Dutche Treats….Boterkoek!

This is so exciting: my first guest post!! And what an honour to post at HoneyB’s blog! I instantly knew I had to make something special so I decided to bake a typically Dutch treat: Boterkoek.

In the past I’ve baked a lot of Boterkoek, but I always used a pre-made mix of Koopmans. Now I wanted to make it from scratch.

Boterkoek is a flat round biscuit that is traditionally made with butter (boter), it has to be butter otherwise it’s not a proper boterkoek! The Boterkoek is usually baked in a special round Boterkoek tin from 22 to 24 centimeter. The butterbiscuit is then cut into wedges, leaving them somewhere between a cake and a cookie. But you can also use a pie dish (I used a 9-inch silicone dish) or a baking sheet and cut into squares.

I’ve found loads of different recipes for Boterkoek on the Internet and decided on trying these two: Oma’s Boterkoek(number one, in English) and Allerlekkerste boterkoek(number two, in Dutch). Number one used baking powder and almond extract, I skipped the almond extract as I wanted to make a boterkoek au naturel. The flavour of number one was okay, but not exactly what I had in mind. Number two had no baking powder, but it did have some vanilla sugar. This one tasted great, but the texture was too dry, I think it might have had a little too much flour in it. In my opinion the boterkoek should still have a somewhat soft texture…..

O well, this meant the search for the perfect Boterkoek continued….. I adapted the second recipe to my liking and it turned out almost perfect as I made one mistake: I used regular sugar instead of white castor sugar. So yesterday I tried it one last time: perfection!!! Or so I thought…. Luckily both my parents and my coworkers agreed with me!!

Boterkoek

250 gram butter
250 gram white castor sugar
1 bag of vanilla sugar (8 gram)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
250 gram flour
1/4 tsp salt
Preheat the oven at 200 degrees Celsius. Grease the tin with butter or spray. In medium bowl, mix together butter, white castor sugar and vanilla extract. Add 3/4 of the beaten egg and mix. Sift flour and salt and mix with wet ingredients. Put dough in greased 9 inch pie plate. Brush 1/4 of the beaten egg over the dough. Decorate the dough using a fork that you gently press down into the dough while making stripes. Bake at for 25 minutes, the boterkoek should have a golden colour and still a bit soft to the touch. Let the boterkoek cool down completely and cut it into wedges or squares. If the boterkoek is cut into wedges I always cut it into 12 wedges, this means 7,5 WW Points per wedges. This time I cut it into 34 squares, which means 2,5 WW Points per square.