18 DECEMBER 2020
OBSESSIONSN THE SCORCHING Australian summer of 1982, when
the weather reached a record-breaking 105°F in Sydney,
three catastrophic events occurred that promised to
explode my four-year-old brain and ruin Christmas: Big
Bird stopped speaking German, our Christmas deco-
rations melted straight off the tree, and our holiday
cookies suffered untold casualties from the heat.
Six months earlier, my parents and I had emigrated from the
storybook Bavarian Alps in Germany (where my grandfather
yodeled and wore lederhosen for real) to the working-class
suburbs of western Sydney. It was physically and culturally as
far away from my hometown as you could get, but to my parents,
Australia was the promised land of opportunity, sun, beaches,
and cute marsupials.
A few months later, a single shipping container of our belong-
ings arrived that held, among other things, our trusty Grundig
television, traditional Christmas wax figurines, and cookbooks
filled with nostalgia. We used those books to try and re-create
a taste of our German homeland that summer, but I remember
hating everything.
I was traumatized that the cast of Sesame Street now spoke
a language I didn’t understand (it was a German TV!), that angels
could actually burn from the tree, and that dough could catch
on countertops like sticky tar. But we pushed on. With a spray
bottle of water MacGyvered to a pedestal fan to cool us, my
pregnant mother and I stood in our tiny, furnace-like kitchen
and baked gingery lebkuchen whose chocolate glaze melted,
coconut macaroons that went chewy from the humidity, andvanillekipferl that wouldn’t stay cold
long enough to roll into perfect
crescents.
There was one cookie that with-
stood the hellish Australian heat,
though. One cookie to rule them all:
the spitzbube. The dainty little brother
of the jammy linzer, the spitzbube is a small slip of a thing that
can be hoovered down in just two bites. Literally translated as
“cheeky boy” (and nothing to do with ladies, as its phonetic
pronunciation might suggest), the cookie is Swiss in origin, but
given a shared border, the style was adopted by southern Ger-
mans. Typically a round butter-cookie sandwich with fluted
edges, the top half of the cookie contains a cutout to reveal the
glossy jam inside.
It is the cookie that all the women in my family have baked
for generations, and I baked those cheeky boys with my mother
and sister every year, always using the same recipe and same
raspberry jam. But they especially sparked joy that perilous first
Australian Christmas Eve, a particular treat after our dinner
fondue, which made both our insides and outsides sweat. By
year two, we figured out what all Aussies know to be true about
Christmas—it is best spent at the beach eating cold ham, prawns,
and chilled mangoes, while getting sand in your bathers.
Holiday baking connected me to my heritage—to the grand-
parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins we left behind. When I
moved out of home at age 22, I continued turning out batches
every December, sharing the bible of ’buben with colleagues
and friends.
In my early thirties, as a more confident cook having worked
in food magazines for a decade, I boldly experimented with my
spitzbuben. I tried different nut flours, spices, and jams. I cut out
star shapes and heart shapes and square shapes instead of round
shapes. I went completely off-piste and made mini versions of
Deb Perelman’s extraordinary pretzel linzers with salted caramel
filling from her book Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant
and Unfussy New Favorites, a salty-sweet success.
And yet, the biggest revelation by far in the years of experi-
mentation was using browned butter in the dough. It affords
the cookies such a robust potency. Match that with the intensity
of cardamom, plus a jam like apricot or cherry, and you have a
cookie to stop folks in their tracks. It is my favorite version.
Now that I am based in the U.S., I’m back to baking spitz-
buben in a climate that is more conducive to working with
pastry at Christmastime. I live closer to my Bavarian relatives
than I have in decades but far away from my Australian family.
No matter, though—we’re all baking spitzbuben this Christmas.
The cookie will still connect us.I
The dainty
little brother
of the jammy
linzer, the
spitzbube is a
small slip of a
thing that can
be hoovered
down in just
two bites.