[food] Gretel Beer's Teebäckerei

[kaberett]

Minimally adapted from Gretel Beer's Classic Austrian Cooking, which is atrociously indexed and her recipe for Strudelteig (pastry) is wrong, but other than that it's great and I highly recommend it. My family makes generally makes these around this time of year, but they're an Always Good as far as I'm concerned.

Ingredients
150g plain flour
150g icing sugar
150g ground nuts (Beer says unblanched almonds; my family uses a mix of almond, hazelnut and walnut)
100g butter
25g finely grated (dark) chocolate
1 egg or 2 egg yolks (or, if they're not large eggs, one egg plus one yolk)
pinch of cinnamon and nutmeg
egg white for brushing over pastry (optional)

Method

Pre-heat oven to 190°C.

Mix together all of the dry ingredients. Rub in the butter, but don't worry too much about getting it to an even crumb. Mix in the (beaten) egg, which will get you a very stiff dough.

On a floured board, roll out to ~1/8"/~3mm. Cut into shapes and transfer to a baking sheet (prepared however you like); squish the scraps up, roll them out again, and repeat. Optionally, brush with egg white and sprinkle with more ground almond.

Bake until nicely browned -- 10 to 15 minutes, depending on how done you wind up liking them.

Comments

[steorra]

Somehow I had picked up the idea that "icing sugar" was a specifically Canadian term - one of the handful of terms where we differ from both US and UK usage. I guess I was mistaken!

[kaberett]

Hee! Yes, that's standard terminology here :)

[shewhostaples]

Oh, that sounds good. And with ground nuts I might be able to get countertony to eat it, too. (He doesn't like nuts, but it's more the 'unexpectedly solid chunks!' thing than the taste.)

[kaberett]

They are so good. I would love to know how you get on with them, if you do try!

(They hold shapes and patterns pretty well if you're inclined to that kind of Fancy.)

[highlyeccentric]

If you ever run across Jane Lawson's Snowflakes and Schnapps I would be intersted in your opinion of it! My friendly local (South) Tyrolean has a copy, but when I actually sat down with her to go through it she kept pointing at things and saying they were wrong!

If I get super enthusiastic I might try making these tomorrow on GF flour.

[highlyeccentric]

*eyes it* do you think this would work in a food processor? Asking for someone who fails at everything involving rubbing in, pretty much ever.

[kaberett]

yep, it absolutely should!