Speculaas - A Childhood Memory Evolves

You can buy molds everywhere. Old molds, really old molds, new molds, newer molds ... you name it. Not every mold is unique. In fact many molds were just "cranked out", the demand for inexpensive molds was great so woodworkers used machines to produce molds. Owning a unique mold was a desire of mine: Two years ago we celebrated a big anniversary: 500 years of the Reformation. October 31, 1517 was the day Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses on the door to the church in Wittenberg, Germany. (Nice story, if it's true nobody knows.) The beginning of a reform. An anniversary like this calls for a cookie mold. A wood carver in the Check Republic carved a cookie mold for me - from a photo of a statue of Martin Luther in front of the town hall of Wittenberg. I tried different kind of dough. In the end the spiced dough won. The mold is a bit flat. I added 2 bars at the side to give the cookie more body. Good, old Martin - if he knew what I did with him he would turn

Molds come in many sizes - small to big (aka huge). This one produces a 35" cookie, yap - that's almost a yard!!! Many hands make for light work - and tons of fun. Our oven was too small. (A pizza oven would have been better.) We had to cut that poor guy in half.    

Mr. Dandoy had a world-famous bakery in Brussels. Even to this day the Dandoy House makes the best  speculaas . They are considered the benchmark. The wooden boards did wear – the company needed new once constantly. Mr. Dandoy and Mr. Vande Vorde teamed up – and a career in cookie board carvings was established. Jan Vande Voorde was a furniture maker/wood carver. He just took the opportunity and carved speculaas boards, it provided him a living. Not many people made these boards at that time. Jan Vande Voorde carved for professional bakeries as well as for himself; he sold his molds locally at craft fairs. However his contacts were international, he had customers in the US and Japan.  Interestingly the local, Flemish people did not pay much attention to him. He tried to retire at age 80 – but that didn’t work. He might well be carving in heaven at this point. I was fortunate to see a mold for sale – a court jester, all but 13” in height.  (The mold, the molded cook

... Call On The International Community. The key to all the baking: mold and dough have to go together. If not: disaster is going to strike.      The trusted speculaas dough came out of the mold crumbling. Frustration set in. What saved the day? A cry for help on social media. There are Facebook groups dedicated to nothing else but molded cookies. People from all over the world belong to these groups. And they heart my cry!!! The solution came from an expert in Holland: wrong dough. The mold is NOT a speculaas mold but a “tai tai” mold – it requires honey dough. When I tried the honey dough – the little guys came out of the mold in one piece. It was just after Christmas – so I called them my little kings. (In reality they are Santa’s – I just had to rename them.)     

Many molds are sleeping in museums and cloisters. Nice to look at – and preserved. Luckily there are some museums and some companies in Europe and Switzerland that make resin copies of these old molds. They copy the molds with all the imperfection there are – sometimes including even the woodworm. The mold below is a copy of an Austrian mold from 1790 - sold by the Smithsonian. The date was carved on the mold but doesn’t appear on the cookie. There are initials (of the carver?) F. F. right and left to her feet. The Smithsonian calls it a gingerbread mold which it very well may be – looks good in speculaas .   J It took me a whole evening to make these 8 ladies. (Since my purchase I have seen other molds with the same subject: lady with big hair, fan, dress, always holding something in her left hand, in this case she is holding a flower! Fans were in fashion among young women in 1780-1790.   One could drop it – and the chosen one could pick it up. She is up to no good I wo

     In February 2018 life gave me lemons. It was soooo close to Valentine’s Day – heart shaped cookies sweetened the day.  The mold is a “Printen” mold from Aachen, Germany; I used Hungarian honey dough with an egg wash– a speculaas dough would have worked as well. Baking can be therapeutic. You do something with your hands – and for other people (unless you want to eat them all yourself). A little bit of creativity on a day you feel low – happiness and satisfaction might crawl back in.

A simple mold, (not quite the right) dough, and the decision: pressing with background or without. (Without would have been the answer.) And how to package them? Real speculaas are brown in color thanks to the spices used: Cinnamon, ginger, ground anise seed, coriander, cardamom, nutmeg, allspice, mace, cloves, white and black pepper. Darker once often have cocoa, some recipes omit the ginger … and so it goes. The internet delivers many different recipes.   I went for a simple one: 450 g butter, 600 g brown sugar, 900 g flour (a simple ratio: 3:4:6), 1 egg, some milk, spices 350 F, 10-12 minutes butter sugar flour egg Raising agent extra Dandoy, Belgium 300 g 600 g 1000 g 0 1 tbsp bicarbonate of soda Salt, spices, 0.1 l water Mama’s-rezepte.de 150 g 200 g 300 g 1 ½ tsp baking powder

Speculaas, Speculoos, Spekulatius   Speculaas   are thin, very crunchy,  caramelized , slightly browned, spiced cookies. They are made using sturdy, carved wooden molds that depict ornately detailed figures like animals or costumed men and women. The back is flat. They were peculiar to Belgium, Holland, Rhineland and Westphalia. Nowadays they are available world-wide. Speculaas have a special place in my heart. We ate them at Christmas time. You put your hand into the box, pulled out a thin, spicy cookie … and that crispy thing went right into your mouth. Repeat. There were quite a few cookies in a 500 gram box. I had all forgotten about these little gems – all these years living in foreign countries do that to you. But in recent years “molded cookies” became a big subject in my life. I fell in love with cookies that require a mold, preferable a wooden one. It brings me back to the “good, old days”, when life was simpler. Butter, sugar, flour, spices …. No nee