Sugar & Spice VANILLARINGS: SEE NEXT PAGE FOR RECIPE

VANILLA RINGS

Every Danish family has a recipe for these little vanilla wreath cookies. The dough has to be quite cold to work with in order to achieve the ridges on the final cookies, but it can be quite tricky to extract the dough from the piping bag. I tend to use a large piping nozzle and press the dough through with my finger, one at a time.

MAKES ABOUT 30

• 170g caster sugar
• 200g butter, at room temperature
• 275g strong white flour
• 100g ground almonds
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 egg
• A pinch of salt
• Seeds from 1 vanilla pod
• A strong piping bag and a medium star nozzle
• Baking sheets, greased and lined with baking parchment

1. Mix the sugar and butter (only briefly until just combined), then add the remaining ingredients and mix until you have an even dough (you can do this in a food processor or by hand). Do not over-mix. Your dough needs to be soft enough to push through a piping bag nozzle. It is a hard dough – in Denmark, most people use a metal case to push the dough through the nozzle. A fabric piping bag is also good. If you find it really hard but have a good-sized nozzle, you can simply push the dough through with your thumb.

Pipe out the dough into 8–10cm-long pieces, then carefully connect into circles and place on the prepared baking sheets. Make sure