Easy Speculoos Cookie Crust Recipe | Julie Blanner (2024)

FAQs

Why are speculoos cookies so good? ›

While speculoos, and its slightly spicy flavor (ingredients include cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves, and ginger), tickles many a Belgian adult's nostalgic tendencies, the shortbread biscuit is more than ever a thing of the present.

Line the crust with foil, parchment, or a paper coffee filter. Fill it about two-thirds full with dried beans, uncooked rice (or other uncooked grain berries), pie weights, or granulated sugar. Bake the crust in a preheated 375°F oven for 20 minutes, set on a baking stone or steel if you have one.

Speculoos, the cookie family to which Biscoff belong, are often described as a type of gingerbread, but that's a little misleading. Aside from their use of caramel sugar, speculoos don't have quite the same bite; their spice blend tends toward aroma rather than heat.

In the United States and the United Kingdom, the same company is branded as Lotus Biscoff, short for biscuit with coffee. Company founder Jan Boone Sr. created the original recipe in 1932. In October 2020, Lotus Bakeries decided to omit the word "speculoos" from local markets, to harmonise their brand.

With our easy recipe for Cookie Butter (pictured above), you can whip up homemade cookie butter in 20 minutes. Instead of Belgian speculoos, we use a mix of readily available cookies including gingersnaps, graham crackers and shortbread.

While using butter straight out of the fridge for your cookies is a big no-no if you want them to come out all fudgy and delicious, many people tend to use softened or creamed butter in their baked goods. However, in our professional opinion, the best way to apply butter to your cookies is by melting it beforehand.

Non-chilled crust is fairly crumbly and less smooth, which makes it harder to roll out and means it may not look as polished. It will brown more quickly and the final product will likely be tougher, heavier, and more doughy – none of those in a bad way. It will likely have a more intense, butter flavor.

"Blind baking" is the term for baking a piecrust before you add anything to the pie. If you don't blind bake the crust, the liquid from the filling will prevent the pastry from becoming flaky and crisp. You'll be left with a pie that has a soggy bottom. (It tastes just as bad as it sounds).

Blind baking simply refers to baking a pie crust, partially or completely, without any filling in it. Easy enough, right? The only catch is that if you're using pastry dough for your pie (versus a crumb crust), you can't just slide the pie into the oven as-is.

“The mix of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, and cloves makes it quite a tasty treat, and because they are so small it's very easy to eat more than a few of the smaller versions easily.” Because of its association with flying, the Biscoff cookie can also lock into the sensory memory.

What makes Biscoff cookies so good? ›

It all comes down to 3 simple things: its unique flavor, crunchy bite, and iconic shape. For many, it's their cup of coffee's best companion. For others, it's an irresistible treat on its own.

Speculoos – also called biscoff – is similar to gingerbread and 'pumpkin spice' flavour. It also goes well with caramel to make sweet recipes that need a hit of warming spices.

The word 'Speculoos' supposedly derives from the Latin speculum (mirror): it is the mirror image of the wooden mould in which it has been made. But what once was a Belgian and Dutch speciality saved for Sinterklaas has now become a global sensation with manufacturers shipping the biscuits worldwide.