Markus Zusak’s Vanillekipferl Recipe
An author’s tribute to baking
This is a first for us! Although we love featuring our favorite cookbook authors, we’ve never before featured an author’s dish from a work of fiction. But when the folks at The Book Club Cookbook recommended this Vanillekipferl, how could we say no? In addition to working it’s way into Zusak’s The Book Thief, the recipe for Markus Zusak’s Vanilla Kipferls, aka Vanillekipferl, appears in The Book Club Cookbook, an entire tome dedicated to recipes from great books and authors.
What’s so special about Vanillekipferl?
Why was this particular cookie significant enough for Zusak to highlight? This is how he explains it:
Growing up in the southern suburbs of Sydney, Australia, my family was a small oddity; our last name wasn’t Smith, Jones, or Johnson. Even as kids, we knew that our parents—who had immigrated separately from Germany and Austria—had brought a whole different world with them when they came to Australia. This was often felt most around Christmas, when we celebrated on Christmas Eve as opposed to Christmas Day. We cooked up weisswurst and leberkase and rouladen, with kraut and potato salad, and everything happened in the night.
The other memory I have of that time, of course, is the sweet things. For starters, my mother would make colossal gingerbread slabs and fashion them into houses. Sometimes her construction work was sound. Sometimes it wasn’t.
Us kids would decorate the houses with icing and lollies that ranged from smarties (like M&M’s), freckles, crunchie bars, and jaffas. The jaffas always went along the top, on the ridge. Sometimes small pretzels also found their way onto those rooftops, and it really was the time of our lives, especially given that we felt deprived all year of these things! Of course, we loved it when the houses collapsed as we decorated them—it just meant that they had to be eaten immediately . . . so there was always plenty going on at our place around Christmas.
Next to the gingerbread houses, the accompanying ritual was the making of Vanillekipferl. This is technically the wrong plural—in German there’s no s on the end—but I’ll go with the English version here. As a child, I remember making the mixture and taking clumps of it and rolling it into a long sausage. We would then chop it into the sizes we wanted and make them into horseshoe shapes.
Of course, these cookies were always best made on cold days, which can be hard to come by in Australia around December. Still, that’s what I do now. As soon as there’s a cooler day in the lead-up to Christmas, I start making Vanillekipferl. For the first time this year, I made them with my daughter, who just turned four. That’s the other good thing about this recipe. Kids can easily get involved. The ingredients are minimal, and if you destroy a cookie or two in the dough-making, it doesn’t matter. You just squash it up and try again.
The only warning I offer apart from choosing the right day to make them is that no matter how well you make these cookies, they’ll never taste as good as your mother’s. It’s just the way it goes.
Love this Vanillekipferl recipe? Try these icing cookies, too!

Markus Zusak’s Vanillekipferl
Ingredients
For the cookies
- 1 ¾ cups all-purpose flour
- 1 1 /4 cups hazelnut meal see note
- 2/3 cup granulated sugar
- 14 tablespoons 1 ¾ sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
For the vanilla sugar
- 1/3 cup confectioners’ sugar
- 1 –2 whole vanilla beans cut crosswise into 1-inch pieces (see note)
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350°F. Spray two baking sheets lightly with cooking spray.
- To make the cookies: Combine the flour, hazelnut meal, and granulated sugar in a large bowl. Cut butter into 1/2-inch pieces and add to flour mixture. Using your fingers, mix butter and flour thoroughly for 8–10 minutes, until a soft dough is formed.
- Pinch off small pieces of dough and mold gently between your palms to form 3-inch ropes, thicker in the middle and tapered at the ends. Fashion each piece into a crescent shape and place onto the prepared trays, leaving a generous 1/2-inch in between (they do spread a little and grow in size when cooked).
- Bake the cookies one tray at a time for 10-12 minutes, until the bottoms and edges just start to turn golden brown. Let the cookies rest on the baking sheet for 1 minute before transferring to a cooling rack.
- While the cookies are resting, mix the vanilla and sugar for the coating. Carefully coat each cookie in the sugar before returning to the cooling rack to cool completely. Store in an air-tight container.
Notes
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