W’s

These pretty cookies are the signature cookie of Wittamer, the best pastry shop in Brussels. The traditional shape is a wavy W, but of course they may be piped in any shape. The recipe is adapted from Les heures et les jours Wittamer (“The Hours and Days at Wittamer”) by Jean Pierre Gabriel (Editions Lannoo, 1994).

This recipe uses a typically European method: scraping out and using the seeds of a vanilla bean rather than vanilla extract.