Gevulde Koeken

Today I made “Gevulde Koeken” (Stuffed Biscuits). Gevulde Koeken are an everyday biscuit that you can find at any local Dutch supermarket or a bakery: it’s buttery and indulgent and best eaten freshly baked, slightly warm from the oven. Amandelspijs (“almond paste”) is one those fantastic sweet fillings of Dutch cookies. It’s very similar to the more internationally known sweet soft almond filling for cake called frangipane but contains fewer ingredients. The Dutch bakeries make different type of cookies with amandelspijs and Gevulde Koeken are probably the best sold

The Recipe

Before making the actual cookies, you need to make the amandelspijs a few days before. It needs to rest in the fridge to fully develop the taste. The recipe for amandelspijs is super simple: equal amounts of almond meal and sugar, egg and grated lemon peel. My go-to recipe reference is on the website of Laura’s Bakery.

For the actual cookie dough, I followed Rutger’s recipe on Rutger Bakt: Rutger won the very first edition of the Dutch Bake Off in 2013 on has a huge collection of baking recipes on his baking blog. He uses 50% plain flour and 50% Zeeuwse bloem, which is a lower protein flour that is used for baking biscuits and cakes. This flour gives the biscuit of the Gevulde Koeken a more crispy bite. I used Lighthouse biscuit, pastry & cake flour which you can buy at the local supermarket and reduced the caster sugar amount with about 10 grams to make it slightly less sweet.

The Gevulde Koeken turned out delicious: crispy on the outside, with soft amandelspijs on the inside. The outside tastes like a regular butter biscuit. I struggled to stuff the biscuits to the brim with right amount of amandelspijs, because I didn’t want them to overflow in the oven. I think next time I will make the Gevulde Speculaaskoeken to give the biscuit a more spiced flavour because I think this will make them more interesting.