7. Meeting: Baking German Christmas cookies

This time I joined my sister Katrin and her each one teach one partner Evelina again on their meeting. We decided to cook the German Christmas cookies called “Vanillekipferl”, which are my favourite Christmas cookies in Germany. Therefore we met at Evelina’s apartment in the early evening of the 30.11.2016.

For the “Vanillekipferl” we at first had to make a dough out of sugar, flour, butter and powdered almonds. Thereby we realized that the Finnish way of measuring things is completely different to how we do it in Germany. In Finland, Evelina told us that everybody is using dl, when measuring something. However in Germany we always use grams or kilograms for everything. Yet we were able to convert our recipe right from grams to dl, which ways quite difficult at the beginning.

Afterwards the dough has to be formed like a half moon with your hands, which could take quite some time. However with three pairs of hands it was much faster than only with one pair. While forming the cookies we talked about Christmas in Finland. Evelina told us that they usually bake pipari for Christmas and also build a house out of ginger bread, which they decorate. This also differs from the German Christmas traditions, because we usually bake 10 or more different Christmas cookies at home.

When the Christmas cookies were finished, we put them out of the stove and dusted them with powdered sugar. Afterwards we sat at the table and were talking and enjoying the delicious cookies, which really reminded me of home. Evelina also told us about some good places to go sledging, because this is also on our to-do-list before we are heading back to Germany. There were quite many possibilities in Tampere. Thereafter we talked more about sport in Finland and Evelina explained us that they for example had to learn ice skating at school, which I think is really cool. Besides she also told us that in winter, when it is really cold they are flooding football fields with water. This water freezes and you can go ice skating there. It would be really cool to go ice skating there for one time before my departure.

After talking a little bit more and eating half of the cookies, we headed back home – full and happy. It was really nice to show Evelina our Christmas tradition and through this a nice evening.