Each holiday season when I was little, my grandmother made platters of cookies for her doctors, friends, and family. When she could no longer bake cookies, my mother took on the task. My mom made Viennese crescents that tasted just like my grandmother’s using a recipe from the Fannie Farmer cookbook she’d received as a wedding gift in 1945. As an adult in the 1990s I tried to replicate the cookie. I failed miserably. Mine were formless blobs rather than the elegant crescents I remembered. A few years ago, I succeeded, creating something that gave my cousins and me a taste of our childhood.
Recently I attended a party introducing a new baby to his community of family and friends. Guests were given a goodie bag filled with cookies shaped like little boys.
I realized that the cookies had been made using a cookie press, something I’d always been too intimidated to try. These cookies reminded me of one my grandmother used to bake. I had always wanted to make them but didn’t have a clue how. I recall a narrow cookie with a pattern on top, which had one end dipped in chocolate. I didn’t have a recipe. After I described the cookie to my friend who had baked the baby cookies, she said she believed the cookies had been made using a pastry bag rather than cookie press, another baking skill I’d never tried to tackle.
Perhaps I never learned to make such fancy cookies because my mother never baked anything that required equipment. Perhaps she had been intimidated too. Or didn’t want to spend the extra time and effort shaping cookies.
I looked through my cookbooks and recipe cards for a likely recipe, not knowing what the cookie was called. Unsuccessful, I turned to the internet. I looked up Viennese cookies but all that came up were recipes for the Viennese crescents I already knew how to make. Then I searched using phrases to describe them, like “piped shaped Viennese cookies”. After a few tweaks to the wording, recipes for Viennese Whirls and Viennese Swirls came up. They were piped but usually made into sandwich cookies. I was on the right track! I had always thought of them as finger shaped and when I typed in “fingers”, several other recipes popped up. All the recipes I found were from the U.K. I guess Americans don’t make this cookie. I finally settled on Mary Berry’s Viennese Fingers.
After finding the recipe, I went shopping for pastry bags and tips. I watched piping videos, but had trouble finding one to show me the most basic thing – how to correctly put the tip in the bag. After consulting with a friend who is a professional baker, I finally had the courage to jump in. The first batch tasted great but much of the dough seeped through edges of the bag, ended up in blobs, or stuck to the inside of the bag. But it was a good first attempt.
I shared the best-looking cookies at a meeting a few hours later. One woman there is from Scotland and recognized them as Viennese Fingers! Success!!! I’d like to think my grandmother would be proud.
Early attempts at Viennese Fingers. At this point mine are more like acorns, but perhaps in a few more attempts they’ll look the way I remember.