And today, on highly cooking's Christmas around the world, Siris, we're headed to Germany or Deutschland, as I think they call it there.

I don't know.

We're gonna make cinnamon stars or zip stone, which are perhaps one of the most unusual cookie recipes that I have ever made.

So I'm really excited to share them with you.

It's like a meringue with almonds and cinnamon and lemon, and it's really quite interesting.

And I think you're going to love it, Winston.

All right.

For the cookie dough, I use that word loosely.

We've got two egg whites here, and we're gonna beat these up until they're fairly stiff.

Uh, when you're doing egg whites, you like the enemy of fluffy egg whites is oil or grease.

So make sure that your bowl on your beater is super clean, and you can even, like, wipe it out with a little bit of vinegar.

If you're worried, there might be some oily residue.

So we're gonna start this some kind of ah, medium low just so we don't split her egg all over the place.

Um and then when it starts to get a little foamy, I'm gonna add in some lemon juice.

Okay, so once that starts to look like this, a little bubbly.

I've got some lemon juice and some lemon zest, and I'm gonna add those in.

And the acid in the lemon juice is also gonna help the egg whites make nice firm peak.

And we're gonna let this go until it's at a medium stiff peak, and that'll take a few minutes on high.

And I'll show you what that looks like when we get there.

Okay, I'm gonna check it.

I think it looks media me.

OK, Yeah.

So you can see when you lift up your beaters.

If the meringue in the bottom of the bull makes a little bit of a peak kind of follows the beaters and then flops over bloops.

See, it went like up and then m tired.

So that's good.

That's a medium stiff.

And now it's got some powdered sugar and cinnamon and I've sifted these well, knighted and set the cinnamon.

But I have sifted the powdered sugar so we wanna have this kind of on a low speed.

Just you don't like spray cocaine powder everywhere.

Kidding.

It's better sugar and limits cannot add this gradually, a little, little tam.

If you were doing this with a hand mixer as opposed to a stand mixer, you just add a little bit and then mix it up and then add a little bit more and then mix it up with a stand mixer.

It's a little more streamlined because you could just do it like this.

So once you've got it in there, just wanna scrape on the sides to make sure all the sugars in there you could see this meringue has kind of fallen a little bit from the sugar, but it's still very thick.

So now all that in there, we're just gonna beat this on high again until we get a really beautiful, shiny, thick meringue and I'll show you what that looks like.

When we get there, it'll take a few more minutes on high.

Mmm.

Okay.

So just check it periodically.

I could see that the beaters were starting to leave.

Ah, streak through the meringue.

So there we go.

Okay.

We're getting really close now.

Let it go a little bit longer, okay?

Beautiful.

Okay, So it's not gonna make, like, a stiff peak because of the sugar and everything.

But can you see how it's?

It's sort of almost making ribbons when you lift the the beaters up and then you get left with this little streaky peek hole.

Streaky peak.

Um, try to show it to you a little better.

See that in the center there.

See how the beater is.

Just sort of hanging like a little still at.

Right.

OK, now we're gonna take some of this meringue and set it aside.

That's gonna be like the topping for our cooking.

So I'm just actually gonna you wantto many third of a cup for half a cup.

All right, so that's about enough.

We'll set this aside, and this is gonna be like a little meringue icing.

So I've got some almond meal or almond flour.

This is already like, pre ground up almonds.

If you want to grind your own, I put directions for doing that on my website.

Um, I prefer to use the almond meal just cause it's more, uh, consistent consistency on dhe.

So we're gonna add about 1/2 a pound of this.

You don't really need to be delicate with it because we're trying to get it stiff enough to roll out.

So it's okay if you pop your air bubbles.

Okay, so once you've got a doe that is like this, it's still fairly soft, and it's just chock full of healthy nuts.

It's little greenie and Sandy, I'm gonna put this in the fridge now for an hour up to a couple of hours, that's really important.

Or else you're just gonna, like, go crazy trying to flatten it out.

So, um, cover it with plastic or something and just stick it in the fridge and then I'll show you how to roll now.

Okay, so my dough has been in the fridge for a while.

It's still quite soft.

That is okay.

And if you want to just work with half of it at a time to, that's totally fine and probably recommended.

All right, so I've got a sheet of parchment here and a piece of wax paper on top of that, and you just wanna you could use a rolling pin.

Sometimes it's easier just to use your hands, but you want to flatten it out, too.

Maybe 1/3 of an inch or what Is that like, a little less than a centimeter.

Nick looks good.

We'll peel that off.

And if you find that it's sticking to your paper, you can Sprinkle a little bit of almond meal or powdered sugar down, um, to me, help with that a little bit and I've got a little star cutter.

I'm sure you could use another shape, but I'm gonna do this.

Try to be proper, and if it does that you can lift it out and poke it over here.

But really, the reason I'm doing it on parchment paper is because the dough is so delicate.

Sometimes the the shapes get distorted.

When you try toe, move them so it's actually working really well right now.

But if it's not popping out in your cutter like this, then at the end you could just pull away the excess and your cookies are already on a pressure, and then you can just transfer that right to your baking sheet waken transfer this right to our little baking sheets and they're all in crazy positions.

But that's okay.

It's like a constellation.

Okay, so then we're gonna spread these with a little bit of our meringue.

A small, uh, new paintbrush would probably work better.

But all my paintbrushes have temperate paints all in him Tempera paints.

So you just wanna coat the top as much as you can try to get all the little edges.

And the cool thing about this dough is that it's naturally gluten free.

So if you're cooking for anyone with, you know, sensitivity or celiac or anything, these are something that you could make for them.

And because of that, you can reroll the scraps indefinitely.

So the stuff that I just pulled away from these cookies I'll put back in the fridge and let it chill again for another 30 minutes or so and you couldn't roll out and cuts more cookies, no bigs.

In the first few times I made these, it really took me.

Ah, few tries to get this recipe right.

So don't be discouraged if the first time you make them your does too soft to roll and cut, you can totally just make little round blobs and decorate them the same way, and they won't look as cute, but they'll still be tasty.

Okay, so once they are all coated with your meringue, you could bake him now.

But I'd like to make him a little bit dance your and I've got some just sliced almonds here.

You can kind of decorate him.

However you want for this particular star shaped cutter like to do a little kind of a cross in the middle.

So once they're all decorated, put these in a very slow oven to 75 for about 25 minutes until the tops of them rings air set, but not actually turned brown.

And then take him out and let him cool completely on the cookie sheet way.

Okay, so 25 minutes later, he's air are beautiful.

Zips turn.

So the meringue is still white, but you can see around the edges of the cookies.

The bottom edges are a little bit brown.

So there they're good and they smell cinnamon and delicious.

I'm gonna let them cool completely on the tray.

Then we'll be ready to eat them just like that.

Okay, the cookies have cooled off.

Let's see how beautiful they look.

They're like little snow capped mountains for this recipe in principle form, as well as tons of other recipes and the easiest way to ask me questions about recipes.

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Right.

There you go.

There is how to make Everyone has a wonderful holiday season and all you all night time.

Thanks for watching.

Bye.