Banketbakkerij

banketbakkerij a Dutch baker’s shop specializing in pastries, cakes, and Dutch koekjes (see cookie). In some shops it is possible to drink a cup of coffee and enjoy a cake on the premises.

Speculaas (speculoos in Belgium and Spekulatius in Germany), Christmas biscuits (traditionally baked for St Nicholas’s Eve on 5 December) made of wheat flour, butter, sugar, and a mixture of spices in which cinnamon is predominant. The dough is baked in decorative moulds. The biscuits are crisp and flattish and may have cut almonds pressed into the underside. For special occasions, a very large speculaas may be made in a special mould. The Abraham, as Ileen Montijn (1991) explains, is baked for a man’s 50th birthday:

a large, flat, edible doll, once made of bread dough, nowadays more cake-like and elaborately decorated, or even mistakenly taken to be a kind of gingerbread man …. The basis for this is in the Bible, John, 9: 57: ‘Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou seen Abraham?’ The giving of Abraham dolls to people on their fiftieth birthday (and Sarah dolls to women, as a kind of consolation prize) has … become more rather than less popular.