Plum and cinnamon Christmas tree cookies: how to pipe Spritzgebäck like in a professional bakery

The butter should be soft but not liquid. Break the almond paste into small pieces so it blends in evenly, then put it in a bowl with the butter and icing sugar. Beat everything with the hand mixer for about 3 minutes until fluffy and no bits of almond paste are visible anymore. Lumps would clog the piping nozzle later on.

Beat the egg and weigh out 30 g of it, which is about half an egg. Add it slowly to the butter mixture and stir it in right away until the mixture is smooth again.

Mix the flour with the cinnamon, salt and lemon zest and add everything to the mixture. Fold it in briefly with a dough scraper until no flour is visible. If you mix for too long, the dough becomes tough and hard to pipe.

Add about 2 drops of green gel color to the dough and work it in evenly with the dough scraper. You decide how intense the green becomes: start with a little and add more if needed. The cinnamon softens the green a little, which gives a lovely fir tone.

Fit the 7 mm star tip into a piping bag and fill it with the dough. Fill the bag no more than halfway, so you have more control when piping.

Preheat the oven to 170 °C fan and line the trays with baking paper. Pipe the little trees from the top downwards: start with a small dot and then pull the dough back and forth in a zigzag line, making each row slightly wider. The crown should be about 5 cm high and about 5 cm wide at the base. For a trunk, pipe a short line of about 2 cm underneath.

Because you will later join two trees together, pipe them in pairs: one tree of each pair gets a trunk, the other does not. You should end up with about 30 trees in total.

Bake the trees for 8 to 10 minutes. They should stay green and must not turn brown, so keep a close eye on them towards the end of the baking time. Let them cool completely on the tray, as they are still very fragile straight out of the oven.

Temper the dark couverture. We show you how in our guide to tempering. Then dip the trunk of every tree that has one into the couverture, scrape off the excess on the edge of the bowl and place the trees on baking paper. The trees without a trunk stay completely green. Let the couverture set.

Stir the jam smooth and fill it into a disposable piping bag. Turn half of the trees over and pipe approx. 3 g of jam into the middle, a dot about the size of a hazelnut. Place a matching second tree on top and press it on gently. Don't use too much jam, or it will squeeze out at the edges.

Use the edible glue to place small dots on the trees, like baubles on a fir tree. Press a sugar pearl or a sprinkle piece onto each dot. It's best to pick up the sprinkles with a cooking tweezer or a slightly moistened finger.

Roll out the yellow fondant thinly and cut small stars with the mini cookie cutter. Stick a star on each tree top with a dab of edible glue.

For the simple variant, dust the filled trees with icing sugar through a fine sieve. Hold the sieve a little higher up, so the sugar falls evenly like snow.