Hazelnut macaroons: Make these super easy Christmas treats

Hazelnut macaroons (Haselnussmakronen in German) are meringue-based biscuits with a delicately crisp exterior and soft, chewy interior. Their key ingredients are ground hazelnuts (or hazelnut meal), egg whites and sugar. Thus, they are naturally gluten-free and dairy-free treats.

Hazelnut macaroons are one of the many traditional festive biscuits baked each year during Advent by home cooks in Austria, Germany and a number of other European countries. Other favourites include Zimtsterne (“Cinnamon Stars”), Vanillekipferl (“Vanilla Crescents”) and Florentiner (“Florentines”).

Platter of traditional homemade German Christmas biscuits. My son’s mother-in-law baked all of these wonderful family treats. Photo source: Judith Salecich 2021.

Advent is the season on the Church calendar when Christians prepare to celebrate the first coming of Jesus Christ, the God-child born to a woman (the virgin Mary) at Bethlehem over 2000 years ago. Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas Day, the Sunday nearest to November 30, and ends on Christmas Eve (December 24). This year (2025) Advent began on Sunday 30 November.

The season of Christmas, or Christmastide, begins on Christmas Day and ends on January 5. It lasts for 12 days, hence its other common name, The Twelve Days of Christmas.

In Australia, as in Europe, there are home cooks (like me) who love to bake cakes and biscuits in preparation for Christmas. In my birth family’s tradition, a Christmas cake (rich fruit cake) and a plum pudding were the two essentials. From the late 1970s, my mother and I added Almond Bread (Biscotti) to our Advent baking regime.

Three of the Christmas cakes I baked this year. Photo source: Judith Salecich 2025.

Today, my daughter also bakes Christmas cakes and almond bread (biscotti) prior to and during Advent and, like me, loves to make Brotlaibchen. The latter, which translates to ‘little loaves of German bread”, are festive chocolate biscuits of Austrian and German origin. We bake all of these sweet goodies to share with our families at Christmastime and to give to friends, neighbours and colleagues as Christmas gifts. It’s truly a labour of love.

Almond Bread gift-packed. — Almond bread gift-packed. Photo source: Judith Salecich 2015.

Hazelnut macaroons: Super easy-to-make Christmas treats

This year I decided to add hazelnut macaroons to my Advent baking. They are super easy-to-make and require just four ingredients. As a bonus, they can be successfully stored in the freezer, and thawed, for later use.

As the name suggests, hazelnuts are the main ingredient of hazelnut macaroons.

Hazelnuts are the edible fruit of the hazel (Corylus) tree, which is native to the temperate regions of Europe and Asia. While their origin is in Europe and Asia, they are now cultivated commercially worldwide, including the temperate regions of southern Australia. Turkey and Italy are the world’s leading producers, together accounting for over 70% of the world’s production of hazelnuts.

Hazelnuts, still in their shells. Photo source: Laura on Pixabay. Used with permission.

What makes hazelnuts so desirable? The nut kernels are highly nutritious, with a rich, sweet buttery flavour. You can enjoy them raw or roasted, in chocolates, and as a paste in products like Nutella. Hazelnut kernels are ground to produce hazelnut meal, which is used in baked goods such as hazelnut macaroons.

The recipe I used for my hazelnut macaroons is based on a traditional Austrian one. It comes from a little book entitled Best of Kekse: Die besten keksrezepte aus Österreich, which my son gave me as a Christmas gift several years ago. In it he wrote: “A small gift to remind you of Austria!”

He lived in Vienna for 12 years or so, during which time my husband and I visited and stayed with him several times. Our first visit was at Christmas, 2004. You can read about that visit in The wonder of Christmas in Vienna (December 22, 2018).