These German Christmas cookies are gluten-free and have a wonderfully airy, crunchy texture. They’re easy to throw together and pair well with hot chocolate, tea, or coffee. If you’d like a keto-friendly version, simply replace the sugar with monkfruit or Swerve.
On the Ingredients
- Hazelnuts come from the Hazel tree, which grows in the Northern Hemisphere. Humans have been enjoying hazelnuts for at least 8,000 years, as evidenced by a Mesolithic pit filled with burned hazelnut shells found on Colonsay Island in Scotland. Today, hazelnuts are used in many confections, their buttery flavor pairing well with chocolate, coffee, cream, and other ingredients. Hazelnuts are highly nutritious, full of healthy fats, and high in manganese, vitamin E, copper, thiamin, and magnesium. (Read more about hazelnuts.)
Haselnussmakronen (Hazelnut Meringue Cookies)
Prep time
15
minutesCooking time
30
minutesTotal time
45
minutesThese German Christmas cookies are gluten-free and have a wonderfully airy, crunchy texture. They’re easy to throw together and pair well with hot chocolate, tea, or coffee. If you’d like a keto-friendly version, simply replace the sugar with monkfruit or Swerve.
Ingredients
2 cups hazelnuts
2/3 cups white sugar or monkfruit sweetener for keto
2 egg whites
Directions
- Put the hazelnuts on a cookie sheet and bake at 325° for 10 minutes.
- Once they cool down, rub the flaky skin off and discard.
- Set aside 1/2 cup of whole nuts and grind the rest in a food processor until you have hazelnut flour about the size of coarse cornmeal.
- Measure out 1 1/2 cups of ground hazelnuts and store the rest in an airtight container.
- Preheat oven to 325° F.
- Whip the egg whites until foamy, add the sweetener in three parts, whipping between. Whip until stiff peaks form, and the meringue is shiny.
- Gently fold in the 1 1/2 cups of ground hazelnut until fully incorporated, but don’t over stir.
- Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Using a soup spoon, make small cookies, about 2 tablespoons each, the dough will not spread when cooked. Top each cookie with a whole hazelnut—bake for 20 minutes.
- Remove them from the sheet and cool on a wire rack.
