These are fragile and buttery and easy to pipe because the dough is rather firm. The dough is also fine for putting through a cookie press if you have one. These cookies don’t need to be finished off with anything before or after baking, but you can dust them lightly with cocoa powder, sprinkle them with sprinkles, or place a quarter of a candied cherry, an almond slice, or a chocolate chip (flat side up) in the center of each before baking.

I owe the trick of imparting extra flavor to the cookies by using honey-roasted peanuts to my friend and mentor Maida Heatter. They add so much to the flavor of these cookies that I I can’t imagine preparing them with anything else.

Fragile and delicate in the extreme, these cookies are a labor of love to make because you need to bake them one pan at a time on the middle rack of the oven. If you have a double oven, start to bake another pan a couple of minutes before the first pan is ready to come out. These spread best on a bare buttered pan; brush the pans with very soft but not melted butter. If you don’t mind cookies that are a little thicker, you may use silicon mats to bake them.

Famed as a small resort right outside the city of Vienna, Bad Ischl was a favorite gathering place on members of the imperial court from Vienna during the nineteenth century. Of course, for Viennese aristocrats vacation meant strolling around and enjoying sweets. This was one of their favorites: walnut butter cookies, sandwiched with raspberry preserves, streaked with chocolate icing, and topped with whole blanched almonds.

Fragile and delicate in the extreme, these cookies are a labor of love to make because you need to bake them one pan at a time on the middle rack of the oven. If you have a double oven, start to bake another pan a couple of minutes before the first pan is ready to come out. These spread best on a bare buttered pan; brush the pans with very soft but not melted butter. If you don’t mind cookies that are a little thicker, you may use silicon mats to bake them.

This little pastry has a different name in every country where it is made. Palm leaves, butterflies, pig’s ears, and elephant ears are the names I know, but there are doubtless many others. Really simplicity itself, they are made by rolling the puff pastry in sugar and causing it to absorb as much sugar as possible during the process. When the “ears” bake, the sugar caramelizes, and that delicate caramel flavor mingles with the butter in the dough.

These are a mainstay of almost every pastry shop in Switzerland. These are a sweet cookie, as anything meringue-based tends to be. In the past I always used unsweetened chocolate to make them, but I once accidentally substituted some premium bittersweet chocolate and the cookies were already in the oven before I realized my mistake. Though still sweet (the sugar in the chocolate didn’t really make them appreciably sweeter), they had a much more complex flavor because of the superior quality of the chocolate. An S shape is traditional for these, but of course you may pipe them in any shape you wish.

These are fragile and buttery and easy to pipe because the dough is rather firm. The dough is also fine for putting through a cookie press if you have one. These cookies don’t need to be finished off with anything before or after baking, but you can dust them lightly with cocoa powder, sprinkle them with sprinkles, or place a quarter of a candied cherry, an almond slice, or a chocolate chip (flat side up) in the center of each before baking.