Swiss Style Onion Tart

 

I was recently on a baking kick and was determined to find an onion tart recipe similar to the one my grandfather used to make. Though I ave not found a perfect match just yet, and I likely never will, this tart was delicious and very quickly devoured. The dough is a little finicky to work with, but that could also be my lack of experience with making pie and tart crusts. This tart filling is delicious and you could cheat and use store bought dough or a pie shell. I made this without bacon and I still love it. Feel free to use Gruyere cheese if you have it readily available, otherwise a Swiss cheese (like Emmental) will work as well.

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Spitzbuben (Swiss Butter Cookies with Jam)

Spitzbuben are a typical Swiss cookie which is usually baked around Christmas time. The consist of a buttery cookie base and are filled with jam. My favorite jam for this cookie is raspberry jam, but feel free to use apricot, quince, blackberry, or any flavor you love. These cookies are an easy hit and look beautiful too. You can serve them with or without a sprinkle of powdered sugar. My dad always prefers his plain, but the powdered sugar makes it look more festive. To me this cookie is not particularly just a Christmas cookie since it doesn't have an ingredients which shout "Christmas!" (no nutmeg, no cloves, no cinnamon...). But a traditional Swiss family will make sure to stock their cookie tins with these come December. Clearly I am behind schedule, but trust me, you will love these regardless.

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Duchesse Cookies

This recipe comes from one of my mother's Swiss Betty Bossi cookbooks. The cookbook is solely dedicated to baking cookies and is full of mouthwatering pictures. Even though the recipes in this book are old (this book was published in 1978), they always seems to produce great results. Betty Bossi is kind of like the Martha Stewart meets Betty Crocker of Switzerland. I think every Swiss household has at least one Betty Bossi cookbook in their possession.

This recipe usually creates a cookie that looks pretty different from mine. The cookie is meant to have a chocolate filling that gets sandwiched between cookies. The cookies are also supposed to be piped into the shape of a meringue kiss, so you end up with a three dimensional cookie. I rushed these a bit too much and hastily spooned my batter onto cookie sheets/ sure enough, they turned out flat, but they still tasted amazing. My family prefers these without the chocolate and has these cookies with tea or coffee. If you're trying to make a more elegant cookie, add the chocolate filling. I also apologize that I didn't remember to convert the gram measurements into cups, so hopefully you can get your hands on a scale.

(photo from the cookbook- the intended shape)

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Mailänderli (Swiss Lemon Butter Cookie)

Mailänderli are typically a Christmas cookie in Switzerland, but that has never made much sense to me. They're buttery, lemony, and don't have any "Christmas" flavors in them (no cinnamon, allspice, ginger, etc...). My mom has always made them year round and I've come to consider them more of a shortbread alternative. I actually forgot they were meant to be a Christmas cookie until I found the original recipe link and read the description there.

These are the perfect cookie to have with tea or coffee. They're crispy and make a great dunking device. What I love about these is the lemon flavor. I find most traditional shortbread cookies kind of boring, but the lemon zest and heavy dose of butter in these makes for a great flavor combination.

This dough makes LOTS of cookies. I ended up with over 5 dozen, but it's really hard to gauge how many average sized cookie this dough would make since mine were all bizarre shapes and sizes. I especially loved the bite sized mini cookies I baked. They vanished within they first day since they were so easy to snack on every time I walked by the kitchen. If you don't want tons of cookies, feel free to cut this recipe in half. Otherwise you can roll out your cookies and freeze the ones you don't want to bake right away. Just make sure to add a little more baking time if you take the cookies out of the freezer.

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