FFwD - Speculoos

I have made it to Friday - hooray! It's been a long week in which I haven't had one decent night's sleep, for one reason or another. I won't be getting that tonight either - I have tickets to see U2 at Etihad Stadium in Melbourne, and I am stoked. Years ago when I was at Uni, someone asked me to go to the Zoo TV/Zooropa tour, but I declined because of lack of cash to buy a ticket. It is therefore great to be able to have the chance to see U2 now. I am not up on their latest music so much, but a band like U2 will always throw in some old favourites. All I Want Is You, a U2 song that featured in the movie Reality Bites, is one of my favourite songs of all time, so I hope they play it.

What has all of that got to do with French Fridays with Dorie? Nothing actually, apart from the fact that both events occur on a Friday.

This month, FFwD is once again free choice within the 5 recipes. I decided to start with the Speculoos - as a baker, it seemed like a natural choice, and I was curious to know what they tasted like. Ever since seeing David Lebovitz's post on Speculoos in a jar, I have been keen to try them, so now is my big chance.

Speculoos are spice cookies with cinnamon, ginger and cloves, making them appropriate Christmas fare. I didn't have any cloves, so I left them out - and at 1/8th of a teaspoon, I don't think it made much difference. I rolled my dough thinly with the thought of making my Speculoos into sandwich cookies, but apart from one that I filled with dulce de leche for myself (and which tasted excellent!), I didn't bother making sandwich cookies.

The dough was very hard to work with because it was incredibly soft - after just a couple of minutes out of the fridge, it became almost impossible to remove the scraps from around the cut out cookies, so I resorted to carving out the scraps with a knife and leaving the cookies on the baking paper on which I cut them out. (Warning - don't try using fancy shaped cutters to make these, as it will be way too hard to get them out in one piece.) So that I could space them on the baking tray with enough room to spread, I cut around the cookies on the paper and reassembled them on a baking tray like a jigsaw. The softness of this dough surprised me, as my friend Anna gave me two Speculoos kits with moulds for my birthday a couple of years ago. The use of moulds would indicate that the recipe used in the kits yielded a far more robust dough than Dorie's recipe.

And the verdict? These cookies are delicious, crisp spice cookies, similar to many others in my Christmas repertoire. This means that, due to the difficulty of working with the dough, I am unlikely to choose these over some of the other more robust spice cookies that I have made. I highly recommend sandwiching a teaspoon of dulce de leche between two of these cookies - the spices and the caramel were made for each other, and I imagine tastes something like David Lebovitz's Speculoos a Tartiner.

To check out what the other FFwD members made this week, go to the LYL section of the French Fridays with Dorie website.