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Plum luck

Susan Parsons

Vanillekipferl... also known as Vanilla Crescents.
Vanillekipferl... also known as Vanilla Crescents.Colleen Petch

In autumn this year, I bought a slice of plum cake from a stall being run by the Austrian Australian choir to raise funds for their trip to Europe next year. It was delicious, so, as plum season approaches, I searched for the baker.

It was Hanni Glanznig, an alto singer and secretary to the Austrian choir, and she has gained a reputation for the treat. The recipe is derived from an Austrian cake that is usually made with apricots, but she uses purple plums from a friend in Kambah.

At home in Stirling, Hanni Glanznig's husband Kurt Glanznig, a tenor, alpine hiker and retired builder, has what must be one of Canberra's most neatly tended gardens of flowers and vegetables, enriched with sheep manure and homemade compost. He was raised in Carinthia in southern Austria and helped his mother tend a garden in the country.

Kurt Glanznig holds aloft one of his beer radishes from his garden.
Kurt Glanznig holds aloft one of his beer radishes from his garden.Colleen Petch
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Thriving in his 10-year-old garden in Stirling are Lebanese cucumbers, onions, carrots, snowpeas, French shallots, oak leaf lettuces and an Austrian variety of crisp hearting lettuces. Among the tomatoes is a Patio Prize pot bush tomato, in potting mix in which Kurt Glanznig incorporates coir (coconut husk fibre, commonly available) for water retention. Hanni Glanznig says they have so much produce that "salad comes out of our ears". A favourite plant is lovage, which the couple says Austrians and Germans call "Maggi herb" because it lends a perfect flavour and aroma to soup.

Munchner Beer radishes, sturdy and white, came from a friend, and Glanznig has saved the seed for a decade. He uses a small kitchen implement to turn the vegetable into an accordion of rings that he salts (so the radish weeps), then serves with beer, cheese and salami.

The pair has three large beds of Kipfler potatoes, grown from saved seed potatoes. Hanni Glanznig uses them for making gnocchi and for apricot dumplings known as knoedel, a recipe she learnt from her Austrian mother who put a sugar cube in the centre of each apricot in place of the stone.

The Austrian choir holds its annual Advent Singen with a Christkindlmarkt, another fund-raiser for Europe, this Saturday, December 8, at the Austrian Australian Club in Mawson. Members will be selling home-made Christmas biscuits (bookings essential, 6288 7884, $5).

>> Susan Parsons is a Canberra writer.

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Vanillekipferl - vanilla crescents

250g plain flour

100g almond meal

70g caster sugar

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220g butter

1 egg yolk to bind the mixture (this is Hanni Glanznig's addition)

icing sugar, to decorate

65g Masterfoods vanillin sugar, to decorate

Preheat the oven to 180C. Place all the dry ingredients in a bowl and rub in the butter, using your fingers. Add the egg yolk and fold it in using a knife. By now the dough should have come together. Knead until it is combined and smooth.

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Form the dough into a long sausage-like roll. Cut it into even slices about 2cm wide.

On a bench top, using a slightly cupped hand, roll each of the slices until about 7cm long then curve the dough (it should be thick in the middle and have pointy ends).

Place on a well-greased, lined baking sheet, each biscuit a couple of centimetres apart (they don't spread much). Bake in the middle of the oven for about 12 minutes or until pale gold.

Cover a dinner plate thickly with icing sugar mixed with the vanillin sugar. Cool the biscuits for just a few minutes then cover them liberally with the icing sugar mix. Place on a rack to cool.

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