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Mr Food Recipe - When thinking of Austria and baked goods in general, there's a tendency for the mind to jump to the image of involved cakes piled up in many layers, this is recipes about "Twice - Baked Tea Biscuits ( Grazer Zwieback )".

...or else rich pastries stuffed with whipped cream or glossy with chocolate icing or fruit glazes, all sourced from fancy city bakeries. But the Austrian baking scene isn't all like that. There's a well-established tradition of cookie and biscuit baking as well, going back centuries.

Many of these recipes reflect their origins in periods when yeast was mostly reserved for breadmaking, and non-yeast leavening agents were expensive and hard for home bakers to find. Some of these cookie and biscuit recipes use pre-baking powder rising agents like hartshorn (ammonium carbonate): others relied on beaten-in air to lighten the final baked product.

This recipe, from the region around the little city of Graz in eastern Austria, is typical of the second type. Grazer zwieback is a very light and toothsome cookie or biscuit based mostly on egg white and confectioners' sugar / icing sugar, with just enough flour stirred into the mixture to help it hold together when it bakes, and a little vanilla sugar for flavoring.

Baking this mixture produces a modestly risen cake with a very delicate flavor. But the story doesn't stop here. After the cake's completely cooled, it's sliced finger-thick, the slices laid on their sides and dusted with icing sugar / confectioners' sugar again, and rebaked just long enough to dry them out completely. The final result is a beautifully crunchy and delicately flavored confection that is very hard to stop eating once you start.

The texture of Grazer zwieback is slightly reminiscent of that of the Italian biscotti: and the two names have the same meaning, "twice baked". They're also known as Kinderzwieback, "Children's Zwieback", the idea possibly being that these are the kind of cookies that might be given to a good child as a reward. However, EuroCuisineLady thinks that this particular goodie would frankly be wasted on the kids. Grazer zwieback make a wonderful accompaniment to coffee or tea. And if you like, you can also omit the dusting of powdered sugar and produce a biscuit that goes surprisingly well with a cool white wine (which probably shouldn't be a surprise, considering where these come from).

Butter and flour an oblong cake tin or pan measuring about 11 inches by 7.

Whisk the egg whites until stiff. Carefully, so as not to reduce the amount of air trapped in the egg whites, whisk in the icing sugar / confectioners' sugar; then sift in the flour and the vanilla sugar, and stir until well combined.

Preheat the oven to 340° F / 170° C. When the oven's ready, place the cake pan carefully inside (handling it gently so as not to knock any of the air bubbles out of the batter) and bake for about fifty minutes, or until set and golden brown. (If you have a fan oven, you may want to set it about 10 degrees lower.)

When baked, remove the cake from the oven, turn it out carefully onto a cake rack, and allow to cool completely -- overnight is best.

The next day, cut into slices about a finger thick. Arrange the slices on a baking sheet and dust lightly with icing sugar / confectioner's sugar. Preheat the oven to 375° F / 170° C, and when ready, place the cookie sheet in the oven and bake for approximately ten minutes: then turn off the heat, crack the door, and allow the oven to cool.

When the cookies are cool, dust them on both sides with a little more powdered sugar and store in an airtight tin. Serve with coffee or tea.

(These can also be made as a good simple wine biscuit. Bake exactly as above, and just omit the dusting with powdered sugar.)