Its thinness and delicate motifs make the bricelet appear like lacework. It is made with simple ingredients, but its preparation requires a special oven and expertise that is generally passed on from mother to daughter. Depending on the regions and tastes, it is either savoury for aperitifs or sweet to be enjoyed with a coffee.
"Crumbly like a bricelet" or "you’re like a bricelet, a partaker of all parties”! These typical Vaudois expressions show the bricelet’s popularity throughout the region. This biscuit exists in several forms but connoisseurs prefer the original, prepared patiently one by one by housewives in their kitchen filled with the steam from their precious bricelet oven.
The basic ingredients are butter, eggs, cream, salt and kirsch, to which sugar is added for the sweet variety, and cumin, cheese, sesame or poppy seeds for the savoury one. When the dough comes out of the oven, its shape must be worked immediately: traditionally rolled around a stick to form sweet cylinders or in the form of tiles or flat for savoury bricelets. In the canton of Vaud, both varieties are appreciated: the sweet ones at coffee time, the savoury ones at aperitifs with a glass of white wine, obviously Chasselas.
