Fast forward twenty years: I bake German Christmas cookies this time of year, since I now understand the wistful feeling that true Germans get this time of year, and how well their favorite cookie helps allay this angst. And, so help me, I even have a huge tin, courtesy of my Nuremberg-dwelling sister-in-law, who in true Swabian (read skinflint) fashion, buys them factory direct, and sends huge packages via DHL. It appears that cookies in quantity make homesick Germans feel better.
My husband's favorite are Vanillekipferl, little melt-in-your-mouth vanilla crescents, made with butter, egg yolks, ground almonds and a token amount of flour, then dredged in vanilla bean-scented powdered sugar. Their companion cookie is Zimtsterne, cinnamon stars, since they use the egg whites. They're essentially nut meringues, cut into six-pointed star shapes and dried in a slow oven. These, it turns out, are the favorite of our exchange student.
This year presents the wheat/egg/dairy free challenge. Rather than start by adapting recipes, I hit the Internet, looking for German gluten free (GF) sites. Bingo! My hunch was right: even Germans with health issues were not going to do without their Christmas cookies! The Vanillekipferl turned out lovely without eggs and flour (I don't consider butter dairy, since it's pure fat). There were other surprises: I didn't expect much of Elisenlebkuchen, those delicately chewy gingerbread made with honey, orange peel and ground almonds, but they turned out to be the best of the bunch, chewy and tart with their lemon icing. But I thought Marzipanhoernchen would behave, since they're mostly marzipan with a few eggs to bind. Clearly egg replacer doesn't make the grade on these: they absolutely lost their shape. I saved them by slicing the thin, bubbling mess into squares before it cooled, then drizzled the squares with chocolate (no sense wasting all that marzipan!). I can always pretend I intended them to come out that way.
It does help to think out of the box, even--or especially--when dealing with tradition. One hot August day back in our student days in Freiburg, I went into the community kitchen in our dorm to bake up some chocolate chip cookies. I was writing my thesis, and really needed some of those gooey bundles of home (together with a tall glass of cold milk) to feed my muse. In waltzed a fellow student (pre-law), asking what I was doing. When I told him I was baking cookies, he looked puzzled, then alarmed, and stated with Teutonic authority, "but it's not December!"
Nope, they're not the way Oma made them, but they're just right for right now.
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