Viennese Crescent Cookies

This lovely old recipe produces delicate little cookies, so handle them carefully. They're crumbly, buttery and sweet with a soft note of vanilla. They're fantastic with coffee.

A few days before you make the cookies, get a good 6 cups of confectioner’s sugar and a vanilla bean or two. Split the vanilla bean(s) lengthwise, and pack them in an airtight container with the powdered sugar. Over the next few days, the flavor and aroma from the vanilla beans will suffuse the sugar, giving you a fantastic vanilla sugar coat the finished cookies with.

Ingredients #

Instructions #

Split the vanilla beans down their length and scrape out the seeds. In a small bowl, mix the seeds with a tablespoon or two of the powdered sugar, mashing with the back of the spoon to evenly distribute the seeds. In an airtight container, mix that combination with the rest of the confectioners sugar. Bury the vanilla beans in the sugar, seal the container, and put it away for a week or so.

Cream the butter and sugar until the mixture is fluffy and light. Add the ground hazelnuts or almonds and the vanilla, and mix until well-blended. Stir in the flour in parts until it’s well-blended. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and chill overnight.

Preheat your oven to 350 F. To make the cookies, break off tablespoon-sized pieces of the dough and roll them into balls. Then shape the balls into fat crescents and arrange about 1/4 inch apart on a buttered cookie sheet. Bake until the crescents begin to brown, roughly 13 to 15 minutes. Let stand briefly to cool, and then transfer to a rack.

Roll the cooled cookies in the vanilla confectioners sugar.