When it is about food, I love so read history. It explains why we eat what we eat and it defines our culture. Therefore a small history lesson below:
In 1747, the German Andreas Marggraf succeeded to produce crystallized sugar from the juice of sugar beets. Since that moment, Napoleon was focused on sugar production from beets. The French Charles-François Lebrun, responsible for the area of the Netherlands during the 19th Century, propagated the sugar beets to the Netherlands. However, due to wars, slavery and trade, the local sugar production was not always the most bestselling sugar. Since Dutch people love efficiency, a new product was made from the leftover liquid from the sugar production: Stroop! Nowadays, ‘Stroop’ is one of the Dutch food items registered as Guaranteed Traditional Specialty in Brussel. It is a thick sweet syrup, delicious with ice cream and pancakes and the main ingredient for these cookies.
‘Stroop’ Cookies
Equipment
- Oven
- Cooking pan
Ingredients
- 100 gram Brown Sugar
- 100 gram Dutch Stroop
- 100 gram Butter
- 2 tbsp Milk
- 1 tsp Ginger Powder
- ½ Orange
- 1 tsp Baking Powder
- 250 gram Flour
- 100 gram Sugar
- 3 tbsp Water
- 100 gram Nuts
Instructions
Preparation
- Preheat your oven on 170 degrees Celsius or 338 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Chop the nuts in smaller pieces.
Baking the Cookies
- Add the sugar, stroop, butter and milk to a cooking pan. Bring this to the boil. Once the sugar is dissolved in the mixture, turn off the heat.
- Add the ginger powder, grated orange peel, baking powder and flour. Mix until you have a firm cookie dough.
- Divide the cookie dough on the baking sheet and bake them for 10-15 minutes.
- Whenever the cookie is brown and done, take it out of the oven. Just make sure that you directly cut the cookie in squares. This needs to be done when the cookie is still hot.
Decorating
- Add the sugar and water to a cooking pan, and bring to a boil. Then turn the heat to a low-medium. Make sure you don’t stir in the mixture. It is ready when the mixture is around 160 degrees celsius or 320 degrees Fahrenheit. You can test this by dipping a clean spoon in the sugar mixture and then cool the spoon in ice cold water. When the syrup turns into hard caramel, the syrup is ready.
- Dip a third of the cookie in the caramel and add the chopped nuts. Be careful, the caramel is very hot!
- Let the cookies cool down before consuming.