Sweet
Vanilici
Small lard-and-butter biscuits turned hot in vanilla icing sugar, baked in every house at Christmas.
Recipe from Туѓино Јабано
- Prep
- 35 min
- Cook
- 20 min
- Total
- 55 min
- Fasting
- Not suitable
Ingredients 11 ingredients
Method
- Beat the caster sugar, vanilla sugar and egg together until pale.
- Work in the softened lard and butter, then the yoghurt. The lard is what makes these short; an all-butter batch is good but firmer and less crumbly.
- Sift in the flour with the baking powder and mix to a soft dough. Add flour a spoonful at a time if it sticks — a dry dough bakes to sand.
- Fold in the chopped almonds, wrap the dough and rest it in the fridge for 20 minutes.
- Roll to 1.5 cm thick on a floured board and stamp out small rounds with a glass or a fluted cutter. Lay them on lined trays.
- Bake at 180 °C for 18 to 20 minutes, until the edges have only just coloured and the tops are still pale.
- Mix the icing sugar with the second sachet of vanilla sugar. Let the biscuits sit in the tray for 3 minutes, then turn each one in the sugar while still warm so it takes a thick coat.
- Cool on a rack and keep in a tin. They soften and improve over two or three days.
If you cannot find it
Substitutions that work outside Macedonia.
- Lard
- Solid white vegetable shortening, or all butter — butter alone gives a firmer, less crumbly biscuit.
- Vanilla sugar sachets
- 1 tsp vanilla extract in the dough, and the scraped seeds of half a pod stirred through the icing sugar.
- Thick sheep’s or Balkan yoghurt
- Greek yoghurt let down with a spoonful of milk, or soured cream.
