Punschkrapferl

The first time I saw Punschkrapferl, I was about seven years old, standing on my toes to peer into the glass case at a Konditorei in Salzburg. They were the pinkest things I'd ever seen. Gretel bought me one and I bit into it expecting something sweet and gentle, the way pink things usually taste when you're seven. What I got was rum. A lot of rum. My face must have been something, because Gretel laughed so hard she had to sit down.

Punschkrapferl are one of the great secrets of Viennese cuisine, and they tell you everything about how Austrian bakers think. Nothing gets wasted. You take your cake scraps, your Biskuit trimmings, the odds and ends left over from a day of baking Torten, and you crumble them up with apricot jam and cocoa. Then you soak the whole thing in a rum punch so strong it could strip paint. You shape them into little cubes or rounds, glaze them in that unmistakable pink fondant, and put them in the Konditorei case like they were born that way. Nobody seeing them for the first time would guess they began as leftovers.

This is thrift dressed in its best clothes. The pink is traditional, the rum is not optional, and the apricot jam running through the center is what keeps the whole thing from being just a sugar bomb. In my grandmother Eva's kitchen, Gretel would make these around Christmas, though any Viennese Konditorei sells them year-round. She'd soak them until they were almost dangerously boozy, then line them up on a rack to glaze. The kitchen smelled like a rum distillery for days. I loved it.

Don't be intimidated by the steps. Each one is simple. The technique is assembly, not architecture. You're building small, delicious things from honest ingredients, and the payoff is a tray of shocking pink confections that taste like nothing else in the world.