Sparrow in Space

 A dear friend gave us this cookbook Home Made Winter for Christmas and we love it. It’s not just a bunch of recipes, it’s a collection of things you need to know when making everything from scratch. We also own Home Made which tells you how to Home Make just about everything. It’s by a Dutch woman so it includes a lot of typical Dutch recipes. Such as this Ontbijtkoek-recipe.

Ontbijtkoek (click here for pronunciation) or pain d’epiche is literally translated breakfastcookie and it’s a lot like gingerbread. In Holland, people eat it for breakfast, lunch or as a snack. Because it’s kind of sticky, people eat it with butter.

We’d never made ontbijtkoek before, but we like how it turned out. Here’s our version of Ontbijtkoek. We altered the original recipe a bit. I like my ontbijtkoek spicy.

Ingredients
400 grams of self-raising flour
2 teaspoons of ginger powder
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
2 teaspoons of coriander powder
a pinch of allspice
a pinch of salt
200 ml of whole milk
100 grams of brown sugar (see note)
75 grams of honey
75 grams of maple syrup

Heat up your oven to 150°C. Butter up your baking tin.

Get out your mixing bowl and add all the ingredients. Mix it with a whisk until the batter is smooth. Pour it into your baking tin. When your oven is ready, put your Ontbijtkoek in the oven for about an hour.

When done, let it cool on a rack. Cooled down? Wrap it up to make sure it stays nice and sticky. As with most cakes, it’s better the day after baking so control yourself!

Note: This recipe calls for basterdsuiker. Basterdsuiker is a typical Dutch product. It is made by adding invert sugar and caramel to fine white refined sugar. This mixture helps to achieve certain textural structures and keeps baked goods moist. There are three varieties, white, brown and dark brown. Although there is some discussion about this, I’m of the opinion you can use muscovado sugar to replace it.