St. Nicolaas

Last night we celebrated St. Nicolaas. During the day we wrapped the presents, hid them all through the house and I made list of what was where. The kids were to find it all and then unwrap it. There was something for everybody.
We also baked kruidnootjes in the afternoon. This year I didn't make borstplaat or taaitaai or pepernoten, maybe somewhat later in the year.
Some presents were just toys, others were more interesting, like the "experiments" boxes. We have 5 and my partner will do those with the girls. This will be quite educational.
Some of the stuff I bought on e-bay, others in the shops. I tried to keep the spending a bit down this year. The kids were involved in picking presents for their siblings, I do consider it important that they try to put themselves in the minds of theirs siblings to see what they would like. It worked out really well.

Some recipes:

kruidnootjes:
250 gr flour
2 gr baking powder
5 gr cinnamon powder
2,5 gr. clove powder
2 gr. cardamom powder
1 gr. ginger powder
125 gr butter
125 gr demerrera sugar
50 gr golden syrup
3 gr salt.
Put flour, baking powder and spiced in a bowl. Mix in a pan butter, sugar and syrup with salt and melt it all. Mix both mixtures together to a well mixed batter. Leave this until its more firm. Make small balls out of it and put those on a greased baking tray into the oven, 180C for 15 minutes. Take kruidnootjes out of the oven and leave to cool.

Taai-taai & pepernoten
250 gr flour
100 gr honey
1 tbs syrup
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
3 tsp cinnamon powder
1 tsp anis powder
1 tsp nutmeg powder
1 tsp clove powder

Warm the honey until soft and put syrup into it. Mix flour, spices and baking powder. Stir honey into flour mix to make a firm dough. Make large shapes for Taai-taai and very small balls, really close together for pepernoten. Put it on a greased baking tray and bake on 160C until done, for about 15 to 20 mins. Taai-Taai is usually made in the shape of dolls.

Borstplaat
12 tbs white sugar
4 tbs cream
some taste, like: vanilla, lemon, cocoa, raspberry aroma or instant coffee. I basically only use vanilla aroma or cocoa powder as the kids love those tastes. mix sugar with cream and cook it slowly, let it cook for about 5 minutes. When a drip becomes hard in cold water it is right. When you want to use instant coffee or cocoa powder you have to use that while cooking, the rest comes in when the pan is taken off the stove. You can make circles out of this or use cookie cutters to make shapes. Make sure the cookie cutters are heat resistent. You can do this in 1 ways: 1 way is
to put the cookie cutters flat on baking paper and pour a bit of the fluid in there. The other way is having the fluid on a baking tray and cut them out of that.

Speculatius
50 gr self raising baking flour
50 gr flour
75 butter
50 gr demerrera sugar
1/2 tbs speculaas spices **
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbs almond shavings
Preheat oven to 160C
Put all ingredients in a bowl, cut the butter in small chunks with 2 knives. and knead the lot to a nice dough. Roll the dough out to 1 cm thick. Put cut out pieces (either with cookie cutters or just squares) on a greased baking tray and bake for 25 to 30 mins in preheated oven. Let cool for 10 mins.

** speculatius spices=
1 tsp cinnamon powder
1 tsp cardamom powder
1/2 tsp ginger powder
1/2 tsp clove powder

Well... now we will go prepare for Yule / X-mas.
I will post some of the recipes for stuff we use for Yule as well in one of the next posts.