Christmas

It’s Cookie Exchange time! First I would like to thank Carol of Just Let Me Quilt for organizing it again. This is my favourite blog hop of the year, and I never really have enough time to join many blog hops but this is the one I try not to miss. I started working on my project in July this year, knowing that with my health issues I would need extra time. And for once I actually finished with lots of time to spare. No last minute night shifts for me this year.

And once again, I have a German cookie recipe. (For previous entries, check German Butter Cookies in 2018, Hazelnut Cookies in 2019 and Mandelsplitter in 2020.) This time I made Vanillekipferl. I think this is as German as it can get. Or maybe Austrian. Because I started thinking about the name. Vanille means vanilla, and Kipferl means the crescent shape of the cookies. But Kipferl is not a very German word, in fact these cookies are the only context I could think of. So I looked it up, and it turns out that it is Austrian which makes perfect sense. Yes, they speak German in Austria but they have different words for some things that the average German does not understand. And Kipferl fits right in there. I also found out that the recipe originated in Vienna, so it isn’t even German at all. But they are delicious and one of my favourites for Christmas.

In Germany, the four weekends of Advent leading up to Christmas are a big thing, and we traditionally started baking on the first weekend. In most years that’s the last weekend in November. My mother is a fabulous baker, and she made lots of Christmas cookies but she stored them all in safe places and we didn’t get to eat most of them until Christmas. She needed them for another very German tradition: “Bunter Teller”. It literally translates to “colourful plate” and means a plate full of cookies, chocolates, nuts and other delicious goodies. I have three siblings, and each of us would receive their own plate as an additional Christmas gift, and nothing on that plate needed to be shared. If you have siblings, you know how special that is. If you would like to know more about this tradition, check out this post by German Girl in America. She explains it in detail and with pictures. We used to have some of those coated cardboard plates with Christmas images that she shows, and I got all excited seeing these vintage paper plates. Exactly how I remember it.

In our house we don’t believe in waiting until Christmas because there is always so much food anyway, and it feels like you are eating constantly. So we start eating our Christmas cookies as soon as we make them, nibbling one or two with our coffee in the afternoon. There is always enough left at Christmas, and when our son comes home, he will happily make more, especially if most of his favourites are already gone.

A few words of caution/disclaimer: This is a German recipe. Germans measure only liquids by volume, solid ingredients are measured by weight. And everything is metric, of course. With the help of the internet I have provided the imperial measurements but there is no guarantee these are correct… it’s the internet after all. So if a number looks suspicious to you, please double check the math.

Click to download Vanillekipferl recipe

And once again I have come up with a Christmas mug rug design. I am always super busy towards the end of the year, not only with longarm quilting but I also have to finalize the new BOM project for next year, and I always send out handmade Christmas cards. A few years ago I started designing next year’s Christmas card right away and always buy the fabric in December, thinking this would take the pressure out of the last minute rush. And then I put everything in a drawer, forget all about it, and suddenly it’s November, and I haven’t worked on my cards at all. At least I don’t have to scramble to come up with a design and run out to buy fabric but it still takes up a lot of my time in November and early December. So in July I decided I could count on Carol running the Virtual Cookie Exchange again and started drawing Christmas designs. This year I played with holly leaves and came up with two designs that I liked. I couldn’t decide which one I like better, so I kept them both. The pattern is ready to go and will be published next week. Here is a little preview, and I am also giving away three digital copies of the pattern (English/Imperial measurements only). If you would like to win one, please leave a comment and enter the giveaway. Entries will be accepted until Sunday (December 12, 2021, 11.59 PST), and I will announce the winners on the following Wednesday and email the patterns. Please scroll down to the end of the post for giveaway rules and guidelines.

Comment moderation is turned off for today to make it easier for you to enter the giveaway. But please don’t leave your email address in the comment text. It is not necessary to do so, and the spam protection software will kick in and not publish your comment, so it will have to be moderated after all. I will be happy to manually publish it but please keep in mind that I am in the Pacific time zone and will still be asleep when this post publishes.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Thank you for visiting today, and please make sure that you visit all the participants of this blog hop and look at their fabulous projects and mouthwatering cookies. Here is the full schedule of all four days of the event.

Giveaway Rules and Guidelines

Please take the time to read them.

• • You must leave a comment to enter the giveaway. If you don’t leave a comment, your winning entry will be ignored and cancelled.
  • You are only allowed to enter once.
  • The winners will be announced either on Wednesday, December 15 or Thursday, December 16, 20201
  • You must give a valid email address when you enter the giveaway. Any email returned to me loses the ability to win automatically.
  • I will email the digital patterns to the winners right away. Please check your spam folders if you are announced as one of the winners and didn’t receive an email. Especially Gmail likes to send anything I send straight to the spam folder. If you have a Canadian address with Shaw or Telus, they are even worse and often reject my email address without notifying me or the recipient.
    
