First we must set the scene:
It is early December: We have a girl from Southern California and a girl from Germany who have just finished an evening yoga class in an open-air shala at the beach in small town, Costa Rica where the only way to live, is to live simply; any attempt to rush or to have expectations and you are halted back by life, nature, or culture. Both girls are wearing tops without sleeves: the German girl in shorts and the Californian in loose pants that hug around the ankles. The only reason she is persuaded to wear these long pants is to keep the mosquitoes off her ankles as she attempts to guide meditations. The old wooden planks creak under their feet as they roll up their yoga mats and blow out the citronella candles that were purchased from the nearest Walmart over an hour’s drive away.
Since it was my friend’s first year away from her home in Germany during the holidays, I asked if there were any Christmas traditions that she wished to continue with this year. She brought up the advent calendar and how that was a big tradition and also how her family would light a candle once a week for four weeks prior to the holiday. We chatted about our favorite parts of this time of year; ornament shopping, Christmas markets with hot chocolate, the cozy cold weather… all while listening to the ocean waves beat onto the warm Costa Rican shoreline. She finished off our conversation with, “We should make Christmas cookies sometime.” No doubt, I was all in.
So with our bicycles in small town, Costa Rica we began to collect the ingredients for our (almost) German Christmas Cookies:
- 80ish g white sugar (easy)
- 250ish g flour (she had integral, which is like whole wheat flour, great.)
- powdered sugar (it took the adventure of a beach bike ride to the estuary, crossing the estuary by boat to the busy streets of Tamarindo to be fueled up by a smoothie bowl, and then heading to the nearest market so we could get out of the heated town ASAP) and it is simply for dusting over top the cookies
- vanillezucker aka: vanilla sugar (which we learned is very much a thing only in Germany (possibly Europe), as it was nowhere to be found in our Costa Rican mini markets, I had never heard of it as an American, and our Brazilian friend was unfamiliar with it as well. So we improvised by pouring an unknown amount, my guess would be about 1 Tbsp, of the only vanilla extract we could find into a mug halfway full of sugar and stirred it up really well; she approved of her taste test, so I did too)
- 210ish g butter (almost 2 full sticks of salted butter, how could anything taste bad after that)
- 100 g ground almonds – or hand chopped almonds… (it was hard enough to find whole almonds but I got lucky and found a bag with exactly 100 g of almonds, and chopped them up nice and fine)
With my oven broken (and far from fixing considering the amount of baking that I will be doing in the heat of the upcoming dry season), we head to her little kitchen to bake these up. She pulls out a pot to use as a mixing bowl and gets out the ingredients as I finely chop our precious, whole almonds. Looking at the recipe quantities listed in weight, I ask if she has a food scale. She hesitates… do any small rental apartments in Costa Rica have a food scale provided in their kitchens? That was a long shot, so I ask if she has measuring cups, and I receive another blank stare. I joke about making an old-fashioned scale, picturing my problem-solving, can-of worm-opening self walking out into the wilderness to search for the perfect sticks to use as a base and balance and the perfect palm leaves to use as a string to create two mini food hammocks to place on either side of the perfectly balanced stick that I would supposedly find. And then knowing that we had 100 g worth of almonds we could then measure out all the ingredients to compare them on the balance… but that creative idea of a project faded quickly. So, with her eyeballs as our measuring cups and her hands as our electric mixer, we got to it.
Cookies were invented thousands of years before electric mixers were, so do NOT let the absence of an electric mixer stop you from your baking experience!
YES WE GOOGLED THIS WHILE OUR FINGERS WERE MESSY WITH COOKIE DOUGH
Once all mixed up, we rolled up the log of dough in parchment paper to let rest in the fridge for 30 minutes. After the entertainment of a new-to-me card game, we flattened the dough, and sliced it into little strips about 4 cm long, 1 cm wide, and, due to our professionalism, varying thicknesses. We shaped the strips into little arches to try and copy the image in the recipe, placed them on the parchment paper lined tray from the apartment’s mini toaster oven, and then let them bake in the big oven for about 12 minutes. Once removed, we dusted the cookies with more of our attempted “vanillezucker”, and powdered sugar and placed them on a little rack to cool. Due to the small size of our baking sheet, we had about two more rounds of baking to get through, which meant plenty of time to eat the cookies that we had set out to cool and…
THEY. WERE. AMAZING.
Crispy and crunchy with the perfect amount of sweetness. The butter created that perfect crumble in the mouth and we poured ourselves a little milk for dunking. We agreed that the texture of the chopped almonds as opposed to the ground almonds made these cookies all the more fun. So we munched and dunked and grooved to some holiday classics as the apartment continued to fill up with the sweet, buttery, smell of our (almost) German Christmas cookies.
Happy Holidays to all around the globe.
Celebrate in your favorite way.
Share your traditions.
Spread the sweetness.
