Schuimpjes are a Dutch egg-white-foam confectionery, made by whipping egg whites with sugar to a stiff meringue, piping the foam into small figural shapes (dragonflies, butterflies, mice, hearts, snails), and drying the resulting pieces at low temperature until they set into light, crisp, sugary forms. The product is a Dutch member of the broader European meringue family — closely related to French meringues françaises, Italian meringhe, and English baked meringues — but with distinctive local characteristics: the figural shapes (most other European meringue traditions are largely unshaped), the smaller individual size (Dutch schuimpjes are typically 30–50mm in their largest dimension), and a slightly drier texture than the French equivalent.
The category occupies a particular slot in the Dutch sweet shop: it is the lightest of the traditional confections by weight per unit, the cheapest per piece, and the one most often given to small children as a casual treat. A bag of mixed schuimpjes — perhaps thirty pieces in assorted shapes and pastel colours — was, in the post-war Dutch primary school years, a standard birthday-party-bag inclusion, and the candy retains a strong association with childhood and with the small confectionery shops that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s.
The technique
Schuimpjes are made by the standard meringue technique: egg whites at room temperature, whisked with sugar (usually a 1:2 ratio of whites to sugar by weight) to the stiff-peak stage, with a pinch of cream of tartar or a few drops of vinegar to stabilise the foam. The whipped foam is then piped through a small star-tipped or plain nozzle into the desired shape on a baking sheet lined with parchment, and the shapes are dried — rather than baked in the conventional sense — in a low oven (90–100°C) for two to three hours until the moisture has evaporated and the structure has set.
Industrial production follows essentially the same technique at scale, with mechanical mixers in place of hand-whisking and continuous low-temperature ovens in place of domestic ovens. The figural shapes are produced by mechanical piping heads with shaped nozzles; the colours (most often pastel pink, blue, yellow, green, and white) are added to the foam at the whipping stage with food-grade colouring. The dried product is light enough that a bag containing thirty pieces will weigh perhaps 80–100 grams, which is one of the reasons schuimpjes are economical to produce despite their elaborate visual presentation.
The figural tradition
The shapes most strongly associated with schuimpjes are small naturalistic figures: dragonflies (libellen), butterflies (vlinders), mice (muisjes, not to be confused with the De Ruijter aniseed comfits), snails (slakjes), and hearts. The dragonflies are the most distinctive: a typical schuimpje dragonfly is approximately 50mm wing-tip to wing-tip, with a piped body, two pairs of wings, and a small dot of contrasting colour for each eye. The wings are produced by piping the foam in a flat spiral pattern that flattens during drying, and the resulting structure is delicate enough to be visibly translucent against light.
The butterflies are similar in technique to the dragonflies but with two larger wing pairs and a shorter body. The mice and snails are denser, more compact piped shapes. The hearts are the simplest form and the one most often produced as a standardised industrial product. Mixed bags conventionally include all of the above in roughly equal proportions, with the colours assorted so that an eater taking a piece at random has a good chance of getting a different colour and shape from the previous piece.
Spek, schuimkussen, and the other foam derivatives
Schuimpjes are the parents of a wider family of Dutch foam-and-marshmallow sweets. The two principal cousins are spek (treated separately under spekkies) and schuimkussen ("foam pillows"). Spek is essentially a marshmallow — a soft, springy, gelatin-stabilised foam — that descends from the same egg-white-foam tradition but uses gelatin in addition to or instead of egg white to produce a soft rather than crisp set. Schuimkussen are larger, square or rectangular foam pieces (perhaps 80mm across) coated in sugar; they are essentially a flat, sweetened, larger-format relative of schuimpjes, often with a fruit-jam centre.
The transition from schuimpjes to schuimkussen and from schuimkussen to spek represents, roughly, the modernisation of the foam-confectionery category over the twentieth century. The more elaborate schuimpjes form was the dominant product through the 1960s; schuimkussen took over in the 1970s and 1980s as artisanal piping gave way to mass production; and spek-style marshmallows have grown steadily since the 1990s as the wider European confectionery market has shifted toward softer textures. Schuimpjes remain in production but at modest volumes, supported principally by traditional confectioners and by the children's-party market.
The producers
Schuimpjes are not, on the whole, an industrial product in the way most other Dutch sweets are. The category is dominated by smaller artisanal producers — regional confectioners, traditional banketbakkerijen, and a small number of specialist firms — rather than by the major Dutch confectionery houses. Several of the larger producers do offer schuimpjes lines (Fortuin, Klene's children's brand Autodrop) but these tend to be standardised heart and star shapes rather than the elaborate figural forms produced by the artisanal trade.
The artisanal trade is, accordingly, where the more visually elaborate schuimpjes are still made. Banketbakker Holtkamp in Amsterdam, several Achterhoek and Twente regional bakers, and a small number of specialist confectioners in Belgium produce dragonfly and butterfly schuimpjes in the traditional forms. The supply is small — these are essentially handmade products — and the price premium over the supermarket equivalents is substantial, but the quality differential is also visible.
As a children's-market staple
Schuimpjes occupy, in the contemporary Dutch sweet shop, the same slot they have occupied for a century: the light, cheap, visually elaborate candy given to small children at parties, on small celebrations, or as a daily after-school treat. The product is essentially harmless in nutritional terms (sugar, egg-white protein, very little fat), is too large to be a choking hazard, and is decorative enough to satisfy the visual demands of a children's party without the parental anxiety attached to harder candies like toverballen.
The category has not been the subject of any of the recent reinventions that have remade much of the Dutch sweet shop. Schuimpjes in 2026 are recognisably the same product they were in 1956: the same shapes, the same pastel colours, the same light texture. The persistence is perhaps related to the candy's particular cultural slot — parents giving small children small treats — which is, by its nature, conservative. Whatever changes elsewhere in Dutch confectionery, the small dragonfly schuimpje remains, at the children's party, what it has always been.