Dotterbusserl (Egg Yolk Kisses)

In my grandmother Eva's kitchen in Deal, the Christmas baking started in late November and didn't stop until the tins were full. Gretel would be there, of course, and together they'd work through the Weihnachtsbäckerei list: Vanillekipferl, Kokosbusserl, Zimtsterne, anything that needed stiff egg whites beaten into glossy peaks. By the second afternoon, the little bowl of leftover yolks by the stove would be threatening to overflow. Eva would look at it and say, "Gretel, the Dotterbusserl." And Gretel would nod like they'd been waiting for this moment all along.

Dotterbusserl are what a good Viennese baker makes when she has egg yolks to use and no patience for waste. The trick, and this is the part most people outside Austria don't know, is that the yolks go in hard-cooked and pressed through a sieve. Not raw. You boil them, push them through a fine mesh until they look like golden sand, and work them into the butter and flour. The result is a cookie with a texture you can't get any other way: short, tender, almost powdery on the tongue, dissolving into pure butter and vanilla before you've finished chewing. A raw yolk gives you richness. A cooked yolk gives you that and a crumb so fine it feels like it was never solid to begin with.

They're small cookies. Two bites at most. You sandwich them in pairs with a thin layer of Marillenmarmelade, apricot jam, and dust the tops with Staubzucker. They sit in a tin for a week and get better every day as the jam softens into the crumb and everything merges into one thing. Gretel always said the best Weihnachtskekse are the ones that taste better on Christmas Eve than they did on the day you baked them. Dotterbusserl prove her right.