The first Ischler has been created in an Austrian thermal bath town: Bad Ischl at a famous confectionery called Zauner.
These sandwich-style biscuits became extremely popular across Austria and Hungary and this was the treat that I've always asked for when we visited the favourite confectionery of the family.
We Hungarians like it completely covered by chocolate and filled with some sour, red berry jam -which is my personal favourite too- and others, -like my mom- love the apricot jam version.
Ingredients
- 250 g flour
- 60 g ground walnut or other nuts
- 185 g butter
- 5 tbsp icing sugar
- 1 pinch cinnamon
- 1 pinch salt
- 250 g quality dark chocolate or milk chocolate
- 1 tbsp oil
- Red-berry jam or apricot jam
- Nuts, sprinkles - optional
Instructions
- Place the flour, walnut, butter, icing sugar, salt and cinnamon into a food processor and mix it till the ingredients combine. Remove the dough from the food processor and knead it by hand for a minute.
- Wrap the dough in cling film and place it into the fridge for an hour.
- Roll the dough to 3-5 mm thick then use a cookie cutter to get dough discs. Make sure you end up with even numbers!
- Bake the dough discs in a pre-heated oven at 180 °C for 8-10 minutes. You can stop baking them when you notice, that the edges of the circles started to be slightly golden brown. The biscuits should be as light in colour as possible, so do not over-bake them!
- When they are still hot spread some jam on the top of one cookie and seal it with another one. Repeat this until you use all the biscuits and place them on a cooling rack with a tray under it.
- Melt the chocolate above the steam, incorporate the oil and you can start to cover your room temperature biscuits.
- First of all dip the side of a filled biscuit into the melted chocolate and rotate around to make sure it's perfectly covered on the side, then place the biscuit back to the rack and pour some chocolate on top to completely cover it. Finally, shake the rack a little bit: this helps the chocolate to spread more evenly on the surface. Repeat this until all the biscuits are covered.
- You can sprinkle the top with crushed nuts or add any decoration you wish.
- Place the Ischler biscuits into the fridge and serve after the chocolate sets.
Ischler Biscuit - Photo by © Reka Csulak
