French Fridays with Dorie - speculoos

On Friday it's Christmas Eve day, so what better FFwD recipe to showcase than Dorie's delightful holiday cookies... speculoos.  Speculoos or speculaas as they are known in Belgium, are thin, crisp spice cookies.  As Dorie mentions, it doesn't matter when you eat these cookies, they are going to remind you of the holidays.

I will confess, I didn't make these cookies right off the bat.  I waited until some fellow FFwD participants had made them and read their comments and hints.  They were very helpful.  I am not a rolled cookie person.  Rolled cookies stick and tear and make me tear up (like that little play on words?).  And crying in the kitchen is just so damn sad!  I've never been much of a fan of sugar cookies (either making them or eating them) and I thought the speculoo was probably just a brown sugar cookie.

And, actually, it is...but it's so much more than that too.  The spices really bring the cookie to life.  Dorie says you can make these big or small, thin or thick and spicy or spicier.  I went medium size, thin and just spicy.

 I also took her up on her Bonne Idee and made sandwiches out of the cookies too, using Nutella and Gingerbread Butter (idea stolen from another FFwD blogger, who it is I can't remember...I'm sorry).  I also bought dulce de leche, but when I opened up the jar...the seal had been broken and it was molded...YUCK!  I was going to share a picture and then thought better of it.  Serves me right for not having the guts to make my own by with this recipe.  However, the thought of boiling a can of condensed milk for 3-5 hours is more than I can handle!

With Nutella

The cookies were not that difficult to make, as long as you follow the instructions.  That means, make your dough, roll it out and then refrigerate for at least three hours.  I refrigerated over night, which made cutting the cookies very easy and I think melded the flavors together even more.  I used a great scalloped edge cookie cutter, but these cookies go soft very quickly and don't hold there shape perfectly.  So, I wouldn't use a fine detailed cookie cutter for these. 

With Gingerbread Butter

If you want a last minute holiday cookie that Santa will enjoy, try making these today!  To see what everyone else made this week, click here.  Happy Holidays!  I hope your holidays are filled with love and magic and cookies and lots of great food!