Chai Crescents

Okay, let's get down to cookie-business. First up: Chai crescents - a spicier version of the classic and always popular vanilla crescents. I spotted those in Fräulein Klein's wonderful Christmas baking book which is a colorful treasure chest full of festive sweet recipes and cute ideas for Christmas decoration. These cookies here are rather easy to make. Just pay attention that you handle the hot crescents carefully when you roll them in your icing sugar mixture as they tend to break apart.

Recipe
(from Weihnachten mit Fräulein Klein)

70ml milk
4 bags of chai-tea (for example Yogi tea)
100g ground almonds
250g flour
80g icing sugar
1/2 vanilla pod
150g cold butter

To cover the cookies:
5 tablespoons icing sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 sachet vanilla sugar

First, heat up the milk in a small saucepan. Then, take away from the heat, add the 4 teabags and allow to infuse for about 30 minutes. Remove the teabags and let the milk cool down completely.

Preheat the oven to 175°C. Line two baking trays with parchment paper.

In a large bowl, sift together flour and icing sugar. Mix with the ground almonds and the scraped out seeds of the vanilla pod. Add the cold butter in pieces and the chai-milk. With your hands, bring together to a smooth dough. Form a ball, flatten a bit, wrap in clingfilm and allow to cool outside or in the refrigerator for at least an hour.

After an hour, take the dough out, cut into 3 equal pieces and form equal rolls from it. Cut these into smaller or bigger pieces, depending on how big you want the cookies to be. Bend the rolls into crescents and place on your baking tray.

Bake for about 10 minutes (they should not turn brown!). When you take them out of the oven, dredge in a mixture of icing sugar, cinnamon and vanilla sugar while still hot, but do that carefully, otherwise the crescents will fall apart! Let cool on a rack.