1) Bring all the ingredients together, apart from the icing and vanilla sugar, and knead until you get a smooth dough. Don’t over-knead the dough as you’re aiming for shortcrust pastry. You want the cookies to be nice and short, i.e. flaky and crumbly. If you over-knead the dough, the cookies will be tough and chewy. You may also find is unusual that we’re not asking you to put sugar into the dough itself, but please trust us on this one. The coating will be generous enough to add the desired sweetness.

2) Wrap the dough in some cling film and let it rest in the fridge for a couple of hours.

3) Before you start handling the dough again, preheat the over to 160C / 140C fan.

4) Remove some of the dough from the fridge, leaving the remaining dough in the fridge so that it stays cold. Cut off small pieces of the dough and shape them into screscent (see    the picture). Try and make these same in size, so that they bake evenly. Place the crescent onto a baking tray lined with parchment paper and bake in the preheated oven for 15 minutes.

5) In a bowl, mix together the icing the vanilla sugar. Remove the crescent cookies from the oven, let them cool down for about a minute and then dust them with the sugar. Let       the crescent cookies cool down completely and give them a second coat of sugar.

6) You can make as many vanilla crescent cookies as you want. The beauty about this pastry is that you don’t have to use it all at once and you can keep it in the fridge until you’re ready to use it. Enjoy!