When we were resting in Greece, they brought a box of kurabie. Insanely delicious, like all the sweets we bought there. I have never eaten such delicious delight anywhere else. So, we liked the kurabie so much that she began to look for a recipe. They were all somehow strange. By the composition already, it was clear that it was not right. One, nevertheless, decided to try. It turned out to be with a huge amount of sugar, had to be adjusted. It turned out similar. Not exactly what they bought, but very close (perhaps due to the fact that the almonds were not too finely ground). I will still experiment, I want to be ideally close.

Products:

butter 210 g
icing sugar 180 g
egg yolk 1 pc.
cognac 1 tbsp. l.
flour 350 g
almonds 50 g
baking powder 0.5 tsp.
orange liqueur (orange)
powdered sugar for dusting

Preparation:

Grind the almonds to a crumb state.

Beat butter with powdered sugar.

Add yolk, beat.

Pour in cognac, beat until smooth and fluffy.

Mix half the flour with almond crumbs and baking powder. Combine the flour mixture with the butter mixture, knead the dough, adding the rest of the flour until the dough stops sticking to your hands.

Cover a baking sheet with parchment, lay out balls of dough the size of a walnut (15g).

Bake at 180 * 20-25 minutes.

Cool the finished cookies completely, sprinkle with orange tincture, roll in powdered sugar.

Curabiedes are the most delicate almond biscuits baked and eaten by Cypriots at Christmas.

The name comes from a Turkish word and a similar cookie called kurabie.

A distinctive feature of the Greek kurabiedes from their Muslim brothers is that they are abundantly sprinkled with powdered sugar, and a clove stick is inserted into each cookie on top ( γαρύφαλλο ).
This tradition has religious roots and symbolizes one of the gifts of the Magi to Jesus. Well, at the same time, carnation flavors the curabiedes and gives them charm.

Curabiedes

Making up a sweet Christmas couple with, curabiedes repeats the same approach to cooking. Quite a bit of sugar is put into the dough itself, but after baking, the cookies are well rolled in powdered sugar. The result is an unusual nutty sweetness.

There are a lot of recipes, as always, and here are the ingredients you can choose to your taste:

First, butter. It may be regular cow's, but sheep's butter will give the liver an authentic taste.
Yes, it happens.

In the original from nuts, preference is given to almonds ( αμύγδαλα ), but there are recipes with walnuts ( καρύδι ) and with pistachios.

As an alcoholic drink, you can take cognac, brandy or rum. Or maybe you like the aroma of mastic or ouzo liqueur.

From spices, you can add vanilla, cloves and cinnamon.

If you find rose water, it will turn out just like the Cypriots.

Rose water (secondary distillate, rose hydrolat) - an aqueous solution of rose essential oil components; cosmetic and aromatic product with a pronounced scent of rose flowers. Rose water is obtained by steam distillation from essential oil hybrid varieties of roses (Rosa damascena Mill., Rosa gallica L. and others) and is a secondary product in the production of rose essential oil.

Allow the liver to cool slightly before deboning in powder, otherwise it may fall apart in your hands.

You can form balls and flattened balls, as well as various other shapes to your taste.

Like melamacarona, curabiedes can be stuffed with different fillings. There is no need to limit your imagination.

Recipes

Stavros adds olive oil and lots of spices

Akis, this time cooks in Greek and uses sheep's butter

Well, a video in Russian

Princess Amidala loves almonds.

Kurabiedes cookies are usually baked in Greece on New Year's and on Christmas Day, which is celebrated there on December 25th. It is customary to sprinkle it abundantly with powdered sugar, so that in a box or on a festive plate, these cookies look just like under a snow-white sugar blanket.

Please do not confuse it with Turkish kurabie cookies. Their names are similar, but they are baked according to different recipes and for different reasons.

Advice:

• Almonds are best prepared and chopped in advance, this is the longest process in making these cookies. Or if there is an opportunity to buy it immediately ground, but not;
• Take the oil out of the refrigerator in advance so that it is at room temperature;
• If you want to cover the cookies with a sugar blanket, it is best to prepare 2 cups of powdered sugar.

	Curabiedes recipe with pictures
	First you need to prepare the almonds. To do this, pour 200 grams of almonds with boiling water, hold it for 5 minutes and peel it
	Spread the peeled almonds on paper towels and dry. You can dry it for 5 minutes in a hot oven. You can just wait until it dries by itself.
	Dried almonds must be chopped in a blender.
	Butter, grind with a glass of powdered sugar and beat.
	Separate the yolk from the protein and add this yolk to it while beating the butter.
	Add flour, chopped almonds, vanilla sugar, baking powder and mix well.
	Roll the dough into a 3-4 cm wide sausage, cut into pieces of the same length and roll a ball out of each piece. Press a whole almond into the middle of the ball.
	Either grease a baking sheet or use parchment paper, place the cookies at a distance of about 3 cm from each other. Place in a baking sheet preheated to 180 degrees. Bake for 15-20 minutes
	Take out, cool, sprinkle with powdered sugar.

