Banketstaaf (Almond Pastry Log)

Come late November, the almond ropes appear in every Dutch bakery window, and by December they are bent into letters. The banketstaaf — and its festive sibling the banketletter — is the pastry of Sinterklaas and Christmas: a length of crisp, buttery puff pastry wrapped tight around a dense core of almond spijs, glazed to a shine and sliced into thick, generous pieces. It is celebration food, and it looks the part.

A letter for the feast

The tradition runs deep. On Sinterklaasavond, families give banketletters shaped as the first initial of a name, most classically a great flaky S for the saint himself — a custom that likely echoes far older Germanic breads shaped into letters and eaten at midwinter. Straightened out into a plain log, the same pastry becomes the everyday banketstaaf, sold year-round but belonging, in spirit, to the dark end of the year.

Puff and paste

The making rests on two components in balance. The pastry must be all-butter and properly cold, so it rises tall and shatters crisply rather than sitting flat and greasy. The filling is amandelspijs, the same rested almond paste that fills gevulde koeken, rolled here into a long rope so that every slice reveals a fat, fragrant almond centre.

A banketstaaf is generosity you can slice: crisp pastry, a thick vein of almond, and the whole scent of the Dutch December.

The one thing that goes wrong is a burst seam, and it is easily avoided: keep the spijs firm, seal the join and ends with egg, and chill the shaped logs before they meet the oven. Baked until deep gold and brushed with apricot for gloss, then cut on the diagonal, a banketstaaf is the kind of thing that makes a plain afternoon feel like a holiday.