Christmas Baking! Zimtsterne

It always throws people for a loop when I mention that all of my extended family live in Germany. (Asians! They live everywhere!). When my brother and I were growing up, we spent many a Christmas in Frankfurt and Stuttgart, visiting our aunts, uncles and grandma during the summer holidays.

So despite being Australian born and bred, my memories of Christmas eats are more likely to involve stollen, glühwein, lebkuchen and eating wurst at the weihnachstmärkte, than shrimp on the illustrious bbq.

It’s been a few years since I’ve been back… and this year I’ve been feeling homesick for German Christmas, a huge part of which is baking Plätzchen – Christmas cookies! They become completely ubiquitous around Christmastime. People often give handmade cookies as gifts (which is awesome because then you get to taste all the different secret family recipes!), and there are books and books dedicated to baking the many varieties of Plätzchen. (If anyone knows of a good english translated book, I’d love to get my hands on one.)

So on Sunday my friend Beanie and I decided to bake some gingerbread, and some zimtsterne – cinnamon stars, one of my favourite Plätzchen.

We used these two recipes – one from Notebook magazine for Gingerbread Snowflakes and Stars, and one from Epicurious for Zimtsterne. We doubled the quantities of both recipes to get the amount we ended up with.

First the Zimtsterne:

Unfortunately Beanie’s local Woolies didn’t stock hazelnut meal, though almond meal was in abundance. I’ve seen some recipes on the internet use almond meal, or a mixture of both – but the recipe I was taught by a German frau only used hazelnut, so I’ll stick to what I know. So we bought whole hazelnuts instead.

Blitzing the whole hazelnuts to make hazelnut meal

Fresh hazelnut meal! Probably even better than the packet kind

Adding cinnamon and plenty of lemon zest

Whipping the meringue using Beanie’s mum’s glorious Kitchen Aid

The recipe calls for the egg mixture to be whipped for 8 minutes! A really stiff and glossy meringue

Folding the egg whites and hazelnut meal

The recipe for Zimtsterne is simple, but the method is always a little bit tricky. The dough is basically a mixture of hazelnut meal and meringue, and is incredibly sticky to work with. A trick I learnt to make the dough easier to handle is to chill it in the fridge for a few hours, and then roll it out gently between two pieces of cling film dusted with plenty of icing sugar:

Roll it out to about 1.5cm in thickness, and remove the top layer of cling film. Don’t roll it too thin, otherwise you wont get the nice chewy texture. Now it should be ready to cut! I used Japanese vegetable cutters, but ideally use a 1-inch star cutter to make the cute little cookies. You don’t want to make them too big, otherwise they wont cook properly in the oven before the meringue topping starts to brown.

The mixture is still incredibly sticky, so having a bowl of hot water on hand to rinse your cutters is a good idea. But make sure you dry it before using it again, otherwise that just makes it worse!

After that, it’s just a matter of icing the cookies with some of the reserved meringue. A bit fiddly, but they look so good once they’re done!

Covered in meringue

The recipe says to bake them without the meringue top for 10-12 minutes at 350ºF, and then for another 5 minutes with the meringue on. But because I prefer mini-size zimtsterne, I found it sufficient to bake them just once at 180ºC for 8 minutes. They’ll be incredibly soft when you take them out of the oven – but if you wait for them to cool, they’ll harden up. Yum yum. The meringue goes crispy on top, but they’re still chewy on the inside. If you overbake them, I’ve heard you can keep them in an airtight container with a slice of apple for a few days (!) for them to soften. Never tried that though.

Finished zimtsterne!

… stay tuned for gingerbread mania