On the Ninth day of Christmas, my True Love baked for me…
These.
These, these, these.
Speculaas are like the Foie Gras of Cookies.
Like the Inception of Cookies.
Like Umberto Eco’s as yet unpublished masterwork: Cookies in Hyperreality.
Like: if you believe you are what you eat, and you fed cookies with cookies, those cookies would grow up to be Speculaas.
Because these delicately spiced, impossibly warm in the mouth, Dutch cookies are just that. They are cookies made from Cookie. You start with crushed plain biscuit, like milk arrowroot, and build your Speculaas dough around it. I have no idea how they first came up with this idea, maybe they didn’t have enough flour or something. But boy is everyone glad they did.
Here’s a Speculaa from start to finish:
I think the pictures tell a billion words, but I would like to especially thank my good friend Eleanor, who, for the price of half a batch of Speculaas dough, loaned me her gorgeous Dutch Santa Speculaas mould.
This recipe comes from Hans Kupier, owner of the Sydenham Bakery in Christchurch. It is inestimably wonderful: don’t worry if you don’t have fancy moulds!
Speculaas
makes two laden baking sheets of cookies
ingredients
100g plain biscuit, such as Milk Arrowroot, Vanilla Wine, or Marie, crushed
80mL milk
290g brown sugar
180g unsalted butter
1/8 tsp salt
400g flour
10g baking soda
2 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 tsp mixed spice
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cardamom
about 1/2 – 3/4 cup blanched flaked almonds, for baking
mixing
Combine the biscuit crumbs with the milk and mix to a smooth paste. Set aside.
In a large bowl, mix the brown sugar, butter and salt until just combined (do not cream the ingredients!).
Mix in the biscuit paste. Sift over the flour, baking soda, and spices. Mix together to form a very firm dough (this is where a stand mixer is worth it’s weight in gold!). Gather the dough together and knead lightly, then place in a zip-lock plastic bag, flatten and seal. Refrigerate the dough overnight (or for several days) to allow the spices to infuse into the dough.
About an hour and a half before you want to make the Speculaas, take the dough out of the refrigerator, to allow it to soften.
Working with half the dough at a time, roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface to a thickness of about 3-4mm. Cut shapes from the dough with a cookie cutter, slice into rectangles or if you are moulding the cookies, press portions of dough into a well floured Speculaas mould. If using the mould, roll the rolling pin over the surface of the mould and pull away any over-spill from the mould surface. Working from one edge, carefully peel the cookie away from the mould, using gravity to help the process and taking care at any narrow part of the mould. This process is shown in the photos above. Below, I have cut leaf shapes and pressed them against a leaf veiner (used in making sugarpaste flowers) to pattern the leaves.
Because the dough is quite dry, if you want to gather up the offcuts and re-roll, its best to add just a few drops of water and knead it in before re-rolling. This overcomes the extra drying effect from the flour used to roll out the dough the first time.
Scatter the flaked almonds liberally onto a baking sheet and place the cookies on top of the almonds. Don’t worry about wasteage, the almonds that don’t stick to this batch of cookies can be reused for the next batch!
Bake the cookies at 170 degrees Celsius for about 12-15 minutes, depending on the size of the cookie. They should be firm to the touch and golden brown when they are done. Don’t panic if you see them puff up in the oven during the baking process (especially concerning if you have painstakingly moulded them!), they will subside before they are finished cooking. Remove from the trays immediately to cool on a wire rack.
Enjoy!xxx
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