- (sniffs) You cling-film wrapped forest.
(epic music)
Hello everybody, it's Barry here.
Hope you are well, welcome to our kitchen.
And today we are doing a recipe that derived
from a poll that I put on Twitter last night.
(metal crashes)
I had a lot of requests.
There's one guy in particular
who really wanted to see Scotch eggs recently.
And I was quite interested
in trying to get like the runny yolk and all that,
but also in the recent Easter egg video,
I mentioned about doing a homemade Biscoff biscuits
or cookies, we'll come onto that in a minute,
and that won!
The Scotch eggs, I'm sure we will do that.
I'm very excited, based on the sausage rolls which we made,
which you guys like hammered that out,
thank you so much.
So, homemade Biscoff,
which I think from my Belgian taste tests,
that I did a few years ago, are also called speculoos.
Yeah, these things.
I mean, generally now they've become so popular,
kinda like autumnal, spicy, loads of spices,
which we'll come on to,
biscuit and like, you get Biscoff cheesecake.
It's like quite a viral food and recipe to make
but they are actually speculoos.
And if you don't believe me, ask any Belgian,
but also on the Biscoff themselves website.
"What does Biscoff mean?"
"Biscoff is the name given to Lotus bakery's
speculoos cookies in North America.
It is derived from the words biscuits and coffee."
Well, that's quite cool.
Course it is, Biscoff, I never knew that,
Biscoff, biscuits and coffee.
That's amazing.
And it's really, really simple.
Let's go.
That is an amazing pub quiz question, actually, isn't it?
Biscoff, biscuits and coffee.
Mind, like. (imitates explosion)
Does take about an hour to get the dough ready,
more from a chilling thing.
(laughs) It's like a drum roll.
First thing, spices, spices.
We have got our five main spices.
There's also some baking powder and bicarbonate of soda
as well, which we'll add in,
but the cinnamon is the priority colour, nutmeg,
ginger, allspice, and then ground cloves.
You can see like, it's almost like a colour wheel.
They're all slightly different shades.
(glass clinks)
Like a nervous butler.
But they're all kind of like autumnal and spicy
and all gonna work together to really, well hopefully,
give it that nice flavour.
Yeah, and when you bite into it,
it's got that sort of like caramelised sugar taste,
hasn't it?
So hopefully we can get that.
So there's no order to this,
just chucking it into a huge old bowl.
This bowl is way too big, but I just thought, hey,
let's have some fun, there we are,
a little bit of baking powder
and its best mate, baking soda or bicarbonate of soda.
Just a little bit of each.
Sometimes people ask you, like, why do you use both?
And I do remember someone told me before,
it's something to do with the acidity levels in one,
they both sort of do a similar job, but one,
I think, I guess it's the bicarb of soda, has got more acid.
I think it's that one.
And the baking powder kind of levels it out
but they kind of work in tandem, if that makes sense.
I hope you enjoyed my TED talk.
(spoon scraping)
Oh my gosh, I really wish I could waft that down the,
so you can smell it,
smell your screen, wherever you are right now,
smell your phone.
Get someone to take your photo, send it to me.
I will retweet that.
(laughs) If you're on a bus.
Smell your phone screen, and get someone to take, no.
Don't do that.
It just, like, smells like a forest,
like a really woody, like I'm trampling through,
there's autumn leaves.
(sniffs) Oh, a stench, but a good stench.
Hang on a sec, this recipe's not just a big bowl of spice.
This isn't an Old Spice advert.
No, we need to add some plain flour
to help make it a biscuit,
or a cookie or a speculoos ora speculaas
or a Biscoff, biscuit and coffee.
It's gonna give us a slightly darker colour
but some sugar we add in a bit will help that,
Now for an unnecessary salt bae.
Unnecessary!
Picked up way too much salt than I needed.
And for the time being, we can leave that,
yeah, it smells like a rustic pine forest or,
"Hello, I'm Forrest."
