Vanille Kipferl at last!

So, as some of you (but probably not most) may know, when I am independent (of my parents) and either a) extremely wealthy or b) living off student loans, you will find me (or not) traveling. To EVERYWHERE - London, Stonehenge, Marseille, Paris, Mumbai, Venice, Rome, Istanbul, Budapest, Moscow, Johannesburg, Panama City, the Andes - so when I mean everywhere, I really mean it.

I will definitely be going to Vienna.

Eva Ibbotson introduced it to me (The Morning Gift, The Star of Kazan. Both excellent, both well worth reading. SofK is a "children's" novel, but MG is for teens/adults.) While Paris was on the brink of becoming the amazingly cultured city it is now, Vienna had already been one for hundreds of years. The Lipizzaners - Sachers Hotel - the Prater - the music - the opera - the coffee - the artists. Gustav Mahler was the musical director of the Vienna Court Opera. Freud lived here. Coffee was practically invented here. (No; maybe that was the Turks.)

Anyway, Vienna is an incredibly wonderful city, a lot like Paris, but even more beautiful. I mean, look at this:

And this: 

How can you resist a city like that?

Moving on.

Among Vienna's many other attributes, it's also famous for a little cookie-biscuit-thing called kipferl, which I have wanted to try for a very long time, and finally, what do you know? I made a batch!

DISCLAIMER: This would never have happened without the generosity and loveliness of a very dear friend, Irene Goldman-Price, who sent along a bag of almond flour and some vanilla beans. (If she's reading this, I love her enormously, not only because she aids and abets the baking of kipferl but because she's incredible and wonderful. And marvelous.)

With almond flour and two shrivelled-up vanilla beans in hand (they look a bit like slightly damp twigs that have been soaking in vanilla; they also smell so strongly of vanilla that our entire kitchen smelled pleasantly of it. It's quite lovely), I dumped butter, bourbon (close enough to vanilla essence), salt, and something else that I can't remember into a mixer and beat it up, then added two cups of almond flour and some more regular white flour. And stirred.

And what I got was a crumbly, crumby mess. Not a dough. Not even close. Dismayed, dejected, and despondent, I added another half-stick of butter and stirred and beat and crossed my fingers until finally, it started to look like the "cohesive" dough described in the recipe. An hour in the refrigerator and the stuff was ready to roll.

(I just realized that "ready to roll" is actually an expression. Oops.)

What I meant was, "ready to roll into 2-inch longs about the thickness of my thumb." This I proceeded to do. It took an hour - I had to mash the dough in my hands for about a minute before it would roll into cylinders instead of crumbling. This wasn't much fun.

1. The dough was pretty buttery and so my hands felt sort of greasy and gross.

2. NPR's "Cartalk" was on, which I normally like but which was now grating on my nerves.

3. Since my hands were all greasy, I couldn't turn off the radio or put in a CD.

4. Why didn't I just wash my hands? Even now, the answer to this evades me. The only reason I can come up with is that I thought if I stopped rolling out the cylinders, I would never want to start again. This is probably true.

So anyway, I rolled out twenty cylinders and curved them into things that looked more like horseshoes than the "moon-shaped crescents" the recipe advised, and put them in the oven and baked them.

And when they came out, I ground up a vanilla bean and some powdered sugar and rolled some of them in it.

Turns out, I should have used half the vanilla bean.

 It's not that they're not good, because they are; the vanilla sugar is just really, really strong. I did the rest of the kipferl in powdered sugar. And here they are.

 

Well, here's one of them anyway.

Kind of ugly, really, but they taste good. Shortbready and almondy and crunchy - fragile, but yummy. Irene, the benefactor of the entire experiment, should be receiving a box of them shortly. I would send them to everyone, but we only have so many, and besides, they'd arrive broken, even though on the box for Irene and her husband Alan says "FRAGILE" on it four times, "THIS WAY UP" three times, and "THIS IS THE BOTTOM OF THE BOX. TURN IT OVER SO CONTENTS ARRIVE WHOLE!" once on the bottom.

Well, they turned out good. Worth making again, definitely.

And now for something completely different...

This is the latest installment of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which is a video blog (vlog) based on Pride and Prejudice. Don't you think that Bing Lee (yes, that's really what they named him) is the sweetest, nicest person...well...EVER?