Crescent Cookies or Kiflice are the most versatile pastry in Western Balkans cuisine. There are countless raised dough and pie crust dough recipes with various savoury and sweet fillings including: cheese, poppy seeds, chocolate and various fruit jams. Crescent cookies can be tender and incredibly soft or hard and crumbly. I would dare to say that they are perhaps the most common pastry made in any household.
One of the ground rules, we established long time ago at our household, is to avoid going on a road trip without our own, homemade sweets. Over the years we simply realized, that fast food stores and coffee shops lined along the major highways, are not worth considering. Everything is prepackaged, made by third parties, dry and tasteless, either too greasy or too sweet, or both. The only way to find something decent, is to visit some of small artisan bakeries, but they are usually located out of the way in city centres. Baking our own seemed the only sensible way to go. The fruit jam crescent cookies are ideal candidate and we like them a lot with our coffee or tea.
My wife has a great recipe for soft, savoury kiflice with cheese filling, but more about that coming in one of the future blog posts.
This time I made crumbly crescent cookies filled with plum jam, walnuts and some also with a grape jam. They were both delicious! Sweet crescent cookies hold well if stored in a sealed container, at room temperature; I would say easily more than couple of weeks. Regrettably they never last that long with us.
Since this recipe doesn’t contain any dairy or animal based fat we also like to bake these cookies for our family Slava St.Nicholas.
The recipe has been adapted from Maja’s blog.
| Prep Time | 2 hours |
| Cook Time | 20 minutes |
| Servings |
pieces
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- 1 cup beer
- 1 cup vegetable oil
- 4 cup pastry flour
- 1 cup all purpose non bleached flour
- 15 g vanilla sugar
- 250 g fruit jam
- confectioner's sugar for dusting
Ingredients
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|
- Whisk together flour and vanilla sugar in a medium size mixing bowl.
- Add beer and vegetable oil to the mixture, knead until a soft dough texture is attained.
- Using a pastry bench scraper divide the dough into 10 pieces, each weighing approximately 120-125 g.
- With the palm of your hand, flatten the first ball and then use a rolling pin to roll out the dough to approximately 20 cm (8") diameter.
- Using a pizza cutter or a sharp knife cut the stretched dough round into 8 equal sections.
- Put a teaspoon full of jam at the bottom, at the flat side of each cut triangle.
- Take each corner of the triangle's bottom, pull the dough over the jam and press ends together, sealing the joint and creating a closed pocket with jam.
- Roll the dough towards the top of the triangle, creating a cylinder. Curve the cylinder ends gently into a crescent shape and place on a parchment paper lined baking sheet, seam down.
- Repeat the same with other 9 dough balls.
- Bake at 200 C (392 F) in pre-warmed oven, rack in the middle, for 15-20 minutes or until the crescent edges start to appear a light golden brown. Don't let cookies brown completely, they should remain light coloured.
- Add approximately two cups of confectioners sugar into a medium size mixing bowl. Roll hot crescent cookies in the sugar right after taken from the oven while they are still hot. The cookies should be coated generously since there is no sugar in the dough!
- Cool the cookies on a wire rack. Store in a sealed container at room temperature.
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