Written by Jana Aßmann
Just a few days before the start of the Advent season, a small group of NEP students came together to bake some German and American cookies. Even though both recipes („Vanillekipferl“ and vanilla cookies with soy milk) contained lots of sugar, butter, and – as the names imply – vanilla, they tasted quite different and revealed some of the discrepancies between German and American cookie baking traditions.
After having bought piles of flour, sugar, butter, margarine, and powder sugar, the students and I met at the AIB and tried to cope with these masses of ingredients! But everything went well; with the help of two hand mixers and some strong hands kneading the ingredients we were able to prepare the dough for the „Vanillekipferl“, which turned out to be – at least for the American students – quite not sweet enough! I was surprised but I understood when we prepared the dough for the American vanilla cookies afterwards: Besides some flour, the dough consisted mostly of brown sugar, vanilla soy milk, and margarine, and it was so sweet you could hear the sugar crunch between your teeth! I must admit everybody loved trying this dough, me too, but the difference between the two recipes was obvious.
The dough of the „Vanillekipferl“ was rather crumbly, it was hard to form horns out of it, while the American vanilla dough was so soft it stuck to your hands all the time. But this was not the only difference: I remember standing in front of the students, two different coffee cups in my hands, and asking them: „ Which size of cup do you need for measuring the ingredients? “ After having received some perplexed gazes it turned out that 'cup' is a measuring unit which doesn't have anything to do with coffee cups!
In the end we managed preparing and forming the dough despite all these little problems. We had about a hundred cookies that we decorated afterwards with almonds, sugar icing, and powder sugar. They looked delicious in their little cellophane bags and the whole AIB smelled of vanilla cookies and Christmas.
For everybody who wasn't able to join us that afternoon or who wants to try baking these cookies, we decided to publish the recipes – even though it's a baker's secret we normally don't give to anybody :-)
