Spice cookie deliciousness

My neighbor, in a gesture of madness and true generosity of spirit, let me sit down with the last scoop of her Haagen Dazs Speculoos and Caramel ice cream the other night. It is her favorite flavor, which just shows what a wonderful woman she is...sharing her vices with me! Of course, it was love at first sight. And it reminded me of those visits to the Netherlands...of windmill cookies with tea and coffee, of ridiculous indulgences that were called a healthy breakfast. Visions of spices dancing in my head...

I remember purchasing a container of speculaas spice on one of those trips, but it didn't make it through all these international moves. Sad. So when my neighbor mentioned that not only was that her favorite ice cream but also her favorite cookie, I became inspired. After all, I must replace what I devoured. Google, here I come! After comparing a bunch of recipes, I decided to go with Chocolate and Zucchini’s. With, of course, a few modifications.

The first was to make my own spice mix. I ground whole cloves and some cardamom seeds in our coffee grinder. Don’t try this with your only, wedding-gifted, hard-to-find-in-South-America coffee grinder, like I did. The clove oil ate the finish off the plastic lid, even though as soon as I’d scraped the clove/cardamom paste off, I dropped it into soapy water. Oops. My mix is probably a little heavy on cloves, but I followed this general ratio for the ground spices:

2 cinnamon, 2 nutmeg, 1 ginger, 1 cloves, ½ cardamom, ½ white pepper.
Because I don’t have a special pan or cool cookie cutters, I washed a never-used stamp and pressed it into the dough for a little texture, then cut them out with heart cutters, because it’s almost Valentine’s Day. (Oh, and free-range eggs. People, egg yolks are NOT supposed to be yellow!)

The final result: crunchy bottom, soft center. I wish my brown sugar was a little higher quality; there are a few unpleasant sugar crunches in the middle of a bite, but overall, they're tasty. Give them a day's rest (as many commentators on the sites I'd looked at mentioned) and I think they'll be splendid.




Here’s the recipe:
(adapted from Chocolate and Zucchini: )
3 ½ cups flour
175 grams (or about 1 ½ sticks) butter, at room temperature
1 small egg
1 1/2 cups of dark, dark brown sugar (add a little molasses if you only have light brown sugar)
2 teaspoons mixed ground cake spices (traditionally cinnamon and cloves)

Mix together butter, egg, sugar and spices, then add the flour by hand and knead dough until it is well combined and holds together. Like this:




Separate into two balls. Roll out the first on a sheet of waxed paper (no flour) to about ½ inch thickness, then cut as desired. Remove cookies to a parchment lined cookie sheet and bake at 375F for apx. 12 minutes. Don’t overbake...they should be slightly soft in the center. Pull the parchment off the sheet and onto a rack to allow cookies to cool.