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recipe november-december 2004
"Speculaas" with rich almond filling
Speculaas muffins
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"Speculaas" or
"speculoos" is one of
the Dutch culinary specialties. It is a spiced biscuit, made with wooden forms.
They are typically winterfood, and especially associated with the feast of
"Sint Nicolaas" or Saint Nicholas, the original Santa Claus. This feast is celebrated on
5 or 6 December. Speculaas is very old, the spices used date from medieval
times.
The name seems to derive from the Latin "speculum" (mirror, the
biscuits had the carved figure of the mould in mirror image). Old wooden biscuit
moulds show biblical scenes, historic events, ships, windmills, mermaids, and of
cours images of Saint Nicholas with the small children he had saved according to
the legend. Single youngsters could recieve a "vrijer" or
"vrijster" (lover m/f). According to some this could be considered as
a marriage proposal from the giver. These large speculaas dolls (maybe they can
be compared to the "gingerbread men") were often decorated with coloured icing, silver pills and even leaf gold.
The speculaas biscuits from before, say, 1850, were made with a very hard dough
containingrye flour and honey. These biscuits were so hard they could only be
eaten if they were dissolved into a sweet (and tasty) porridge.
In my youth we used to to eat small speculaas biscuits on richly buttered white
sandwiches as a special treat.
The dough is easy to prepare, and children will love to help with it.
The amounts for the dough are for the speculaas with almond stuffing. If you
just want to bake biscuits, you can easily halve the amounts.
If you are allergic to almonds, simply leave them out of the dough, and use
paste of legumes instead of almond paste.
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Ingredients:
500 gram (4 1/4 cups) simple white flour
250 gram (1 cup) cold butter
250 gram (1 1/4 cup) sugar
2 eggs, stirred
1/2 decilitre (1/4 cup) cream
salt to taste (don't forget this, and be liberal, otherwise your speculaas will
taste bland)
50 to 60 gram (1/4 cup) spices for speculaas
grated skin of 2 untreated lemons
200 gram (2 cups) flaked almonds, broken in to little pieces (optional)
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
Preparation in advance:
Mix flour with the baking powder and soda and spices (don't forget the salt,
otherwise the speculaas will be bland). Add the butter, cut it with two knives
to little chunks the size of peanuts. Add almonds and lemon peel, and as much
egg and cream as necessary to obtain a firm dough. Place the dough in a bowl, cover,
and let it rest, preferably a whole night, in the refrigerator.
With this dough you can make
small bisuits, called speculaasjes. To roll the dough out, the dough must be
taken out of the refrigerator well in advance, because otherwise it will be too firm to roll out
(because of the butter in it). Once the dough is rolled out, you can use either
a cookie cutter, or real Dutch wooden speculaas moulds. If you use these, be
sure to sprinkle the mould liberally with flour ever time you press fresh dough
into it.
Tap the mould upside down on the worktop to free the speculaas dough. Cut the
sides to make a neat form, and place the biscuits on a greased baking
sheet.
Bake the biscuits in the preheated oven (175ºC)
until done (about 20 minutes). Let the biscuits cool on a cake rack.
To make the speculaas with almond
stuffing, we go on:
500 gram pure almond paste
1 or 2 eggs
1 to 3 tablespoons rose water
whole peeled and blanched almonds for decoration
Preparation in advance:
Stir the eggs with the rosewater. Knead the almond paste with the eggs and rosewater
to moisten it. Don't add the liquids all at once, start with half the amount, then add a
little at the time until the stuffing is smooth. Like the dough, the almond
stuffing has to rest in the refrigerator for at least one day before use.
Preparation:
Divide the dough in two. Roll out one half, and cover a bakingsheet with it. If
you have trouble rolling the dough out and transferring it to the baking sheet,
just flatten it with your hand to your satisfaction. Spread the moistened almond
paste on the dough, but be sure to keep away from the borders of the
dough.
Roll our the second portion of dough, drape it over the stuffing, press the
sides of both sheets ofdough well together.
With a knife trace a pattern of lozenges, and decorate further with the almonds.
Bake the filled speculaas for 20 to 30 minutes in a preheated oven (175ºC).
Extra recipe: 'Banketstaaf' and
'Banketletter' (Dutch almond pastry, litterally meaning 'banquet stick' and
'banquet letter').
Roll out 350 gram puff pastry
into a long, rectangular sheet.
Shape 250 gram almond paste into a thin roll (2½
centimeter or 1 inch), place on the sheet of dough. Fold the
dough over the stuffing, seal with egg. Cut away any excess dough.
You can leave the roll straight as a rod, but you can also shape it into letters
(the Dutch also present each other with their initial in chocolate letters).
Adorn the 'banketstaaf' with halved almonds and/or the excess dough.
Let the pastry rest in the refrigerator for a half hour. Meanwhile, preheat the
oven to 220ºC/425ºF.
Brush the dough with lightly beaten egg, eggwhite or milk, then bake it for
twenty minutes.
Almond
paste:
Almond paste can be bought, but you can easily make it yourself: grind blanched
sweet almonds to a flour (or buy ground almonds), add as much sugar in weight as
you have ground almonds, and add 1 egg for every 100 to 150 gram of almond flour
(depending on the size of the eggs) .
A cheap replacement of almond paste is a paste made with ground legumes (I
believe haricot beans are used).
Spice mix for Speculaas:
In The Netherlands you can buy the spices for speculaas premixed. I doubt
whether that is the case elsewhere in the world. So here you have a mixture to
make yourself: Take cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, white pepper, ginger and cardamom
(everything powdered) in a ratio of 8:2:2:1:1:1 (whether you use grams,
teaspoons or tablespoons, the proportions must be the same). The used spices
betray the age of the recipe for speculaas: this combination of spices can be
found in many fifteenth century recipes.
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