The main ingredients are flour, eggs, sugar, butter, cream, and plum schnaps. To give it the characteristic shape, the dough is rolled out italian pastry cannoli cut into even strips with a dough cutter. The strips are then arranged alternately over and under a stick, or the handle of a wooden spoon. Eventually the stick is lifted and slowly removed while the dough strips are formed into a loose ball.
The schneeball is a dry, cookie-like pastry, so it has a long shelf life – about eight weeks without refrigeration. Danish pastries were brought with immigrants to the United States, where they are often topped with a fruit or cream cheese filling, and are now popular around the world. A yeast dough is rolled out thinly, covered with thin slices of butter between the layers of dough, and then the dough is folded and rolled several times, creating 27 layers. If necessary, the dough is chilled between foldings to ease handling. Butter is the traditional fat used in Danish pastry, but in industrial production, less expensive fats are often used, such as hydrogenated sunflower oil.
A common version of the pastry in Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Sweden. The origin of the Danish pastry is often ascribed to a strike amongst bakery workers in Denmark in 1850. The strike caused bakery owners to hire workers from abroad, among them several Austrian bakers, who brought along new baking traditions and pastry recipes. One of the baking techniques and traditions that the Austrian bakers brought with them was the Viennese lamination technique.
