Viennese Vanilla Crescents

I don't have a lot of recipes left in the cookie chapter...or rather, the remaining recipes require things like spritz presses or madeleine pans or they're ornaments for the Christmas tree.

Or they have coconut. Regular readers will recall that Dr. S. hated coconut, so I have a backlog of coconut cookie recipes to work through.

Viennese Vanilla Crescents don't have coconut, and they don't require a mold, but they do have a fussy step that had prevented me from baking them in the past. Not complicated, actually, just something requiring forethought--24 hours, to be precise. You're supposed to cut up a vanilla bean and put it in 2 cups of confectioner's sugar, and let that rest for a day. This sugar is what you'll dust the baked cookies with.

The dough is pretty straightforward in a shortbread kind of a way--grind toasted hazelnuts with flour and a little confectioner's sugar (and baking powder and salt), then pulse in three sticks of butter. The recipe suggests you do this in the food processor, but I had a little problem:



It didn't really fit.

Which is not to say I didn't try. I pulsed it and ran it and tried to poke that butter down towards the blades with a spoon (NOT while it was running, I learned my lesson on that with blenders) but it was just too full.

So I switched the whole operation over to the KitchenAid, where it mixed up beautifully.



The dough has to sit in the fridge for a while...kind of tedious for instant gratification folks...but then comes the shaping, the baking and the dusting.



These cookies just melt in the the mouth. They are so tender, so fragile--you'd never be able to ship them anywhere, or hardly even send a plate to a next-door neighbor. The hazelnut flavor is deliciously prominent, but I'm sorry to say I didn't discern a noticeable vanilla flavor in the confectioner's sugar.

And they aren't overly sweet, even with all that powdered sugar clinging to the sides, thanks to very little sugar (1/4 cup) in the actual dough.

A nice cookie to round out your repertoire. Just skip the food processor step and you'll be fine.