No, no, this is not an oriental kurabye, which is sold in Russian bakeries and markets. These are other cookies, much tastier.
Round snow-white cookies, exhibited in the bright showcases of all Greek grocery stores, without exception, attract the glances of passers-by. One such "snowdrift" is fraught with as much as 180-200 calories, but it is impossible to resist the temptation and not eat it!

At home, we can easily prepare this New Year's delicacy, lay it out traditionally (in a similar way) and please our loved ones with it.

Ingredients

• butter - 400 g,
• vegetable margarine - 100 g,
• icing sugar -100 g,
• yolk -2 pieces and 1 whole egg,
• vanilla powder -2 pcs.
• nutmeg (powder) - ½ tsp,
• cognac -1/3 cup,
• soda - 1 tsp,
• almonds 250 g,
• flour 850 g,
• icing sugar - up to 1 kg.

Preparation

Beat butter at room temperature with about 100 g of powdered sugar until a thick white foam. This is one of the main conditions for making delicious kurabi, the longer we beat, the more airy it will turn out. It will take us about 15 minutes to get the best result.



Add 1 egg and 2 yolks, as well as soda diluted in brandy.





We knead the dough, we knead it with our hands.



Brown the peeled almonds in a frying pan without oil or on a baking sheet, on parchment paper, in the oven at 160 degrees for 15 minutes. If the almonds are unpeeled, then boil them for 5 minutes in hot water, cool them cold, now the peel can be removed very easily.



Chop almonds coarsely and add to the dough. You can also make kurabiye with whole almonds by placing it in each cookie.



We sculpt curabiedes. We tear off a small piece from the dough, knead it in our hands like plasticine and make small balls. Then we press down a little from above, so that such barrels would turn out. You can sculpt kurabiedes in the shape of a crescent.



Line the baking sheet with parchment paper and lay out the kurabie. We bake at 160 degrees for up to 30 minutes.



As soon as the curabiedes is browned and cracked, it is ready. Remove from the oven and let cool.



Put the first layer of cookies on a large plate, sprinkle generously with powdered sugar, sifting it through a strainer. Then put the next row and sprinkle again. And so every time.



Here's what we got.

Advice... Kurabies quickly absorbs moisture, so it must be stored in a closed container.

Winter kaleidoscope 28.01.2019

Dear readers, our blog contest is coming to an end. Let me remind you that it runs until January 27, 2019. And I am publishing the latest contest articles. We will summarize soon. Follow the news.

Today Elena Meteleva from Greece is with us. We meet her article, which participates in the category "New Year and Christmas Delicious". This is her second entry. The first article received a huge response. And today Lena will tell us about how kurabi is cooked in Greece. I give the floor to Lena.

Dear readers, we continue to join the Greek holidays. As promised earlier, in this article I will talk about other traditional Greek treats. Let's start with the recipe for New Year's kurabie.

For some reason, they are also baked only during the Christmas and New Year holidays. At other times of the year, these cookies are rarely seen anywhere. It is no less aromatic than melomakarona, but in its own way.

Greek kurabiye recipe (Κουραμπιέδες)

For the test we need:

• 250 g butter,
• 150 ml. vegetable oil (any, I take our olive),
• 150 g almonds,
• 2 doses of vanilla powder
• 1 stack. powdered sugar
• 50 ml. ouzo (Greek aperitif)
• 1 tsp soda without a slide,
• About 1 kg of soft flour,
• Powdered sugar at the end for sprinkling.

Remove the butter from the refrigerator beforehand to warm and soften. Then mash it with a spoon and start pouring in vegetable oil, whisking the mass with a whisk or mixer until smooth.

Brown the almonds in the oven at 160 degrees. Enough, if it turns golden, you do not need to fry too much. Then chop or knead in large pieces.

Add vanilla powdered sugar, a glass of ouzo and soda mixed in a little water to the oil substance.

Then everyone will shout - where can I get you ouzo and what is it in general? Ouzo is a Greek grape aperitif with a sweet anise scent. It adds freshness and sophistication to the flavor of the cookie. If someone is worried about alcohol, it will evaporate, only the aroma will remain. But in the absence of ouzo, you can take some kind of strong liqueur or just brandy, mastic liqueur or tincture is well suited.

