Vanille Kipferl de Sébastien

I just had the best time of my life. 

I catered for my friends' 3-year anniversary dinner and made them a 5 course meal.  I honestly enjoyed it better than they did.

Here's the menu

Amuse bouche of 3 mini crostinis -- pumpkin seed butter, parmesan and lemon ; miso ricotta and roasted tomatoes : ricotta with wholegrain mustard, basil, anchovies and orange zest.  
Appetizer -- ricotta gnocchi with herbs and lemon
Main - Romesco sauce potato cakes and spiced chicken
Dessert -- Torta Caprese with whipped cream
Petit fours -- crostini with dark chocolate and sea salt flakes ; hazelnut cinnamon crescent cookie ; chocolate hazelnut cookies ; crostini with white wine syrup soaked apricots, orange zest and mint. 

It wasn't bad.  Oh I loved it so much, thank you Kelsey and Nathan -- hands down my favorite couple. 

ANYWAY.  How does that relate to these cookies.  Well, I got the recipe for the hazelnut cookies I made tonight from the same cookbook as these cookies right here. And these raspberry chocolate cookies.   Yea it's a fantastic pastry book.  A bit on the $$ side, but it was a worthwhile investment for me.  I really only spend money on cookbooks and kitchen stuff and food.

These cookies are beautifully delicate and fancy and refined, I mean just look at the name -- I don't even know how to pronounce these.  They're so delicate and full of flavor and just melt heavenly in your mouth.

Recipe from Patisserie
Makes about 3 dozen cookies
Ingredients
3 tbsp/35g sugar
1 vanilla bean, cut crosswise into thirds
1 stick/250g butter, diced and softened
1 cup + 1 tbsp / 140g flour
3/4 cup / 60g ground almonds
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Method
Preheat oven to 170C

Grind the sugar with the vanilla bean in a food processor to make vanilla sugar.

Sift the vanilla sugar into a medium bowl along with the butter, flour, ground almonds and vanilla extract.

Stir with a wooden spoon until smooth.

Shape the dough into a ball and cut it into quarter

On a lightly floured work surface, roll each quarter of dough into an even log

Line up the logs and cut into 1 inch pieces

Arrange them on a greased and lined baking sheet, spacing them slight apart

Bake for 15 - 2- min, until the cookies are firm but pale.

Leave to cool then dust with icing sugar.