Speculaas Biscuits
You’re unlikely to get very far in Amsterdam without coming across these festively spiced and beautiful biscuits, and nor would you want to. They are the perfect Christmas cookie. Traditionally — and it’s how bakeries still sell them, though they’re made less and less at home — they’re made by pressing the dough onto carved wooden moulds, which give the biscuits the look of edible Christmas cameos, but you don’t have to ‘print’ them (as it’s called) but can cheerily roll out the dough and turn them into biscuits with a cookie cutter. This, indeed, is what I do. Some time ago, I got my hands on some cookie cutters in the shape of those narrow 17th century houses that line the canals of Amsterdam, and this was too good an opportunity to miss. (It might interest you to know that the narrowness of the houses wasn’t a purely decorative architectural feature, but due to the fact that the wider the frontage, the more tax was levied on it.) I also have a special tulip cutter in my collection, and I cut out some Speculaas with these, too. But any Christmassy shape will look charming, and hearts always look lovely. Strictly speaking, these shouldn’t be iced, but if I don’t try and do some sort of basic window shapes with a tube of squeezy white icing on the biscuits made with my Amsterdam-house cutters, they do rather look like gingerbread tombstones. So I ice — if sketchily — the biscuits shaped like Amsterdam houses (using instant royal icing powder, though you can find a recipe for royal icing here and leave the tulip ones bare and beautiful, not least because these Speculaas just so happen to make cheese biscuits of utter, unparalleled gorgeousness.
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