Traditional Heidesand Cookies - German Shortbread made with browned butter ✪ MyGerman.Recipes

In today's video I want to show you how to bake the classic German Heidesand cookies. For the Heidesand cookie recipe today we will need 375 gram of flour, one teaspoon of baking powder, some salt, two to three tablespoons of milk, 250 gram of butter, 200 gram of sugar and two teaspoons of vanilla sugar. And if you don't know what vanilla sugar is or if you don't know how to make it you will find a video up here and I explain it all in that video. If you don't have vanilla sugar and want to bake it right away you can just use some of your vanilla extract. I start with melting the butter and I want to not just melt I also want to brown it. So I put this in a saucepan and turn the heat on and simply let this melt. Here you can see that the butter has melted and so what I want to do now is I want to kind of boil it for as long as it takes until the butter turns into a brownish color. Here you can see now this butter is getting brown. It took a while so you need a little bit of patience with that. There's a lot of foam here so I'm not sure if you can really see it very well. So yeah yeah there you go. So you see the color has completely changed to a darker color and I want this now to cool again. For that I will remove it of course from the heat and I will fill it into a different container and let it cool on the kitchen island for a little bit and then I will put it into the fridge and let it stay in the fridge until the butter is firm again. So if you want to bake these cookies I would advise you to prepare the butter like in the morning and then later in the day when the butter has become solid again start the baking process. Here you can see the butter now is solid again and now my next step I want this butter to become fluffy again. So this goes into my mixing bowl now and I will whip this for like half a minute before I can add the other ingredients. You can see here this is nice and creamy now. I'll put this aside and you've probably noticed that this recipe comes without any eggs which is rather uncommon when it comes to cookies. So if you have a sweet tooth and you want to have some of your cookie dough you can have it because there is no eggs in there. Now I'm mixing the flour and the baking powder. I'm also adding a little bit of salt and I am mixing the vanilla sugar into the regular sugar. So you can take two or maybe three teaspoons of the vanilla sugar. Okay so I'm switching to this attachment now and I'm adding some of the sugar and some of the flour and I'm slowly starting to mix this. And I'm adding again some flour and some of the sugar and I'm also adding a little bit of the milk and the remaining flour and sugar comes in now. And the smell of this dough is the typical smell that you have with these cookies of the brown sugar. It's a very specific kind of smell when you brown the butter. So it's a very specific smell of brown butter and that's what I smell here. It smells very nice. Probably needs a little more of the milk. Okay so this needs to become quite sticky so I can make a dough from this. Let's mix it one more time. Okay let's see. Yeah that's good. So you can see I can stick this together and it keeps its shape. I can even press it a little bit without it completely falling apart. You have to check with the milk how much milk this needs for the dough to become sticky and not too wet. So I put in there like I would say two and a half tablespoons. You might need more or less depending on the flour that you're using. Yeah and now I have to shape this and knead this a little bit with my hands. Let's take this all out. And it looks like sand, right? So the name Heidesand. Heide is actually a place in Germany. Actually there are two places there called Heide. One is a little town and the other one is an area south of Hamburg. And I'm not sure to which of these places this refers. Both places have sand so the town is near the northern sea and the place that is south of Hamburg is a very interesting place too. It's something where people travel to just to see certain flowers bloom and stuff like that. Okay now I'm dividing this into two parts and I want to shape two thick rolls. And the diameter should be about well let's say a little more than an inch or three centimeters. Still refusing to stick here a little bit. So if your dough is falling apart and won't shape you can add a little more milk to it. Sometimes that's necessary. And see this looks nice but here I can see it's not sticking as I want it to. Okay this is the first one and I'll do a second one. And these strings will go into the fridge then to become firm so I can cut them better for the individual cookies that I'm gonna cut out of these strings. Yeah okay so I put this on this board and now it goes into the fridge. And I will check this in between and see if they have become firm enough to be cut. And then I will continue with the next step. The dough has been in the fridge now for roughly I would say an hour. And the dough is now I wouldn't say it's super firm but it's firm enough to cut slices of it. So I will start let me even the first one here. And these slices should be like I would say that's a quarter of an inch from the size. And I put them on my baking sheet and I just started to preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit or 180 degrees Celsius. And I will cut all these cookies now and put them on the baking sheet. Yeah and now these cookies go into the oven and the baking time depends a little bit on the size of your cookies. So I would say roughly between 15 and 20 minutes. Yes and this is what the cookies look like in the end when they are baked. So I took them out once I saw that they become a tiny little bit brownish on the rim and that showed me that they are ready to be taken out. And what you should know about baking cookies in general is that once you take them out they continue to bake a little bit. So don't always let them in the oven until you think they look perfect because they continue to bake outside of the oven. If you want your cookies to be not too dry and brittle then it's a good idea to take them out earlier. And that's what I'm doing here. I think these cookies are super delicious. I hope you like them too. My favorite way to eat them is with a good cup of tea. And yeah maybe you try this on a cold fall or winter's day. They're also great in summer but I think they are best in wintertime before Christmas. So if you like this video please give me a thumbs up, follow me on the social media and on this channel. And thank you for watching. Please stay tuned for the next video.