Oh, by the way, "Forrest Gump II", the book that I read?
Amazing, so good.
Okay-doke, so we've got a bowl of sugar here,
and what we're gonna do,
we need the two sugars combined.
We've got dark brown sugar too,
so we're gonna make a little bit of a medley.
And just 'cause I'm the cheeky chap I am,
we're gonna use the same wooden spoon
that we had before for the flour.
And actually to be honest, you could probably get away
with just using light brown sugar rather than the mix,
of white and the dark, but I don't have any light brown.
So we're gonna just keep mixing that through
to make the medley.
And then that's gonna get medleyed together with our butter.
This next step is (laughs).
Damn my cupboards!
A whisk worth taking.
The butter that I've got here,
this was sat at room temperature for about 20 minutes
but it's a cold day.
It's still not soft enough and it will help the whisk.
So in my microwave.
(reversing sensor beeps)
About 15 seconds in there, just to soften it up.
But I will...
(reversing sensor beeps)
Just to make sure that it doesn't splatter everywhere.
Ooh, better, see?
(Whisk whizzes)
- I probably did that for way longer than I needed to,
but I could just see this one little rogue chunk of butter.
I was like, no, I must get you.
So, this is it done.
The next step, we're gonna incorporate the flour
into the buttery sugary mixture.
We're gonna do a little bit of a workout.
It's going to be spoon and whisk,
spoon and whisk.
(whisk whizzes)
Because, hopefully you can see,
even from that initial batch going in,
and don't forget to scrape down the sides,
but spoon and whisk.
(whisk whizzes)
We're really affecting the texture now.
It's getting slightly, like, drier,
and it might go crumbly, but that's fine,
'cause we're making, effectively, a dough.
So I'm just going to keep spoon and whisk.
(whisk whizzes)
Right, if it looks dry and clumpy like that,
don't be alarmed, like "Oh my gosh!"
It looks like the surface of Mars a little bit, don't it?
But (sniffs) you still smell like a pine wood.
So it might look like this,
but if I just show you, if you pinch it like that,
you can see how it suddenly goes to a dough,
and that's what we'll basically do.
Bring it together roughly into, there we go,
that's so much more now dough-like now,
but the butter, with it being softened,
the purpose of putting that back into the fridge
is to firm that up so we can get those nice shapes on there.
So let me just keep getting that,
I mean, you're probably find if you just scrape it.
Oh wow, yeah, I pretty much got the whole lot there.
Now it's up to you whether you do it into a ball.
But what I find is, whilst you've got something like this,
with biscuit dough, if you make it,
if you've got enough space in your fridge, that is,
it should chill quicker.
And if I leave this in my hand, it's getting quite sticky.
Yeah, Wrap Master 3000.
(cheerful music)
Boom, in there, and it's all (vocalises) together.
Sealed together, chill it in the fridge
for at least 45 minutes to an hour, as I say,
or if you're in a rush, stick it in your freezer.
But wait, it'll be worth it.
(sniffs) You cling-film wrapped forest.
The only thing you probably else need to do,
if you haven't done it already is prepare your baking tin.
I've got one of me Barry Lewis Silpats,
they're out of stock at the moment,
but coming back very, very soon,
or just line it with some baking parchment.
The other thing is that I've got the most random array
of cookie cutters, but I have not got one similar
to the the shape of the biscuit, but that's fine.
It can be whatever you want.
I think a gingerbread man would actually work quite well
with it, 'cause of all the spices,
The other thing is the colour of the biscuits
when we bake them, I'll come onto that in a minute.
It's not quite time to preheat my oven just yet,
because as I say, we're leaving it in the fridge
for an hour.
So, I've got a bit of tidying up to do,
and I will see you in a jiffy
I can't remember if this was an in-house joke
between Mrs. Barry and I,
but when we got this,
I'm sure we mentioned it on the channel.
