Soren in the team loves tea cookies, and since his birthday is approaching, I have been experimenting with tea cookies. I am so happy with the result that I want to share the recipe with you who follow the blog.

Søren loves the classic cookies with wheat flour – but when we gather for a birthday here in Nørre Snede, there are almost always some of the guests who prefer a gluten-free variant. That's why I'm sharing a recipe here that can be used both with regular wheat flour and with a gluten-free base of almond flour and oat flour. Personally, I'm a wheat flour fan. type-of-mad, but both versions taste good, so you can't go wrong here.

Ingredients

• 150 g soft butter
• 100 g cane sugar
• 100 g brown sugar
• 1 egg
• ½ teaspoon organic vanilla powder
• 200 g grated marzipan
• 225 g flour (wheat or a combination of almond and oat flour)
• ½ teaspoon salt
• The zest of a grated lemon
• The juice from half a lemon
• Birkes to turn the cookies in

Flavor variation and alternatives
Grate the zest of 1 organic lemon and mix it into the sugar before stirring it into the butter.

Procedure

Grate the zest of 1 organic lemon and mix it into the sugar before stirring it into the butter.
Beat together butter, cane sugar and brown sugar until the mixture is light and fluffy.
Add eggs and vanilla, and mix well.
Fold the grated marzipan into the dough.

Mix the dry ingredients in a separate bowl: flour (oat and almond flour or wheat flour), baking powder and salt.
Gently fold it into the dough until it is uniform.

Form the dough into small balls the size of a tablespoon. Place them in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours, preferably overnight, to set and become completely cold.
Take the dough balls out, shape them slightly flat into cookies (we prefer about 4–5 cm thick), and turn them into birkes so that both the top and sides are covered.

Baking

We bake the cookies refrigerator cold* to get a more solid and chewy result.
Bake at 175°C for about 9–11 minutes, until the edges are set but the center is still soft.
Let the cookies cool on a rack.

* A little reminder
If you want thick, soft cookies, bake them when they are still cold from the refrigerator.
If you want thinner, crispier cookies, put them in the oven straight from room temperature.

Tip
The dough can be rolled into balls and stored raw in the freezer. That way, you'll always have birch cookies ready to bake when the craving strikes.