Recipe for Speculaasbrokken / Speculaas Chunks

[sierra_le_oli]

For Kelvix and anyone else who wants to give this a go. A traditional Dutch biscuit:

Comments

[few]

Oooh! Thanks for this. Will have to try it, once I make it back out to the store with the cheap spices, since all I've got on hand are cinnamon and ginger. (Though I don't think even they have ground anise....hmm. Then again, I don't like anise, so maybe I could leave that out?)

[sierra_le_oli]

I have yet to find ground aniseed in London and even had trouble finding it in the Netherlands. There is no one true speculaas spice mix, and doing without the aniseed is certainly not unknown, so if you don't like it (and many don't) go right ahead and leave it out. I think I'd better soon do a post with suggested speculaas spice mixes. :-) I've run out of the shop bought variant myself, but can't make my own until I get a new and more accurate set of scales.

[few]

Then I'll just avoid the anise question altogether, quite happily. :)

Just realised I'll also have to buy some self-rising flour, too, though. Hmph.

Oh, and is it light brown sugar, or dark, or do you think it matters? Because I've got both.

[sierra_le_oli]

I've used light brown or normal brown because that's what I had, but I'm pretty sure that dark brown would work too.

[megabitch]

I tried some commercially made from somewhere here a little while ago and they had way too much cinnamon in :(

[sierra_le_oli]

Commercially made speculaas or ground mixed spice?

[megabitch]

The speculaas. I'm not much of a fan of cloves either but didn't taste that in the ones I bought - I'll have to have a go making my own and tweaking the spices to my own taste :)

[sierra_le_oli]

Someone brought commerical speculaas chunks to the party and while it tasted nice, it was quite different from what I had made. Some recipes for speculaas spice have half the amount of cinnamon that the milder variants have, so there's definitely a lot of room for tweaking!

[artela]

Is there not an English "near translation" for speculaas (which is too near to another word in my mind for comfort!)? :-)

Oh, and there's an LJ afp recipe archive on the go... afp_cooks

[sierra_le_oli]

I'm trying, but I can't think of a word. The Belgians call it speculoos if that helps any.

sessifet has already lured me to the recipe community, thanks. :-) I might post this recipe there, but am debating whether the crossposting would annoy people. But I will definitely post another Sinterklaas related recipe there as soon as I've finished translating it.