When I told my sweet-toothed nieces and nephews that I was making their beloved speculoos cookies, their response was blank incomprehension … until I clarified the link with the brown sugar and cinnamon-flavoured spread they eat by the jar-load. Oh, they said, faces lighting up as far as teenage cool allowed: you mean Biscoff! It seems Lotus, the Belgian company that produces those snappy little biscuits you get in the hairdressers, has recently rebranded speculoos, presumably for ease of pronunciation. Biscuits for coffee; they now do what they say on the packet.
Whatever you call them, however, they’re a close relative of the much older, and more boldly spiced speculaas, a descendant of the medieval pepper cakes that Belgian food writer Regula Ysewijn describes as “the Low Countries gingerbread”. Unlike its plastic-wrapped cousins, speculaas come in many shapes and sizes and, though they’re eaten throughout the year, Ysewijn tells me that St Nicholas-shaped ones are particularly popular around the Christmas period. Worry not, you don’t need a special mould to make a gift that even grumpy adolescents will enjoy– just say the magic “B” word, and they might even crack a smile.