  • No purchase whatsoever is necessary.
  • You must be 18+ in order to win a gift.
  • All winners are chosen at random.
  • All winners will be announced on the blog via the Rafflecopter entry form and a post. All winners must allow for their first name and first initial of their last name to be announced on this blog.
  • Odds of winning a prize are based on the total number of rafflecopter entries.
  • This giveaway is void where prohibited by law.

Welcome to the last day of the Virtual Cookie Exchange Blog Hop 2020, and a big thank you to Carol of Just Let Me Quilt for organizing it again. I wish I could join more blog hops but with my main business being longarm quilting I simply don’t have the time. But I didn’t want to miss the Cookie Exchange, this is my 3rd year, and I love all the delicious recipes and Christmas projects that are being shared.

Once again I will be sharing a German recipe. After German Butter Cookies in 2018 and Hazelnut Cookies last year, I am going with Mandelsplitter this year, a German chocolaty delight that requires no baking. The name translates to “slivered almonds”, and they come in all kinds of variations and are very popular in Germany. I have been making these for 30 years or so, and somehow the recipe got lost during our move to Canada. I was sure I had scanned and saved every recipe I wanted to keep but this one was nowhere to be found. Not a big problem, I remembered the amounts of chocolate and almond slivers and how to put it together.

I have to back up a bit here and admit that I don’t like to cook at all, and baking is only marginally better. It’s not that I can’t do it, I am just not loving it. I love eating though… 😀 Anyway, my husband loves to cook, and he is quite good at it, you can actually taste the love he puts into his creations. Both he and my son belong to those people who religiously follow every step in a recipe and carefully measure out each required amount. I on the other hand believe that these amounts and instructions are only suggestions which sometimes leads to tension in the kitchen, especially when my husband tries to write down one of the recipes that I have only in my head, and I can’t give him proper amounts and just say “as much as you need”. This also applies to the Mandelsplitter recipe because I honestly don’t know how much butter and honey I use. Somewhere between one and two tablespoons, I start out with one and add more when the almond slivers look too dry. Anyway, we made them last weekend, and they are delicious, even with my eyeball measurements. The taste of roasted almonds with a hint of caramelized honey, all covered in chocolate… yum!

A few words of caution/disclaimer: This is a German recipe. Germans measure only liquids by volume, solid ingredients are measured by weight. And everything is metric, of course. With the help of the internet I have provided the imperial measurements but there is no guarantee these are correct… it’s the internet after all. So if a number looks suspicious to you, please double check the math.

Click to download Mandelsplitter recipe

Quilting for others cuts into my own sewing time, and this year has been especially crazy with everybody cooped up at home, producing quilt top after quilt top. So in between getting them turned around as quickly as possible and trying to come up with a new BOM design for 2021 I did manage to make another Christmas mug rug called “Reindeer Romp”. The pattern is ready to go and will be published next week. Here is a little preview, and I am also giving away five digital copies of the pattern (English/Imperial measurements only). If you would like to win one, please leave a comment and enter the giveaway. Entries will be accepted until Monday (December 7, 2020, 11.59 PST), and I will announce the winners on Wednesday and email the patterns. Please scroll down to the end of the post for giveaway rules and guidelines.

Comment moderation is turned off for today to make it easier for you to enter the giveaway. But please don’t leave your email address in the comment text. It is not necessary to do so, and the spam protection software will kick in and not publish your comment, so it will have to be moderated after all. I will be happy to manually publish it but please keep in mind that I am in the Pacific time zone and will still be asleep when this post publishes.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Thank you for visiting today, and please make sure that you visit all the participants of this blog hop and look at their fabulous projects and mouthwatering cookies. Here is the full schedule of all four days of the event.

Giveaway Rules and Guidelines

Please take the time to read them.

• • You must leave a comment to enter the giveaway. If you don’t leave a comment, your winning entry will be ignored and cancelled.
  • You are only allowed to enter once.
  • The winners will be announced either on Wednesday, December 9 or Thursday, December 10, 2020.
  • You must give a valid email address when you enter the giveaway. Any email returned to me loses the ability to win automatically.
  • I will email the digital patterns to the winners right away. Please check your spam folders if you are announced as one of the winners and didn’t receive an email. Especially Gmail likes to send anything I send straight to the spam folder.
  • No purchase whatsoever is necessary.
  • You must be 18+ in order to win a gift.
  • All winners are chosen at random.
  • All winners will be announced on the blog via the Rafflecopter entry form and a post. All winners must allow for their first name and first initial of their last name to be announced on this blog.
  • Odds of winning a prize are based on the total number of rafflecopter entries.
  • This giveaway is void where prohibited by law.

