I had never, ever heard of kipferls before. Then, in two weeks they came into my life twice! First, my friend Priscilla made some in the Culinary School Pastry Arts program she is enrolled in. I didn’t try one because I don’t like nuts. I dislike nuts so much that the name of the cookie didn’t even register. Then I read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and kipferls are important in one chapter. Since I was hosting book club this month and since the author had contributed his mother’s recipe for kipferls to The Book Club Cookbook—a birthday gift from my friend Kayte—I decided to make the cookie. I had to do a Google image search to even see what they looked like!

Then came the hunt for hazelnut flour. It’s out there—I found it at Sprouts, shocked by the price. I told the cashier that there must have been a mistake, and she said she doubted it. I asked her to call a manager for a price check, and yep, she was right—there was no mistake. It was $16.95 for a 14oz. packet of hazelnut flour—aka hazelnut meal. After creating such a fuss, and with my book club in less than seven hours, I bought the dangblasted, expensive, and pitifully small bag of hazelnut flour.

BTW, you don’t have to buy this flour to make these cookies 🙂

How to avoid using expensive Hazelnut Flour:

1. Make your own; start by preheating your oven to 350°.
2. Place 6oz. (¼ cup) of shelled hazelnuts on a baking sheet in a single layer.
3. Bake 8–10 minutes, stirring occasionally until the hazelnuts are fragrant and brown.
4. Remove the nuts from the oven and let cool slightly.
5. While still warm, fold the nuts inside a clean kitchen towel and rub vigorously to remove their skins.
6. Place skinned nuts in a food processor fitted with the stainless-steel blade, and process until they are finely ground.

OR

1. Substitute almond flour/meal for the hazelnut flour. Almond meal is about one-third the price of hazelnut flour. My German friend, Karin, said she always makes her kipferls with Almond Meal, but her German relatives grind their own nuts.

To continue with my saga…Upon returning home with my $16.95 package of hazelnut flour, I got out the recipe and got started. No! Two vanilla beans? TWO? For 36 cookies?! It is now clear to me that I am making The World’s Most Expensive Cookie, and I am thinking these better be dang good.

They were, thank goodness. They were so good I might have to make them again, and again, and again 🙂

This recipe is based upon Markus Zusak’s recipe for kipferls as published in The Book Club Cookbook.  I made some changes to the method and to the ingredients, though. Mr. Zusak’s mother mixed her dough by hand, I tried it for a bit, then resorted to my electric mixer. I split the use of the vanilla beans, putting one in the cookie and one in the powdered sugar—Mr. Zusak put both in the powdered sugar. I had to quadruple the amount of powdered sugar to cover all the cookies, and I covered the cookies with the powdered sugar while the cookies were still warm* as to get a crackly, almost melted sugar coating on the cookies.

*Let the cookies cool a little, to firm up a bit—if you toss hot cookies in powdered sugar, the cookie will break.

Kipferls

Crisp German Vanilla Hazelnut Butter Cookies

INGREDIENTS

For the cookies

• 1¾ cups all-purpose flour
• 1¼ cups Hazelnut Flour or Hazelnut Meal or alternative (see above)
• 2/3 cup granulated sugar
• 14 tablespoons (1¾ sticks) butter, at room temperature
• 1 whole vanilla bean, split in half, and insides scraped off with a knife.  Discard the outside of the vanilla bean [Editor’s Note: Do NOT discard the scraped pods of vanilla beans; place them in your sugar bowl/container to make vanilla sugar!]

For the vanilla sugar

• 1 1/3 cup powdered sugar
• 1 whole vanilla bean, cut crosswise into 1″ pieces (different preparation than above)

1. Make the vanilla sugar first.  
   • Place the powdered sugar with the chopped up vanilla bean in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a metal blade.  
   • Process until the vanilla bean has been incorporated into the powdered sugar, several 10 second bursts.  
   • Place a fine meshed sifter over a small bowl and sift the powdered sugar to remove the unblended pieces of vanilla bean.  
   • Pour vanilla sugar into a large Ziploc bag, and set aside.
2. Preheat oven to 350°, and spray two baking sheets lightly with cooking spray or line with parchment paper.
3. Combine all purpose flour, hazelnut flour/meal, and granulated sugar in a large bowl.
4. Cut butter into ½” pieces and add to flour mixture.
5. Scrape the inside out of the split vanilla bean and add to bowl.  With an electric mixer, mix dough for 3-4 minutes or until a soft dough is formed.
6. Pinch off small pieces of dough (1 T; ½oz; 15 grams) and mold gently between your palms to form 3-inch ropes, thicker in the middle and tapered at the ends—this took a bit of doing to master.  I rolled the dough to the length of my three middle fingers.  I rolled the dough a bit more firmly with my ring and index finger so the ends of the dough would be thinner. Fashion each piece of rolled dough into a crescent shape and place onto the prepared trays, see picture above.
7. Bake in preheated 350° oven for 15-20 minutes or just until the cookies are beginning to turn brown.  Mr. Kusak says that once the Kipferls are brown, they are over-cooked.
8. Remove cookies from oven, and cool just slightly before tossing them into the Ziploc bag with the vanilla powdered sugar—tossing the cookies while they are still hot creates a slightly melted-on, and truly special coating.
9. Remove cookie to a cooling tray and repeat with remaining cookies and vanilla sugar. If you have vanilla sugar left over, you can re-coat the cookies.
10. Let cool completely before eating. The cookies will crisp up as they cool.

 Yield: About 3 ½ dozen cookies

I hope you enjoy The World’s Most Expensive Cookie!  They ARE good and worth the cost and effort. Thanks for stopping by my kitchen today!

PS: I am making another batch of these cookies to take to a Tahoe retreat this weekend—one bag of that dangblasted expensive Hazelnut Flour does make three batches of these cookies. AND, Costco sells vanilla beans now! A note from my friend Sally—put the vanilla beans in the powdered sugar as soon as you get them. Once you are ready to make the cookies, remove the beans and use as outlined above. The benefit is that some of the essence of the vanilla beans will have soaked into the sugar…yummmmm 🙂