Spicy Speculaa Biscuits, Part One

Hey there!

Welcome back to another installment of 24 days of Christmas Craft and Recipes 

here at Little House :-)

Today is the first of our recipes and it comes to you in two parts. This is part one!

This recipe comes from Fashion Quarterly Entertaining. We saw the picture of beautiful snowflake shaped biscuits and couldn't refuse! 

Speculaas are traditionally baked on the 4th or 5th of December to celebrate St Nicholas' day. St Nicholas was the saint who gave gifts to children. Some folks call him Santa for short ;-)

Speculaa cookies originated in Europe, particularly hailing from Belgium, Germany and Holland. Having visited all of these countries and sampled their sweet treats I was particularly keen on having a go at making these spicy tasty cookies!

The key to crunchy, flavoursome speculaas is to let the dough rest for at least a day before rolling them out and baking them. This is why our recipe will come to you in two parts! Today I will show you how to make the dough, tomorrow, we will roll that dough out and make cookies.

Let's start from the beginning, a very good place to start.

To make 40 cookies, you will need:

500g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

220g butter

2Tbs milk

Spices

8 green cardammom pods

5 star anise

1tsp white peppercorns

1 piece of mace

2Tbs ground cinnamon

2tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp finely grated nutmeg

I didn't have access to all the spices in the recipe, so I improvised :-)

I used star anise, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger

Finely grind the whole spices: cardammom, cloves, star anise, peppercorns and mace in a spice grinder or a mortar and pestle. It is quite important to use these as I discovered when trying to improvise. My spices came out OK but needed to be a bit finer

Mix the other spices, sieve the flour and baking powder and mix together. Set aside.

In another bowl, beat the butter and brown sugar together for about 3-4 minutes until creamy

Mix the butter into the dry ingredients until just mixed. Transfer it onto a floured surface and lightly  form the dough. Shape into a disc, wrap it up in plastic wrap and refrigerate.

Give it a go and we'll see you tomorrow at part two!

Leah x