Vanilice

The story

Vanilice, vanilla cookies, are among the standard small cookies of Serbian home baking. Each one is a small sandwich: two rounds of short dough, often made with ground walnuts and flavored with vanilla and lemon, joined with apricot jam and rolled or dusted in powdered sugar. The Belgrade daily Danas traces them to the Austro-Hungarian krancle, called grancle locally, which appeared in the late 19th century as Christmas and New Year cookies. The Austrian original was made with butter and left a hollow on top to show the filling; Serbian cooks switched to lard and closed both halves over the jam. Older recipes still call for homemade lard. A grandmothers' recipe printed by Večernje novosti uses 200 grams of lard to 400 grams of flour and 100 grams of ground walnuts, with the cookies baked for 15 minutes. The Balkan food blog The Balkan Hostess finds them at every special occasion and holiday table. Danas notes that they taste even better after a few days of rest. Bake them two or three days before a party, and dust them with fresh powdered sugar just before they go on the plate.