I only really know about Speculoos biscuits as an accompaniment of espresso or café coffee. Order a coffee, and get a lovely little spicy biscuit wrapped in plastic. I’d mostly thought of it as a ginger sort of thing.

If you like your speculoos enough, you can buy the same biscuits they use in cafés here on Amazon.

Also recently Time to Cook Online Blog gave a recipe for making your own Spekulaas biscuits, based on a Dutch recipe, where they are common. In the Netherlands, you can buy the spice mix, but elsewhere you just have to make it yourself. I’m not rushing to do it because either my pestle and mortar are not very good or my technique is poor – it goes all over the place! I’m not in a hurry to grind cloves by hand.

Interestingly, Time to Cook does not list ginger as one of the spices in the mix – but the Wikipedia page does.

The reason for my renewed interest was a trip to a French hypermarket while we were in Normandy last week. In addition to the classy French food and booze and the crate full of French stationery destined for the classroom we bought, we also strayed in the “Pâté à tartiner” aisle where there are things to spread onto baguettes for French children’s tea time. We swooped on some Cora own brand white chocolate spread and then eagle-eyed P also spotted some Speculoos spread.

Once we got home we found it’s delicious! It almost has the colour and grainy texture of peanut butter but is sweet and spicy. The jar will not last long in our house and it’s all we can do to remember to spread it on bread and not just eat it out of the jar with a spoon. I haven’t seen it in UK supermarkets, but you can buy it on eBay. (Also available in crunchy!)

Whilst searching for the spread, I also found on Amazon this Speculoos syrup – similar, I suppose to the sort of syrup Starbucks use to make a gingerbread lattè. Another suggestion for its use is to flavour whipped cream. Delicious suggestion.

Photo credit – Charles01. PS is it ok to link to images hosted on wikipedia or do I have to copy them?