- Cuisine
Sweet coconut buttercups
It is slowly becoming wintry. Now begins the time in which I feel like I'm back in my childhood. The Advent season traditionally starts with biscuit baking in my family. Only when all the cookie jars are filled to the brim - is the house brought up to scratch, decorated for Christmas, the Advent wreath made and the sacks of the Advent calendar filled with little sweets for the children. So the anticipation of Christmas rises and time almost flies by.
For me, the pre-Christmas period is a time to get together with family and friends. So I meet with my friend Julia for today's cookie baking. We make coconut cookies - my absolute favourite among Christmas cookies.
Ambience is everything
Before baking, however, we must first create a Christmas atmosphere. For me, this includes the scent of incense, which I place on the sieve of my fragrance lamp. Now only Christmas carols are missing to start with. Already with the first notes of "All I want for Christmas is You" we hum along merrily and almost forget that we are not Mariah Carey on tour, but Bianca and Julia, arranged to bake cookies. So the right ambience is provided, we're ready to go!
Give me a Busserl, a Kokos Busserl
When we speak of a "Busserl" in the Home of Lässig, we mean a kiss. But today we don't distribute kisses, but bake the very best coconut kisses. These Christmas cookie classics are a genuine residue recycler, since with many other cookie doughs only the yolk is used and so the remaining protein can be processed.
Recipe
3 egg white
200 g icing sugar
200 g grated coconut
1 teaspoon lemon juice
First the eggs have to be separated. Julia has her own method for this. She opens the egg at the edge of the bowl and then drops the contents into her open hand. So the egg white runs between her fingers into the bowl and the yolk remains intact in the palm of her hand. Even a small spot of yolk would be enough to prevent the egg white from becoming stiff. Julia turns off the mixer and laughs euphorically: "Shall we do the obligatory egg snow test? Hesitantly we turn the bowl with the beaten egg white over our heads. So we check whether the egg whites have been beaten long enough and ideally do not fall out of the bowl. We were lucky, we stayed dry. The beaten egg white remained stuck in the bowl.
Julia then gently lifts the sifted icing sugar and then the coconut flakes underneath. After a short, gentle stirring a thick white cream is formed. We refine this with a little lemon juice. Now it's my turn: with two teaspoons I spread heaps on wafers. But the round, thin leaves are not enough for our mass. I have to confess to Julia that I used to eat in passing. Already as a child I stole the wafers from my grandmother while baking. But since we put baking paper on the baking tray, I still can shape the cream directly on it for the rest of the busserl. The full baking tray is now baked for about 15 minutes at 170° C hot air on the middle shelf until golden yellow.
An early start to the biscuit season
The best comes also this time to the end. With a small touch of bad conscience we taste the Kokosbusserl. It is our family's custom to eat the biscuits not before 6 December for St. Nicholas. But we want to make sure that they will taste good for St. Nicholas and that he doesn't send us the Krampus to blame us for baking mistakes. With a cup of tea from Grandma's tea service we let the coconut buzz melt on our tongue and watch the small snowflakes falling from the sky outside. A baking morning couldn't end better, except perhaps with a Busserl from our husbands as a reward.
