FFwD Rewind: Speculoos

This week's French Fridays with Dorie recipe is Cinnamon-Crunch Chicken, which appears to be some unholy union of speculoos (cinnamon cookies), creme fraiche, and chicken. I'll get to that later in the week. Since I couldn't find speculoos in the store, and it's a recipe from Around My French Table that the group baked last year, now seemed as good a time as any to catch up on the recipe (pg 406).

The dough came together in a snap. It's a standard case of mixing the dry (seasoned with cinnamon, ginger, and cloves) and wet ingredients separately, and then mixing the two together. Roll out the dough in two sheets and refrigerate for three hours. The most laborious part is trying to work quickly with the cursed cookie cutters. I hate making cut-out cookies. I don't move through the kitchen in smooth, steady, efficient movements, so my cut-outs end up misshapen, with many trips back and forth to re-cool in the fridge.

For me, these are not delicious enough to be worth the pain in the butt nature of handling cut-out cookies. I'd happily eat a plateful if someone else baked and served them to me with coffee, though.

Dorie proposes all sorts of ideas for these cookies. She says they work as sandwich cookies, filled with jelly or nutella or chocolate ganache. Oh, baby, those all sound good to me. I made a few with apricot jelly. Yum. They're better with the jelly than they are on their own.

Conclusion: Liked it, but not so much that I'd choose to make them over other cinnamon-ey treats.

I hope to return to Hawaii tomorrow. We all spent the weekend strewn about on couches, suffering colds in the petri dish known as my house. Blech. Fingers crossed that Charlie feels mostly better tomorrow, so a) I can go to the supermarket b) I don't have to watch Finding Nemo over and over and over and over again. I'm on the upswing (I was the first to get sick), but my fellas are still in sorry shape.