I am hoping to make some family favorite cookies (my great grandmother’s recipes) for Christmas—after examining the recipes, they are both variations of Puff Pastry. These are German recipes called “star cookies” and “book cookies”.
The Star Cookie recipe uses buttermilk, flour, and vanilla made into a dough and then layered with butter. It doesn’t use the dough package method, but rather, has one roll out the dough, and put a layer of butter on it, fold, more butter, then fold, more butter until it can’t be folded. This is done twice.
The Book Cookie recipe is more perplexing, it uses almost identical proportions of water, butter, vinegar (or I would substitute lemon juice) and flour to traditional puff pastry, but it also has sugar and 1 egg. I understand the sugar would prevent gluten formation—in which case, would I be better to use ap bleached flour instead of unbleached? I am not fully sure of how the egg would affect the pastry. I am thinking of omitting it since Rose does not include it with her recipe. Any thoughts on this?
