Skip to main content
Dessert

Blitzkuchen or Lightning Cookies

A quick butter, sugar, flour, almond, egg, lemon rind cookie baked thin and cut into squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Blitzkuchen or Lightning Cookies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Melt the butter and remove any solids.

  2. Cream the melted butter with some of the sugar.

  3. Add the eggs and lemon rind, stirring constantly.

  4. Gradually mix in the flour.

Shape and bake

  1. Grease your baking tins.

  2. Spread the dough thinly like a wafer.

  3. Sprinkle with sugar, shaved almonds, and cinnamon.

  4. Bake until golden, then cut into diagonal squares and remove from tins.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the cookies a tender, crisp texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cookies brown as they bake.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the thin dough together once baked.
Eggs
Bind the dough and help set the thin wafer as it bakes.
Almonds
Add nutty flavour and a crunchy topping to the cookies.

The step that matters

Spread the dough thinly like a wafer. Thin spreading lets the cookies bake quickly and evenly. Thick dough would stay doughy in the middle while the edges over-brown.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, flour, almond, egg):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, almond, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes