The dough starts out almost like a pie crust, except it involves equal parts butter and cream cheese - the cream cheese makes the dough more tender and gives it a lovely tart and creamy note. It comes together in no time and all and you can use a food processor to make this part of the process even quicker. Chilling it after mixing is important, to give the flour a chance to properly hydrate and the fat to solidify so it maintains its structure through rolling and baking.
After the dough is chilled for 2 hours or overnight, cut it in quarters and shape it into discs. Ideally, you'd rolls this out into an even circle, but honestly perfection is not needed here, the cutting and rolling process is quite forgiving and the cookies will look wonderful even if they're not perfectly even in size.
Here's where the magic comes in though - the dough doesn't get rolled out on a floured surface like any old cookie, but rather on a mix of nuts and sugar (cinnamon and lemon zest optional). This gets embedded into one side of the dough as it rolls out and coats it in flavor and texture. Don't worry too much if the mixture ends up on the top as well as you move the dough around and the rolling pin picks up some of the sugar-nut mix, but keep it on the same side as you roll it all the way out to a ~10" circle. The dough will be quite thin, but keep it as even in thickness as you can.
Cut the circle of dough into 16 triangles, like you'd cut a pizza (in half, then quarters etc to ensure roughly even slices) - you can see in the picture above an example. Then, take each triangle and roll it from the short edge towards the opposite tip as you would a regular crescent roll, with the nut encrusted side on the outside and the (nearly) plain side on the inside. Repeat with the remaining 3 discs, you should end up with 64 little cookies ready to bake.
Place these close together in a pan, I like to use parchment or a silicone mat to ensure easy cleanup. They don't grow a lot in the oven, so in a standard cookie sheet pan I usually fit 32 of them, two rounds in the oven total.
Bake in preheated 350F oven for 12-14 minutes until baked through and slightly golden on the bottom. They won't take on a lot of color when baking, so keep that in mind as you judge when they're done. Enjoy warm or cooled.
German Crescent Cookies
Ingredients
- 300g flour
- 200g butter
- 200g cream cheese
- 60g sugar
- 60g brown sugar
- 60g ground hazelnuts
- 1 tsp cinnamon (optional)
- lemon zest (to taste, optional)
Method
- Knead a smooth dough from the flour, butter and cream cheese.
- Wrap in cling film and put in the refrigerator for at least two hours or better overnight.
- Mix both sugars, ground hazelnuts, cinnamon and lemon zest in a bowl.
- Preheat oven to 350F. Prepare two cookie sheets with either parchment paper or silicone mats.
- Take the dough out of the refrigerator, quarter it and shape it into balls.
- Sprinkle a little hazelnut-sugar mixture on your work surface and start rolling out one of the dough portions on top. Move around as needed to ensure it doesn't stick/the coating is everywhere under your dough. Keep rolling into an even thickness until you get a 10" disc.
- Cut into 16 parts (like a pizza) and roll up into crescents.
- Place on a baking sheet and bake in the preheated oven for 12-14 minutes.
Notes
- I often skip the cinnamon and lemon zest, especially when I want the flavor of the nuts to really shine through. You can also use other spices and adapt the recipe to your taste.
- You can use any nut flour/ground nuts you prefer. Almonds and pecans work really well.
- The recipe is easy to scale up and down as needed, just make sure the amount of dough you roll out into a 10" disc is roughly the same as the original recipe.
- These cookies freeze really well, and they keep in a covered container at room temperature for several days.
