French Fridays with Dorie Speculoos

My very cute Santas

This month in FFwD we get to pick the order of what we make. Since I'm in the middle of Christmas baking, I chose to make the Speculoos. In Dutch Speculaas! My husband's family is from Holland and Speculaas is a traditional Christmas cookie. When my son was about 15 months old, my mother-in-law went to Holland to visit her family. When she came home she brought these beautiful BIG cookies shaped like old world Santas. She told me they were Speculass and were given to all the children of Holland at Christmas. Over the years I tried to replicate this cookie. I tried all kinds of recipes mostly without success. When I visited Holland I had brought back Speculaas molds with great expectations, but no recipe and no luck.  A few years ago I found a wonderful recipe. I have been making it ever since. I have not used those molds though…until last night. I loved Dorie's recipe for Speculoos. I found this recipe easy to work with. I made the dough in the morning and put it in the refrigerator for about 5 hours. The dough was pliable and the cookie was delicious. I finally got to use my Santa molds, so that I could give one to each of my grandchildren for Christmas. I have to perfect my painting of the cookie but I love the way they look.  I will be stopping by the craft store to get some food color that I could paint onto the Santas. I also rolled out the remainder of the dough and cut them into stars and trees. I did an egg white wash on them before I baked them.  I wasn't going to frost them and wanted them to have a slight shine. Loved this cookie and will definitely be making this again. In fact, I have already started my second batch. One thing I will do in my second batch is increase the spices…more cloves and some nutmeg. We like a little more spice!
This recipe is in the new Dorie Greenspan book 'Around My French Table'. Great book! Great Christmas gift! You can also find it here.

Flour mixture

Creaming sugars and butter

ready to add flour

Everything mixed and ready to be refrigerated

2 disks 

Egg wash gave a very nice sheen

Enjoy!