Cookie n Spice

Recipe: Speculaas (Eggless)
      
I had been wanting to try out a cookie recipe for so long. But since there are truckloads of different biscuits and cookies available at the shops, I didn't get around to making any until yesterday.

Speculaas is a cinnamon and ginger flavoured sweet cookie. The interesting thing about this is the range of spices used. The thought of biting into these sweet and spicy cookies made me curious and eager to try them out.




My touches to the recipe I was supposed to follow are - I decided to omit the eggs and add ground flax seeds instead. I also left out the lemon zest and used lime juice. I added a little pepper to pack a little punch to every bite. Also, I didn't grind the almonds to really fine powder. This was partly because I thought I might end up with a mushy almond paste if I ground it for too long. So as soon as it looked somewhat powdered, I stopped grinding.

Once the dough for this cookie comes together, the yumminess begins. If it wasn't for the curiousity of how the end-product tasted, I would have eaten up the entire cookie dough - it's so good, it has no raw eggs plus you can save on baking time and electricity/gas (depending on the type of oven you have) Yes folks, I had a tough time stopping myself from gobbling up the entire dough.




SPECULAAS (EGGLESS)
Adapted from the Speculaas recipe at Joy Of Baking. To check out their original recipe click here.


Ingredients:


All purpose flour - 1 and 1/2 cups
Almond meal - 1/2 cup (Almond meal can be made by powdering blanched almonds. In order to know how to blanch almonds, click here. I, however, did not powder the blanched almonds extremely fine)
Baking powder - 1 tsp
Salted Butter - 1/2 cup (at room temperature)
Demarara Sugar - 3/4 cup (powdered)
Flax Seeds - 3 Tbsp
Juice of 1 Lime.
Almonds pieces for topping

Spice Mix:
Candied Ginger - 1 piece (of size 2cm x 2cm approx)
Dried Ginger - 1/2 inch piece
Cinnamon - a piece of 2 inches length
Nutmeg - 1/8 th of a whole nutmeg
Cloves - 5 nos
Black Pepper - 1/2 tsp

Grind together the ingredients listed under the spice mix along with the flax seeds.

In a bowl, whisk together, the ground spices and flax seeds mixture, flour, almond meal and baking powder.

In a separate bowl, beat the butter and sugar till fluffy. Add the lime juice and mix well. Add the flour mixture to this and knead till well combined.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C.

Make small balls of dough and flatten to about 3 mm thickness. Cut the cookies into the desired shapes using cookie moulds and lay them on a buttered baking pan leaving a few cms between each cookie. Top each cookie with a piece of almond.

Bake for about 12 minutes or till the sides begin to get a light brown colour.




Mine turned out to be beautifully speckled ones. Every mouthful of this cookie is bursting with the flavours of the spices. This is a must-try for folks who are fond of sweet and spicy flavour combinations.

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All the dishes posted in this blog have been cooked by me. Some of the recipes are mine and some of them adapted / borrowed in which case, the link to the original source is provided.

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