When we put this kitchen in, I said, "Oh look,
I've got two spice racks!"
Never in my wildest dreams
did I realise that I would fill both of them.
So (laughs) we're putting more in here now.
Yeah, for Christmas, I'm gonna ask for a third spice rack.
We used to want PlayStations and stuff like that.
Now, it's all about them spice racks.
So this is like, I've got two or three boxes like this.
Most of them are gadgets if I don't give them away,
or they go to a charity shop, I keep them,
there's some actually, like the panda bread maker,
do you remember that?
We've got the Oreo hook that I flew on a drone.
Some memories in this box.
I found it, I found what I actually genuinely wanted to get.
This is like a stamper for like Jammy Dodgers,
and it's got that curve shape end, you stamp it in.
I've got a custard cream one as well.
It does actually stamp, they were a little bit rubbish,
they weren't amazing.
So we'll see if we can do that actually.
It might be fun to do a few random ones,
and then I think we'll just do plain ones.
Ah, so I'm leaving my garage now.
I was just in there for like about 10 minutes,
just looking at all these memories.
It's like, I just found like loads of stuff,
I was like, "Oh, I remember, I did that!"
Oh, I guess you can't see me.
Do you remember the 3D printed gadget video I did recently?
I was very kindly sent some of my Barry Lewis logo ones.
The main thing with all of these stampers
from what I remember, just like with the dough now,
is to really keep it floured, so let's get it out.
Flour, flour, flour is so important.
Still smelling bonkers.
In the last few videos we did, we put bonkers on the screen,
there was a guy called Dizzee Rascal, like, "Who's that?"
Don't worry,
that probably made me and Linton feel quite old.
(phone ringing)
- [Mrs. Barry] Hello?
- Hello, do you know where the cookie cutters are?
- [Mrs. Barry] In that cupboard above the oven, pink tin.
- That was my hotline to Mrs. B.
She's doing this on purpose,
she's waiting just to come back,
just as they're freshly baked,
and that's exactly what I'd do.
I've got my stamps, but I wanna find a few more.
All right, I got the tin out,
and to be honest, I don't have any rectangular cutters
and this is gonna do the same job as this anyway.
It's fine.
So let's just try.
So it's about quarter of an inch thick.
Take one out like that, boom!
'Cause it's so firm, it holds the shape.
If we tried doing that when we first made it,
no way that would have worked.
So, depending on how long it takes you to do all these,
repeating on all the dough,
you might wanna just do a little batch.
Keep the rest in the fridge,
even put a little bit of baking parchment
with all of these in the fridge just to hold the shape.
Because if this drops to room temperature,
it could just become a blob when you bake it,
and you do really wanna get that awesome shape.
In fact, I'm going to do another. (gasps)
Yes, amazing! Oh my gosh.
That's all I'm gonna do, make a load more.
Custard cream one, you press the stamp design down.
Then you gotta try and get it out.
Come on.
Oh (laughs) yes!
Like I say, keep it floured, keep it chilled,
and you're gonna smash this.
All right, for reference,
I actually had enough to do two trays,
and what I'm just gonna do,
in fact, I'll just grab this one right here.
These have just been chilled.
But I'm just gonna see if, with a toothpick,
oh, this is actually quite tricky.
If I can just write "Baz" with a toothpick.
And as I do this, my lovely wife,
I nearly called you Lady Barry then. (laughs)
Has just walked into the room.
- Oh, they're custard creams! (laughs)
That is, that's playing with your mind, that.
- [Barry] It is, ain't it? (laughs)
And this is the thing, like I said, with these biscuits,
you don't want to bake them too crazily,
but at the same time,
they do have a bit of a crunch to them.
So we'll see what happens.
- Any reason why you chose the backwards stamp?
- [Barry] Backwards B, what do you mean?
What's backwards about that?
Oh yeah.
(both laugh) - Everything?
- [Barry] Oh no!
