Speculoos

Dorie Greenspan: Around My French Table Recipe 14

I chose to make these cookies because they seemed a to me a signature dessert of Dorie's.  Plus, I was interested to find out what a cinnamon sugar cookie tasted like in comparison to other spice cookies, like gingersnaps.  With the addition of a room temperature egg, which was left out of the book at printing time, the dough was easy to make.  I rolled it out to 1/4-inch thickness as instructed, and used a 1 1/4-inch cookie cutter and got about 36 cookies.  Somehow, with the same dough thickness and same sized cookie cutter, Dorie gets 70 cookies.  No matter.  I actually have fancy hand-carved speculaas molds, but it takes me a very long time to bake a batch of cookies when I have to mold each cookie with no errors, one by one- so I stuck with what Dorie was using.  The cookies baked up quickly and cooled fairly quickly, which meant we could eat them sooner.  We ate them at a fairly rapid pace over three days, and at least for me the quality/flavor deteriorated as time went on- though only slightly.  I was still perfectly content eating these on day three.  Paul thought they tasted like a cinnamon version of Social Tea (Nabisco) cookies, and noted that they would go well with tea.  We did have them with tea and they do function as more of a tea cookie than as a snacking cookie.  There was something addictive about them- i wanted to keep eating them (maybe because they are thin?) even though I didn't think they were particularly special.  No doubt, these cookies are good, and I might even make them again, but I would definitely increase the spice level.  I like my spice cookies to have more kick (I am a huge fan of ginger cookies, snap or no snap), and with a little tweaking, these could be real winners.