Pastry chef Iris Reuter swiftly dabs her colleague with a large ladle of warm chocolate mass on a baking sheet-sized wafer. Jochen Seubert quickly pulls the cocoa-brown mass extremely thin with an angled palette and places a new wafer on top. It goes like this again and again, until finally ten wafers wrap nine layers of chocolate. Then it goes to the cooling. This is the first step towards a traditional Franconian Christmas treat: the “Heinerli”.
“The wafer shouldn’t look through,” explains the 41-year-old pastry chef Seubert as he spreads one layer after the other in the bakery of the Brandstätter market café in Würzburg. “But the layer is so thin – it is already on the verge of being scratched off,” adds his boss, master confectioner Christian Englert, himself a “Heinerli” professional. Due to the wafer-thin layering, the “Heinerli” are only around two centimeters high in the end, despite the ten wafers.
The preparation of the small diamond-shaped sweets drives many hobby bakers crazy. It was the same with Irmgard Heidrich, winemaker and countrywoman from Sommerach in Lower Franconia. “It was always such a mess, it made me so excited that I didn’t do it anymore,” she says. Until in 2007 she got the company recipe from her uncle, a pastry chef, when he went out of business. Since then, the little “Heinerli” are no longer a problem. At least not for Heidrich.
Where the “Heinerli” come from – nobody really knows. Not even when they were created. Because the chocolate mass contains a certain amount of coconut fat, as is the case with the “cold dog”, the recipe cannot have been created before the end of the 19th century. It was only then that the German food chemist Heinrich Schlinck developed a process to make the fat from coconuts usable for cooking or baking. By the way, the fat also ensures the feeling of melting when eating.
“You need good couverture and good nougat.”
In addition to the exact mixing ratio of the ingredients, their quality is also decisive for a good “Heinerli”, says confectioner Seubert: “You need good couverture and good nougat.” And it takes time to make the chocolate mass. Because the mass must not be too hot when the eggs are stirred in to bind – if the eggs freeze, the mass can no longer be used. Once everything is well mixed, it is placed in a water bath for three hours “until it becomes nice and creamy,” says Seubert.
The special thing about “Heinerli” – which are sometimes called “Heinerle” or “Heinerla” in other regions of Franconia – is, according to the bakery boss Englert, that they “actually do not count as Christmas cookies because they are not baked at all, but are layered” . Rather, “Heinerli” pralines, or confectionery. “They are chocolaty, not too sweet and simply delicious,” says Englert.
The “Heinerli” production is far from over with painting and layering, which is not very easy from a technical point of view. The next morning, the cooled and hardened panels are cut into small diamonds. Seubert puts on the large saw knife and powerfully pulls one straight cut next to the other through the plywood. “The coconut oil and the couverture make it very firm – you definitely need a lot of strength,” he says. Then the strips are cut into small diamonds, which is then the typical “Heinerli” shape.
Sometimes something goes wrong, says bakery manager Englert. For example, the wafers in a middle tier break apart: “Of course, you can’t sell such pieces.” In addition, there are the cuts on the edge of the panels. “But that doesn’t last long either,” he says: “If there are Heinerli sections, the staff will eat them very quickly.”