What do you think Biscoff stands for?
- I thought you were gonna say sounds like.
- [Barry] Biscuits and coffee.
- Oh! (laughs)
- That's what it's short for, honestly.
Sorry, I just had to get a little clip
of how cute my dogs were looking, they look very chilled.
So, they've got the two different ovens that I use.
This one was actually on the middle shelf, okay?
And they've actually stayed quite thin like that.
The other batch in the corner, I've just got them there.
They were on the top shelf
for the first, sort of, seven minutes.
I had a little look and they were puffed up massively,
probably the baking powder
and the bicarb getting really excited.
So I lowered it and they did actually collapse.
And when I say collapse,
I mean, they kind of got, you can just sort of see,
they're little fatter there in the distance,
whereas these are nice and thin.
Oh, you can see the Baz!
It's kinda held its shape.
Yeah, the custard cream is just about bearable,
but that was just like an added bonus to do it.
Someone did tell me, I don't know if that's true,
but they do actually have moulds that they put these in
to get such an amazing defined shape
when they're making them en masse like that.
But I'm not worried about that.
I'm worried about the taste.
So I've got one, it's still warm.
So if I eat that, it'll just melt in my mouth.
It'll be lovely.
But, by letting it fully cool,
we'll get that proper biscuit texture.
All right, so there we are, cooling down, looking gorgeous,
smelling, again, so good.
So if you turn it over,
you do get slightly more of that colour I wanted to,
but I really feel if I pushed it anymore
they might have just turned to charcoal
and I feel like we've got the balance just right.
So really do monitor that.
Okay folks, I'm not gonna go too crazy
in showing you all of them,
but like the custard cream one, you can see the design here.
Yeah (laughs) but the Berry Lewis logo one, wrong way round.
That's, no, that's the right way round.
No, that's the wrong way round.
But I'm most impressed by my hand-drawn Baz one.
Look at that. (laughs)
Anyway, that doesn't matter.
Let's see what they taste like.
Do we eat all of these?
Does anyone- - Better not.
- (laughs) It depends what they taste like,
they could be rubbish.
Let's go for it.
- Okay. - This shape.
It's got a real nice thinness to it,
so medium shelf, definitely.
- Mm, they smell like it.
- I've just got that smell of an aftershave counter,
in a department store, to be honest.
- Mm, I keep smelling
cloves. - Sort of, spice, mm.
(both crunching)
That is fantastic.
- Wow.
- Do you like it?
- I do, that tastes just like a Biscoff.
I think you've got the flavour,
like measurements.
- All the spices in there.
- Yeah, the flavour level just right.
- The crunch is good, there,
I pushed it a couple more minutes
than I would like a standard biscuit,
just for that extra little bit of snap,
and hopefully you heard that.
That's really, really nice.
- They're yummy.
- I think, as a personal preference,
the fact that you're making it homemade,
you could really push the spices even more.
And I probably would give it a little bit
more twang next time, just 'cause you can.
But I think-
- Great dunked in coffee.
- Biscoffee.
So there we go, one last look at them,
and now it is your turn to give them a go.
If you do try them,
don't forget to send me a photo on social media.
We enjoy seeing your photos.
It's really awesome to see that,
it's very inspiring to keep us all going,
doing these videos for as long as we have,
because that's why we do it.
Don't forget to subscribe for regular videos.
Any more tips, I think keep it chilled,
keep it floured, keep it real.
See you soon.
- Bye.
♪ Check your level, playa ♪
♪ No matter what your style, the kitchen's for me ♪
♪ Sideburns, moustache, goatee, maybe all three ♪
(soft rhythmic music)
I would say a little bit more nutmeg
just 'cause I blimmin' love nutmeg.
A little bit more deeper, I mean,
'cause you can really pimp it.
- Maybe bit less cloves.
- Wahey!
- That's my personal.
- It's a Friday, Mrs. B! (laughs)