Thank you so much, Carol, for hosting the Virtual Cookie Exchange once again. I have collected so many interesting cookie recipes during this blog hop, I will be busy for years trying them all out! I have only been living in North America since 2013, and German Christmas baking is very different from North American Christmas baking. And while I enjoy trying new recipes, our Christmas baking is still mostly German, and I will be sharing another of my favourite German recipes.

Today’s recipe is called “Haselnussblüten” which literally translates to “Hazelnut Blossoms”. They do not look like real hazelnut blossoms though, just flower shaped cookies with ground hazelnuts in the dough. Ground hazelnuts and almonds are staples in German Christmas baking, and while I can get ground almonds at the grocery store here, I have trouble finding ground hazelnuts for my baking. There is a store in Vancouver that carries them but it took a while to get used to having to drive 100 km for some ground hazelnuts. The recipe calls for ground cinnamon and cloves, just a pinch of each. I usually add more. It really depends on what you like, and I love the taste of cinnamon. (I also double the amount of spices I put into my pumpkin pie, not just cinnamon but also ginger and cloves.) Feel free to add more or less, depending on what you like. The original recipe also calls for some hazelnut glaze that you can buy at German grocery stores. I have never seen anything similar here, not even at the German deli, and we substitute semi-sweet chocolate for it which works just fine. My husband is usually the one who decorates the cookies, and he has developed his own system of how to use the liquid chocolate to glue the hazelnut to the cookie which always makes me laugh.

A Christmas tradition that I very much appreciate is baking cookies together with my son. I started getting him involved as soon as he could stand, guiding his little fingers with the cookie cutters, and we made cookies together every year. He turned 20 this year and is in his third year at the University of British Columbia. He will be coming home next week, and I really enjoy that he still wants to bake cookies with me… and not just eat them 🙂

A few words of caution/disclaimer: This is a German recipe. Germans measure only liquids by volume, solid ingredients are measured by weight. And everything is metric, of course. With the help of the internet I have provided the imperial measurements but there is no guarantee these are correct… it’s the internet after all. So if a number looks suspicious to you, please double check the math. Another difference are North American ranges. Having to choose between “bake” and “broil” doesn’t really translate to German full convection ovens. So please keep an eye on the cookies and decide for yourself if they need longer or are done faster in your oven than required by the recipe.

Click to download German Hazelnut Cookies recipe

Being a longarm quilter, this is my busy season, so I haven’t had a lot of time for working on my own projects. But I came up with a little mug rug design that I call “O Christmas Tree”. The pattern will be published next week, here is a little preview. And I am also giving away five digital copies of the pattern. If you would like to win one, please leave a comment and enter the giveaway. Entries will be accepted until Sunday (December 8, 2019, 11.59 PST), and I will draw the winners on Monday and email the patterns. The patterns will only be availabe in English and with Imperial measurements. This is my first time hosting a giveaway with Rafflecopter, and I hope it all works as planned. If there are issues, please be patient and let me know, and I will try to fix them ASAP. Please scroll down to the end of the post for giveaway rules and guidelines.

Comment moderation is turned off for today to make it easier for you to enter the giveaway. But please don’t leave your email address in the comment text. It is not necessary to do so, and the spam protection software will kick in and not publish your comment, so it will have to be moderated after all. I will be happy to manually publish it but please keep in mind that I am in the Pacific time zone and will still be asleep when this post publishes.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Thank you for visiting today, and please make sure that you visit all the participants of this blog hop and look at their fabulous projects and mouthwatering cookies. Once again here is the full schedule of all five days of this event.

Giveaway Rules and Guidelines

Please take the time to read them.

• • You must leave a comment to enter the giveaway. If you don’t leave a comment, your winning entry will be ignored and cancelled.
  • You are only allowed to enter once.
  • The winners will be announced either on Monday, December 9 or Tuesday, December 10, 2019.
  • You must give a valid email address when you enter the giveaway. Any email returned to me loses the ability to win automatically.
  • I will email the digital patterns to the winners right away. Please check your spam folders if you are announced as one of the winners and didn’t receive an email. Especially Gmail likes to send anything I send straight to the spam folder.
  • No purchase whatsoever is necessary.
  • You must be 18+ in order to win a gift.
  • All winners are chosen at random.
  • All winners will be announced on the blog via the Rafflecopter entry form and a post. All winners must allow for their first name and first initial of their last name to be announced on this blog.
  • Odds of winning a prize are based on the total number of rafflecopter entries.
  • This giveaway is void where prohibited by law.

