Valentine's Linzer Sables

A yummy Valentine's Day version of a very old European favorite!

One of my favorite cakes when I was growing up was Linzer Torte, an Austrian cake from the town of Linz which according to the interwebs is the oldest cake recipe known, dating from 1653. 


Linzer Torte is a really rich, dense cake with ground hazelnuts, cinnamon, cloves and lemon rind which has a latticed pastry top and a filling of blackcurrant jam.


There was an awesome Austrian cake shop in Melbourne called Fleischer's, it used to be on Chapel St and then moved to Glenferrie Road. They made the Linzer Tortes I know and love. 


Linzer sables are a biscuit version of the torte, same flavours, just a bit crunchier!

To get the best flavour from the hazelnuts, roast them in the
oven for 5 minutes and then rub the brown skin off. 

I'll put this out there straight away, these were a nightmare to make.

The pastry is very short (a large proportion of butter or 'shortening' to the dry ingredients) and this makes it incredibly fragile and prone to cracking and disintegrating when handled. It sticks to rolling pins, benchtops and just about everything else too.

It wouldn't roll out at all because it cracked and split immediately when I even waved a rolling pin in its general direction.

In the end I had to flatten it out roughly by hand and then smooth the top with a spatula. See the unevenness in the picture, pre-spatula :-(

Of course, while I was flattening the top out with the spatula, the bottom was busy sticking firmly to the bench.

So then the spatula had to be wedged underneath to loosen this soft, crumbly mixture from the surface underneath so that I could stamp out my heart shapes.

Half of the shapes were plain large hearts.

The other half were the same large heart cutter but I also stamped a tiny heart cutter to create a cut out space in the middle of the sable, see picture to the right.

This is so you can see the lovely dark jammy goodness inside.

It took a lot of time and patience to get the sables all cut out and onto oven trays :-/

After spending so long on rolling and cutting, I was paranoid that they would go wrong in the oven, but no! A quick ten minutes and VICTORY!!

They were very slightly puffed and still malleable when they came out of the oven, I was so fearful to disturb these temperamental baked goods that I left them on the trays for ages before being brave enough to transfer them to a rack to cool.

It's worth all the fuss, they are melt-in-your-mouth crumbly and hazelnutty and sweet. Happy Valentine's Day!






Recipe from 500 Cookies by Phillipa Vanstone

• 150g roasted skinned hazelnuts
• 300g plain flour
• 100 g granulated sugar
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp ground cloves
• 225g unsalted butter
• grated zest of one lemon
• 50g blackcurrant jam
• icing sugar to decorate

Set the oven to 175C. Grind hazelnuts in a food processor until fine, then add all other ingredients and pulse until the mixture clumps together. Flour a work surface and roll out the pastry (good luck!!). Cut shapes, making sure you have even numbers of each shape. Cut holes in the centre of half the shapes to make the 'jam holes'. Transfer the sables to trays lined with baking paper, handling them carefully to ensure they don't crack. Bake sables for 8 to 10 minutes. 

Sandwich the cooled sables together with blackcurrant jam, pressing down carefully to make the jam rise through the centre hole. Sieve icing sugar over the top just before serving. 

Filled cookies keep for up to 3 days, unfilled keep for over a week in an airtight jar. 

Melting moments and ricciarelli: flour and butter v almonds and eggs

If we put macaroons on one side for a minute – I know it’s hard – my other favourite bickies are melting moments and ricciarelli.

Melting moments are apparently an Australian invention based on Scotch shortbread, they were first mentioned in an Australian cookbook from 1928. 

 

 They contain the same ingredients as traditional shortbread (flour, cornflour, sugar, butter) but whereas shortbread is baked in slabs or ‘cakes’ and stamped with a pattern, melting moments are small bite sized drops.

At some stage after the 1950s they began to be sandwiched together with jam or icing.

I like using a vanilla flavoured biscuit with a sharp lemony icing/filling. The icing is butter, icing sugar and lemon juice. It needs to be spreadable but stiff, so that it dries hard and sticks the bickies together. 

My recipe is from a book called '100 Cookies' but you can google recipes, they are all pretty similar. 

Ricciarelli (pronounced ‘richie-a-RELli’) are a type of macaroon I guess. They are Italian biscuits made of ground almonds, sugar and egg white and they are moist and chewy rather than crisp’n’crunchy. They can be flavoured with lemon rind which works really well. 

 

I just googled the name and I found out they are named after an Italian prince, Ricciardetto della Gherardesca from Volterra, who apparently invented them when he came back from the Crusades in the 14^th century. 

I am now imagining a knight in full armour clanking around a massive castle kitchen trying to grind almonds really finely while Baldrick beats the egg whites. 

Anyway, here in the 21^st century there is a great recipe for them in Nigella Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess cookbook, thanks Nigella. You get a very sticky mass that you need to hand-shape into diamonds (using icing sugar to stop them sticking to your hands) and place on a baking tray to harden up before baking. 

You are supposed to leave them overnight but I always get impatient and try to bake them same day. 

Here is Jade helping out in the process by trying to speed up the drying with a hairdryer.

Unfortunately it didn’t really work and while you still end up with yummy biscuits, they look swollen and malformed, not the little neat diamonds that you want. So, always best to follow the recipe – sigh.