (I turned them over and put some sugar mixture on the other side too).
8. Let the cookies cool and then give them a second round of sugar mixture dusting.
9. Enjoy!

You can store these cookies in an airtight container - they keep pretty well. The original recipe says you can keep them for 3 weeks, but I can't say because my batch were finished very quickly!