We all probably have some childhood memories that make Christmas special, and as funny as it sounds, skinning almonds is one of mine. I have always found it fascinating that blanching almonds in boiling water loosens the skin and that you can squeeze them out after they cool down. Of course we didn’t just quietly squeeze them out of their skins back then, my brother, my sister and I shot them all across the kitchen and at each other until my mom intervened. To this day it doesn’t feel like Christmas until I am skinning almonds, and it will probably not surprise you that these cookies are always the first I make each year. They are rather simple butter cookies but sometimes less is more, and these taste amazing. If you find my way of decorating them with just some egg yolk and an almond too boring, you can decorate them any way you please, of course.

A few words of caution/disclaimer: This is a German recipe. Germans measure only liquids by volume, solid ingredients are measured by weight. And everything is metric, of course. With the help of the internet I have provided the imperial measurements but there is no guarantee these are correct… it’s the internet after all. So if a number looks suspicious to you, please double check the math. Another difference are North American ranges. Having to choose between “bake” and “broil” doesn’t really translate to German full convection ovens. So please keep an eye on the cookies and decide for yourself if they need longer or are done faster in your oven than required by the recipe.

Click to download German Butter Cookies recipe

Wir haben vermutlich alle Kindheitserinnerungen, die unzertrennbar mit Weihnachten verbunden sind. Und so lustig sich das auch anhört, zu meinen Erinnerungen gehört das Schälen von Mandeln für die Weihnachtsbäckerei dazu. Ich fand es schon immer faszinierend, dass sich die Schale ablöst, wenn man die Mandeln mit kochendem Wasser übergießt, und man die Mandeln dann ganz einfach herausquetschen kann. Natürlich haben wir als Kinder die Mandeln nicht ruhig und gesittet herausgequetscht, mein Bruder, meine Schwester und ich haben sie mit Freuden durch die ganze Küche geschossen und versucht, uns gegenseitig zu treffen, bis meine Mutter genug hatte und dem Ganzen ein Ende setzte. Bis heute ist das Gefühl von Weihnachtszeit für mich mit dem Schälen von Mandeln verbunden, und daher dürfte es niemanden verwundern, dass diese Plätzchen immer die ersten sind, die ich backe. Es sind relativ einfache Butterplätzchen, aber weniger ist manchmal mehr, und diese sind wirklich lecker. Und wem meine Variante zu langweilig ist (sie werden nur mit Eigelb bestrichen und mit einer Mandel belegt), darf gerne die Dekoration nach Herzenslust variieren.

Butterplätzchen Rezept Download

Und zusätzlich zum Rezept gibt es von mir auch noch ein vorweihnachtliches Geschenk, das im weitesten Sinne auch mit der Weihnachtsbäckerei zu tun hat. Als ich mich für diesen Blog Hop angemeldet habe, erschien plötzlich ein Lebkuchenmann vor meinem inneren Auge. Der hat sich dann in meinem Kopf eingenistet und auch noch eine Lebkuchenfrau dazu eingeladen, und ich habe die beiden in Mug Rugs verwandelt und sie Ginger und Fred genannt. Die Anleitung ist bis Sonntag zum kostenlosen Download verfügbar. Am Montag zieht sie dann in den Shop um. Das gibt dann auch denjenigen eine Chance, die in der Woche keine Zeit haben, von Blog zu Blog zu hüpfen. Ich wünsche allen eine schöne (Vor)Weihnachtszeit und danke für’s Vorbeischauen.

And I also have a little virtual cookie Christmas gift for all of you. When I signed up for this blog hop a vision of a gingerbread man popped into my head. And he made himself at home in there and also invited a gingerbread woman, and I turned them both into mug rugs and called them Ginger and Fred. The pattern is available for free download until Sunday, I will move it to the shop on Monday. This way people who don’t have time during the week to hop from blog to blog will also have a chance to download the pattern. Have a great holiday season and thank you for stopping by today.

Edit: Ginger & Fred moved over to the store and are available for purchase now, if you missed the free download.

Edit: Ginger & Fred sind in den Shop umgezogen. Wer den freien Download verpasst hat, kann sie dort noch erwerben.

Click to purchase Ginger & Fred pattern (English/Imperial)

(Kauf)Anleitung Ginger & Fred (Deutsch/Metrisch)

And once again the full schedule of the Virtual Cookie Exchange Blog Hop 2018: