The arrival of December is always a cue for Silver Bullet to bake Speculaas and make Oliebollen. It has always been like that since I knew him.
It’s like the baking gnome in him has been awakened and come hell or high water, there would be Silver Bullet shopping for ingredients, raiding my baking pan and moseying in my kitchen.
Like an accidental tradition, this ritual has been planted into our household since. And now that we are living in Holland, there is no excuse for Silver Bullet not to bake his Speculaas for Sinterklaas which we celebrated on the 5th of December.
This Silver Bullet bake-and-raid-my-kitchen tradition stays strong.
The DoughSpread it aroundAnd spread it some more!Slice it when it’s hot!
Not that I’m complaining.
It’s just that being held captive in the wanderlust of a baking Speculaas in the oven makes me peachy. I heart the aroma of baking. It’s like incense firing up the senses to your soul – a spiced eu de parfum for the home!
300g Brown sugar (Dutch “Basterdsuiker” if possible, if not use brown cane sugar)
3 flat tablespoons of gingerbread spices (spekulaaskruiden)
3 tablespoons of milk
2 knife points of baking soda
2 knife points of salt
Almonds for decoration
Instructions
Mix all of the above together until you get a smooth brown ball.
Spread this mass equally over a baking tray (approx 1 cm thick)
Put in the oven. Do not preheat.
Bake for about 30-45 minutes at 175 degrees celsius*.
Using a sharp knife to slice through the dough, cut immediately into blocks after taking it out of the oven. Use the almond pieces as a guide. Do not wait till it cools down
Notes
Baking time depends a lot on your oven and how thick the dough was spread out over the tray. Finding the right baking time takes some trial and error. Cutting the dough after it cools down will break the cookies
Grubbs n Critters http://grubbsncritters.com/
This is Silver Bullet’s late Opa’s recipe and in the last decade, he has made it his own. It’s like a family legacy. One that stays with our family.
This is a Dutch version of your typical good, old gingerbread. They really are pretty darn good and I’m bringing them over to #FiestaFriday to share the love!
There’s always this festive feeling lingering about. It is usually the time of the year to slack just that little bit, and take in all the holiday mood for all that festive and holiday-ish feeling I could get. It’s nice.
In this part of the world, there is no escaping that festive feeling with Sintaklass making its grand entrance in the first week of December on the 5th. While not everyone celebrates or condones the celebration of Sintaklass, there were a lot of buzz around it.
It’s like the Dutch annual viral infection of sugar and presents overload. Everyone catches the bug. Everyone talks about it, the media fuels it and everywhere you go will be inundated by the spirit of it.
In the office, the Dutch hospitality continues on. Not only was I greeted by a gift on my desk one morning (like everyone else), they also generously offered parents to claim for the gift which we could buy for our own kids. The caveat: we need to bring our children to the special Sintaklass party for which they had organised for the employees.
My gift from Sintaklass once upon a morning in the officeSintaklass Party for kids in the office!
And so we did and the kids had a blast eating rubbish, being entertained by some Dutch Kids TV presenters and getting presents from “Sintaklass” (ahem!)
The fun did not end there.
On the home front, the kids’ Oma and Opa went pretty elaborate with the celebration that started from “Zwarte Piete” ringing the doorbell and only to disappear before anyone could open the door.
The kids were then greeted with sacks of presents that had suddenly appeared all over the front yard. Funny how that all happened…Then the fun of opening presents, after presents, after presents began. Everyone got something.
Ding Dong! Zwarte Piet left a message!Present hunt! Sacks and sacks of presents!Zwarte Piet left his hat…and Spud took it! Now, the gift…Spud attentively reading the poem written for her
The gifts, in my opinion, could comfortably tie them over for at least 5 more birthdays. But don’t tell that to my mother-in-law; she would not have that. ;p
As with tradition, each gift should be accompanied by a written poem which should be read out loud. The only person who did write any poem at all was Silver Bullet and he did this for his parents, the kids and me. Spud read the entire poem by herself!
For the kids, it’s a load of fun and from now on, a part of their Dutch culture. For us parents, it’s shelling monopoly money to buy unnecessary nice gifts to fuel the economy. For the many grandparents, it is a great another excuse to pamper their grand kids with spoils than they would already have.
For me, it was a fun experience. I remember Silver Bullet and I used to do something like this during Christmas a long time back. We called it the Tacky Christmas where we were only allowed to buy presents that are tacky but useful. The rule is not to overspend for we must only work with a small budget with a minimum number of gifts. It was fun!
I can’t remember why we stopped doing it. I suspect it was probably because we started having kids and did not have time to shop for anything anymore.
With Sintaklass, I bet this is something we’ll be doing for a long time to come; or at least till the kids realise that Sintaklass has nothing to do with their presents.
The next one will be scheduled for 25th. Not that we celebrate Christmas in the religious ways, and whether we are in Singapore, Thailand and now the Netherlands, gifting during this time of the year will always be in our DNA. I just don’t know if I have the capacity to follow-through this year.
Speaking of gifting, we’ve been blessed by a little unexpected package that came from our next door neighbour in Bavaria a few days ago.
