Crescent shaped Christmas biscuits - Kourabiedes and Vanillekipferl

Kourabiedes and Vanillekipferl are both crescent shaped short biscuits covered with powdered sugar. One is traditionally Greek, and one is traditionally Austrian. Being an ‘Austro-Hellene’, both biscuits have featured at Christmas time throughout my life, but it didn’t occur to me for a long time that they might have the same origins.

Is there a connection between Kourabiedes and Vanillekipferl?

While legend has it that the Vanillekipferl was created in Vienna and given its crescent shape in response to the city’s victory over the Ottomans, the Greek word ‘Kourabie’ comes from the Turkish ‘Kourabyie’ (meaning dry biscuit). The Kourabyie is known throughout the Middle East - the ancient Persian word for cookie is ‘qurabiya’. It is easy to see the evolution of the biscuit from the Middle East via the Balkans to Vienna, besieged as it was by the Ottoman Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. The biscuits developed separately over the years into something slightly different in each region.

While Kourabie pastry is a pure shortcrust peppered with crunchy chunks of roasted almonds and flavoured with a single clove that is stuck into the middle of each biscuit, the Vanillekipferl contains ground almonds and is flavoured with vanilla, as the name suggests; the Kourabie is larger than the dainty Vanillekipferl, and you really only need one with a strong cup of black coffee. Vanillekipferl in Austria are served on a large platter amongst an array of other Christmas biscuits.

An Austrian plate of Advent biscuits. Vanillekipferl at 7 o'clock.

It’s lovely to see this connection - the idea that something so treasured, the source of great national pride as each of these biscuits, has quite a tangled history. They are a result of migration, and this is perhaps a reflection of the fact that the migration of people and their cultures is and always has been a natural feature of human life - who knows what else these biscuits will evolve into in the future?

Below are my Greek grandmother’s recipe for Kourabiedes and my Austrian grandmother’s recipe for Vanillekipferl:

Kourabiedes recipe

Ingredients for 25 biscuits

225 g butter

100g icing sugar

300 g self raising flour

Pinch of salt

150g almonds (roasted, chopped and cooled)

26-30 cloves

To cover:

300g icing sugar

Method

Preheat the oven to 150 degrees C (fan).

Beat the butter with 100g of icing sugar with an electric mixer until it’s light and fluffy.

Mix in the remaining ingredients and shape the dough into a ball. Put it in a bowl, cover it and leave it in the fridge for 1 hour (this is to avoid the biscuits from spreading in the oven).

Roll out the dough to about 1.5cm thick and cut them into crescents. You can do this using a round cutter by cutting out a circle, and then cutting the next circle over the edge of the first one you cut (my grandmother used to cut out the crescents with a glass).

Place the crescents on a baking tray lined with parchment paper and stick a clove into each one.

Bake for 15 to 20 minutes. Take them out of the oven and let them cool on the baking tray as they are brittle at this point. Once they are cool, sieve some icing sugar into the bottom of a lined biscuit tin, place a layer of Kourabiedes on top, sieve icing sugar on top of them - continue layering in this way until all your biscuits are stored.

Vanillekipferl recipe

A note about vanilla sugar:

In Austria and Germany you can buy vanilla sugar in small sachets of 8g - their vanilla flavour is very strong. If you can’t obtain this, you will have to prepare some in advance: cut open a vanilla pod, scrape out all the seeds and cut the pod into large chunks. Put everything into a large jar and fill it up with castor sugar - give it a shake occasionally over a week or two.

Ingredients for about 50 biscuits

180g flour

70g almonds, peeled and ground

1 egg

50g caster sugar

1 Pkt (or 1 tbsp home made) vanilla sugar (see note above)

Pinch of salt

125g butter

To cover:

100g icing sugar

2 Pkt (or 2 tbsp home made) vanilla sugar

Method

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees C (fan).

Sift the flour and combine it with the ground almonds on your worktop. Make a well in the centre and crack the egg into it along with the sugar, vanilla sugar and salt.

Cut the butter into small chunks and add this. Knead all these ingredients into a smooth dough, working from the outside of the well into the middle. Work quickly so that the butter does not get too soft.

Place the dough in a bowl, cover it and put it in the fridge for an hour.

Scatter the worktop with flour and roll the pastry into a sausage. Cut off 1cm discs and shape them into crescents: roll them into a small sausage and then bend them. Place them on a lined baking sheet.

Bake them for 12 minutes.

Mix the icing sugar with the vanilla sugar and as soon as the Vanillekipferl come out of the oven, sprinkle them with the sugar and vanilla sugar mixture. Once they have cooled, transfer them to a lined biscuit tin and cover with any remaining icing/vanilla sugar.

They will get tastier and tastier as time passes as the vanilla flavour intensifies..