There are many popular Christmas pastries, desserts, and sweets to chose from when celebrating Christmas in the Czech Republic. One of them is Vanilla Crescents, vanilkové rohlíčky in Czech. When baked well, they basically melt in your mouth – almost like a piece of cloud. But to bake them to be this perfect is quite tricky. So what does one have to do to achieve that level of perfection?
Ingredients
Just like Linzer Cookies, Vanilla Crescents are among those popular Czech Christmas pastries that originated in Austria (in this case from Vienna). The only difference is that while in the Czech Republic, Vanilla Crescents are called venilkové rohlíčky, in Austria they are called Vanillekipferl. Both, however, refer to the same popular Central European pastry – rohlíky (kipferl), which you surely know yourself very well.
So what do you need to bake the sweet version of the widely popular pastry?
Ingredients for 70 pieces:
- Flour (“hladká mouka” specifically) – 300 grams;
- Icing sugar – 40 grams;
- Ground walnuts – 100 grams;
- Butter – 200 grams;
- 2 egg yolks (not mandatory);
- Lemon peel;
- Vanilla sugar – 2 bags;
- Some amount of icing sugar for icing.
Steps
- step: First of all, you need to sift the flour so there are no lumps in it. Then do the same with the icing sugar. Once this is done, you mix these two ingredients together and add walnuts, butter, and lemon peel. If you want to make this part of the process a bit easier, add also two egg yolks. Wrap the dough into a plastic wrap and let it rest in the fridge for at least two hours.
- step: When you take the dough out of the fridge, roll it into a cylinder about 3 centimeters in diameter and start cutting it into equally sized pieces. Then roll these small pieces of dough into cylindrical pieces and bend them into the shape of crescents.
- step: Once this is all done, put a piece of baking paper onto a baking sheet and then lay the Vanilla Crescents there. Put the Crescents into an oven and bake them at 180°C for 10 minutes.
- step: Take the Vanilla Crescents out of the oven. Don’t take them off the baking sheet just yet, though! Let them cool for about three minutes and then roll them in the mixture of vanilla and icing sugar.
TIP: You don’t have to add egg yolks – on one hand, they make it easier to prepare the dough, but you’ll get a better result without them.
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Source of the photo: Pixabay.com
