I have declared my love for Biscoffs on this blog before. It's been years since I last baked speculoos cookies, but the planets recently aligned to bring homemade Biscoffs back into my life. First, my friend Louise brought to my attention that Stella Parks had published a recipe for homemade Biscoffs on Serious Eats. I had totally missed this recipe and I might never had seen it if Louise hadn't pointed it out -- it's not included in Stella's BraveTart cookbook that was published a few months ago. Second, soon after I learned about this recipe, I went to Brussels for a week on a business trip. It was my first visit to Belgium and I made a point of stopping by a well-stocked Delhaize grocery store to pick up a few kilos of "cassonade de candi blonde," or Belgian light brown sugar -- which is one of the specialty ingredients required for the recipe. Of course, I also couldn't resist buying a lot of Lotus speculoos cookies at the supermarket, including Christmas edition speculoos and speculoos coated in chocolate. My entire carry-on bag on the way home was filled with two beer glasses, some Kinder Surprise eggs, and a boatload of speculoos.
Once I had assembled all of my ingredients -- which required not only a trip to Belgium for the brown sugar, but also a stop by the Japanese grocery store for some roasted soybean flour and a visit to Penzey's for some ceylon cinnamon -- the recipe is pretty straightforward. I creamed the cassonade de candi sugar with butter, baking soda, ceylon cinnamon, freshly grated nutmeg, salt, cloves, freshly ground cardamon, and anise for 10 minutes; added a little water; and mixed in all-purpose flour. You can roll out this dough immediately without needing to chill it first.
While I found this dough very easy to roll out on parchment without the need to use any flour, the dough had a dry texture and it crumbled when I tried to cut it with a fluted pastry wheel. So I just cut it into rectangles using a ruler and a sharp paring knife. The rectangles were 1.25-inches wide (the width of my plastic ruler) and 2-inches long. The cookies spread during baking, ending up a finished size of 2-inches by 2.5-inches, with slightly rounded corners.
I've made these cookies three times and I prefer them to be on the thick side because then the cookies end up with an airier texture and are less prone to overbaking. When I roll the cookies to what I consider to be the ideal thickness, I get roughly 28 cookies from a batch. In the photo above you can see my homemade cookies next to some of the speculoos I brought back from Belgium; the Belgian speculoos are larger than the Lotus Biscoffs that you can buy here in the United States. While my cookies didn't look like the store-bought version, they tasted every bit as good.
My cookies had the exact same airy, crunchy, immensely satisfying texture as the Lotus cookies, although the flavor was slightly different. The homemade version is sweeter and has a stronger and more complex spice flavor. In fact, after eating a homemade speculoos, the Lotus version seems bland. But it's funny -- eating a homemade version in isolation, I would have sworn it was a perfect copy of the original. It's only after tasting them side-by-side that I realized that they are in fact different. But different isn't bad in this case. And as a bonus, these cookies store incredibly well and if anything, they get better with time.
Don't have time to go to Belgium and want to make these cookies? Read Stella's explanation of the specific ingredients required for the cookies and her tips on sourcing them, here.
Recipe: "Homemade Biscoff (Belgian Speculoos Cookies)" by Stella Parks, recipe available here at Serious Eats.
Previous Posts:
Once I had assembled all of my ingredients -- which required not only a trip to Belgium for the brown sugar, but also a stop by the Japanese grocery store for some roasted soybean flour and a visit to Penzey's for some ceylon cinnamon -- the recipe is pretty straightforward. I creamed the cassonade de candi sugar with butter, baking soda, ceylon cinnamon, freshly grated nutmeg, salt, cloves, freshly ground cardamon, and anise for 10 minutes; added a little water; and mixed in all-purpose flour. You can roll out this dough immediately without needing to chill it first.
While I found this dough very easy to roll out on parchment without the need to use any flour, the dough had a dry texture and it crumbled when I tried to cut it with a fluted pastry wheel. So I just cut it into rectangles using a ruler and a sharp paring knife. The rectangles were 1.25-inches wide (the width of my plastic ruler) and 2-inches long. The cookies spread during baking, ending up a finished size of 2-inches by 2.5-inches, with slightly rounded corners.
My cookies had the exact same airy, crunchy, immensely satisfying texture as the Lotus cookies, although the flavor was slightly different. The homemade version is sweeter and has a stronger and more complex spice flavor. In fact, after eating a homemade speculoos, the Lotus version seems bland. But it's funny -- eating a homemade version in isolation, I would have sworn it was a perfect copy of the original. It's only after tasting them side-by-side that I realized that they are in fact different. But different isn't bad in this case. And as a bonus, these cookies store incredibly well and if anything, they get better with time.
Don't have time to go to Belgium and want to make these cookies? Read Stella's explanation of the specific ingredients required for the cookies and her tips on sourcing them, here.
Recipe: "Homemade Biscoff (Belgian Speculoos Cookies)" by Stella Parks, recipe available here at Serious Eats.
Previous Posts:
- "Good Is Okay, but Better Is Awesome: Dorie Greenspan's Good, Better, Best Cookies," January 20, 2017.
- "Baked Sunday Mornings: Speculaas," January 29, 2012.
- "Belgian Biscuit Tasteoff: Biscoff v. Speculaas," June 25, 2011.
- "The Biscoff Knockoff: Speculaas," November 18, 2010.
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