All the way from Germany! Thank you Christina!
Christina, one of my new blogger friend behind Just Blue Dutch has taken the time to not only make but hand-written a card and then mail it! How completely awesome is that, right?!
Thank you Christina for such a thoughtful gift. It was a wonderful surprise, indeed.
It certainly is looking like fun and delight will be in tow. What can I say, it’s really just December in the air. So mote it shall be!
Everything I have lived by when it comes to meal times, bedtime, candies, chocolates and french fries for the kids have, by now, gone out of the window.
Not entirely, but almost. I wonder how long more it would take before I totally say fuck it.
Our days are shorter but at the same time, longer.
Shorter because we are now right smack in the middle of a period where day light begins just before 8 a.m (that’s essentially 9 a.m if not for daylight savings) and it starts getting dark again at about 4 p.m.
And on some days when it’s foggy and rainy, the day feels like it’s been robbed out of its light. The only consolation to this is that short days are only seasonal. It’s a matter of time before we have longer days again.
Still that don’t bother me; at least not as much as our days getting longer and apart from me considering if I should re-consider working at all, there really isn’t much we could do.
It really has been some exhausting weeks as we re-juggled our routine around because our offices are too far away from where we live. These days we are out of the house before 7 a.m and we don’t get home almost 12 hours later.
For the kids, that means they are hauled out of bed before 6 a.m (resulting in very grumpy, tired kids), a long day outside of home in day-care, school then back to daycare. They get picked up by 6.30 a.m, have their dinner after 7 (sometimes 7.30 p.m when I realise they have nothing to eat so I need to whip up something quick) and only in bed after 7.45 sometimes even after 8 p.m.
They don’t usually sleep immediately and it would take them longer before they get to sleepy land.
Those timings are a far cry from my usual 5.30 pm dinner and no later than 6.30 p.m bedtime. Ask anybody who knows me and they’ll tell you that I can be quite the Nazi when it comes to routine. This happened in the last 6 years (after children).
With a flexibility range of +/- 35 minutes (sometimes up to an hour on special occasions), I’ve really been quite the stickler for routine. And darn proud of it.
These days, the timings I solemnly abide by have all gone out of the window since I started working. Getting the kids home before 6 and in bed by 6.30 p.m are unheard of these days. Hell! They’ll be lucky to even get fed by 7 p.m!
Our days have been loooong and I feel so sorry for the kids. They wake up exhausted every single day and by the end of the day, I see how shattered they are from the full-on stimulation when we pick them up from daycare.
Poor kids are usually the last few to get picked up too! While most kids would he happy to see their parents after a long day, ours didn’t really give a crap. In fact, for most of the time, it’s quite an effort to peel them away and hurry them up as the daycare will be closing for the day.
Funny little imps. I can only take that as a good sign.
For us, we spend a great deal on the road. We live too far away from our respective offices. On bad days (which have been often), it would take us more than 2.5 hours to get to work. And that’s one way.
And, on days when I have to take the public transport home, it would take me no less than 2 hours each way; but first with a stop-over to my in-laws to pick up the kids who have kindly spared us their time to help us release the monkeys from day-care.
It’s a whole new set-up, a whole new routine, plentiful of inconveniences and a bunch of screwed up timings. As much as I don’t like messing up with the kids’ meal and bed times, I have since given up feeling stressed out about it.
These days, I’m more nonchalant and sometimes, I find myself stretching their bedtime a little bit just so that I could spend a little bit more time cuddling with them. Some days, they are even begging to go to bed already!
“Mama, I’m really starving!” also seems to be a regular mantra these days when we pick them up from day-care. Not something I used to hear often, mind you but music to my ears nonetheless (because they really do want to eat!). I just feel bad that they have to wait while I prep.
On weekends, we are now mostly doing brunch or lunner. And lots of snacks in between.
As if that is not enough, I let them have more sugar than I used to (some chocolates here, ice-cream there, candies here and puddings there) and given the Dutch food culture, I am a little more lenient with them consuming french-fries, pancakes and hagelslags (chocolate sprinklers) than I used to.
I still have yet to hear them begging me to stop already with the sweets.
Heck! I’m baking even more than I used to, too.
Then comes the question: How long more before I actually say fuck it (with proper meal times, early bedtime and lesser sugary food)?
Internally, I have to admit that I’m struggling. After more than 6 years in training, twice over, I cringe in discomfort with the kids erratic meal times, bedtime and sugar/junk intake. Í don’t like the idea one bit.
But in reality, I think I’m kind of there with the fuck it (with timing and routine). Until we find another place elsewhere to go back to some decent timings, we’ll just have to wing it. Along with errands, laundry, ironing, chores and cleaning up after 3 cats thrown in.
The good news is: Despite the erratic routine, sleep deprivation and exhaustion, we are still breathing, the kids are still alive and the cats are still around (although there have been the odd occasions we forgot to top up their bowl).
At the very least, we have a roof over our heads and we are not starving. Something to be thankful for. Time will tell if the kids will grow up to be dysfunctional or get the crazies. I’ll keep you posted.
That is the long and short of things. Bring it on!