Gradually add pre-sifted flour to the butter mass and knead a soft dough. Add the toasted almonds last.

Further, everything is quite simple. Bring the oven to 180 degrees. Place the cookies on a sheet or baking sheet covered with baking paper. You can sculpt it simply with your hands, making small balls. Or just roll out the dough about 1 cm and cut out the kurabie with any shape, traditionally it is a crescent moon, I once made stars and other figures.

Bake for about 20 minutes, until light golden brown. It is very easy to check the readiness of kurabiye. Take out one cookie and break it in half with a fork. When it's ready, it lends itself easily and will crumble.

After baking, leave the cookies to cool slightly. Greek housewives sprinkle cookies with rose water, which is specially sold in supermarkets, before rolling the kurabiye in powdered sugar. I do not do this. It is convenient to put the powdered sugar in a bag, add a little vanilla there, and "bathe" in the powder for 2-3 cookies. So it is evenly covered with powder.

Then put the kurabiye beautifully on a plate and it will create a festive mood in your home! And there will always be something to treat guests to tea.

Once upon a time, our relatives, after slaughtering a pig, gave us a jar or two of melted fat. I must say that he perfectly replaced butter in the kurabiye recipe! The feather got a different scent, but no one guessed what was the matter.

Lenten kurabiye. Recipe

And now the recipe for kurabye in a lean version.

• 250 ml of vegetable oil
• half a glass of red wine
• 5 tbsp Sahara,
• zest of 1 lemon,
• 0.5 kg. flour with baking powder,
• 1 tsp cinnamon, 1 vanilla,
• several pieces of Turkish delight,
• powdered sugar for sprinkling.

Sift flour into a bowl. In another container, mix oil, sugar, zest, wine, spices. My mixture of olive oil, spices and red semisweet exuded such an aroma that I understood why this niece calls the cookies "monastery".

Gradually add flour and knead the plastic dough, it is necessary that it is well molded.

Lokum is a sweetness similar to marmalade in powdered sugar. There is a wide variety of flavors in Greece, you can take any. But if there is no Turkish delight, it's okay - take a thick jam, or you can stuff the kurabiye with almonds or raisins to your liking.

Insert the pieces of Turkish delight into the middle of the cookie and form a ball. Bake in the same way as in the previous recipe, and sprinkle with powdered sugar in the same way.

Finally - the recipe for the Greek holiday cake Vasilopita.

Vasilopita's Festive Pie

Actually, this is almost an ordinary cupcake and there are a million recipes for basilopita. But it is always round in shape, lush and very tasty, and without it, the New Year is not celebrated in Greece.

I give the recipe more as an example, this year I baked basilopita just for it.

• 300 grams of butter
• 400 gr. Sahara,
• 3 eggs,
• 150 ml. orange juice
• 150 ml. milk,
• 350 gr. flour,
• 100 g chopped almonds
• 50 gr. mashed walnuts
• 20 gr. lemon zest
• 20 gr. orange peel
• 20 gr. baking powder
• 2 gr. salt,
• 25 ml of Amaretto liqueur.

Cooking basilopita

Sift flour into a bowl and mix it with loose ingredients - nuts, zest, salt, baking powder.

Beat the softened butter and sugar with a mixer. As you continue to beat, toss in the eggs one at a time. Then pour in milk and juice, and after that gradually add flour. At the end, pour the liquor into the resulting mixture and beat a little more.

Pour the dough into a prepared mold with a diameter of about 26 cm. Bake in an oven preheated to 150 degrees for about an hour.

To make the cake become cornflower-seed, after 35-40 minutes after the start of baking, take out the cake and put the fluri, a lucky coin wrapped in foil, into it. If you do this at the beginning, the coin will sink to the bottom.

The finished cake should be left to cool and then decorated to your liking. I had the finished chocolate frosting and leftover almonds that I laid out in 2019.

On New Year's Eve, by 12 o'clock in the Greek house, everything has already been eaten, and everyone is waiting for midnight. Exactly at 12 in the house the lights are turned off for a minute, and then they wish each other a Happy New Year, hug and kiss. At the same time, on the street, we hear the sounds of fireworks - one of the neighbors will definitely turn on funny lights.

After that, the owner of the house, according to tradition, cuts the cake, having previously made a cross on it with a knife. The first cut piece is for Christ and the Mother of God, then for the house and fields, then for the owner of the house, the hostess, the children and one by one to all the guests. Whoever finds fluri in his slice will be lucky for the next year!