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Sand Cookies
2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 2 teaspoons cinnamon mixed with 4 tablespoons sugar cup blanched almonds Mix as sugar cookies; roll; shape with doughnut cutter; brush with water or white of egg; sprinkle with cinnamon mixture. Decorate with halves of almonds. Bake in a quick oven. + cup butter cup sugar 2 eggs 2 teaspoons baking powder
A rolled butter cookie in the German Sandtorte family, cut in rings and finished with cinnamon sugar and almonds. The proportions here are unusually terse, so a few of the quantities need judgement.
- "Mix as sugar cookies"Cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then work in the flour sifted with the baking powder. Chill the dough at least an hour before rolling; a soft butter dough dragged straight onto a floured board will spread and lose the ring shape.
- Ambiguous quantitiesSeveral of the measures have lost their fractions: the butter, the sugar in the dough, and the almonds are all given simply as "cup". For 2 cups of flour and 2 eggs, something around a half cup of butter and up to a cup of sugar would be plausible, but the original does not say so.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons appears twice in the text. Two teaspoons total for 2 cups of flour is right; do not double it.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. At that heat, cookies rolled about a quarter inch thick will need roughly 7 to 9 minutes, and they should be pulled while the centres are still pale.
- Doughnut cutterA ring cutter, cutting an outer round and punching the centre in one motion. A 2 1/2-inch round cutter with a bottle cap or small cutter for the hole does the same job. Bake the punched-out centres alongside.
- Egg white versus waterWhite of egg gives a glossier surface and holds the cinnamon sugar and almonds far better than water. Brush thinly; a heavy coat sets to a hard, glassy film.
- Blanched almondsBuy them blanched, or drop whole almonds into boiling water for a minute and slip the skins off. Split them lengthwise with a small knife while still warm and damp, before they dry and shatter.
- YieldAbout three dozen rings from 2 cups of flour, depending on cutter size.
The name is generally traced to the German Sandgebäck tradition -- Sandtorte, Sandkuchen, Sandplätzchen -- where "sand" describes the short, dry, crumbling texture that comes from a high proportion of butter and, in the older versions, cornstarch or potato flour standing in for part of the wheat. Cookbooks published in the northern United States around 1900 include cookies of this type, usually with a plain wheat flour blend, the name kept, and a cinnamon-sugar finish. Lowney's Cook Book is often said to have been issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston as a promotional volume for its chocolate and cocoa, and a rolled cinnamon cookie of this kind would have been thoroughly familiar to its readers.