The Last Chocolate Pizzelles I Want To Make

Today, we are asking Fante's to help us with our chocolate pizzelles.

Chocolate Pizzelles ½ cup butter ¼ cup cocoa powder 1¾ cups flour ½ tsp baking powder ⅛ tsp salt 3 eggs 1 tbsp vanilla Melt the butter, getting it really hot instead of merely warm enough to melt. Then stir in the cocoa powder, beating out all lumps. Set aside for three to five minutes to cool. If it has re-solidified after this time, re-melt it and allow it to cool until it is barely warm enough to stay liquid.* Meanwhile, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt, set aside. Beat together the eggs and vanilla. Once the cocoa and butter have cooled, add them and beat everything together. Then mix in the remaining dry ingredients. Cook on a hot pizzelle iron according to manufacturer's directions. These may take up to fifteen seconds longer to cook than other pizzelle recipes. *This is called "blooming" the cocoa powder. It draws out a lot more chocolate flavor than simply stirring the powder in. Source: Fante's Kitchen

Our previous chocolate pizzelles were a frustrating failure. Granted, I was not in a good mental state when I made them. But today, I decided to look elsewhere for chocolate pizzelles that might actually let go of the iron.

After I got the ingredients onto the counter, I thought "Is it really this easy?"

When I beat the egg into the chocolate, the batter turned an unexpectedly light color. I wasn't even trying to whip it.

This recipe was suspiciously easy to mix together. Things got a little tricky when I had to switch from whisk to spoon upon adding the flour. But that was the only non-problem I had. When our batter was ready, it looked and tasted like it could have become really good brownies.

I put our first dollop of delicious chocolate batter onto the iron. A few minutes later, I opened the iron and saw that this would be a very long process. We would have no free-falling pizzelles tonight.

After dislodging the first pizzelle with a spatula and a lot of force, I had to clean out all those little grooves with a wooden skewer. This has happened so often that I can now do it in less than a minute. I can't decide if I'm glad for the many opportunities I've had to practice.

I was so glad I used the flat iron and not the ridged snowflake one. No amount of generously-brushed shortening could persuade these to free-fall out of it. I had to jam the spatula under them like I was ruining a batch of hamburgers that had fused with the grill. But to my surprise, the spatula didn't rip the pizzelles to shreds. They actually managed to come off the iron intact(ish).

I tasted one and almost thought this recipe was worth it. The pizzelles had a really nice chocolate flavor. They had the same crisp fragile texture as the cinnamon wafers. For those who don't remember, the cinnamon wafers were my very first recipe on a stovetop iron (unless you count instant waffle mix). It's interesting to sort of come back to where we started, but this time with chocolate.

If you don't mind your pizzelles looking a little roughed-up after divorcing them from the iron, these are pretty good. But I absolutely DO NOT recommend these for your first pizzelle recipe.

After every single pizzelle resolutely glued itself to the iron, I wondered if I had lost my way. Or was the iron gummed up with something I didn't know I should clean off? Was the cocoa powder making these inherently sticky? Are chocolate pizzelles only suitable for nonstick irons?

As a sanity test, I made a batch of chocolate-free pizzelles. I went with Fante's recipe because they always come out so nice. I hadn't planned on making them, but we had all the ingredients anyway. The first pizzelle cooked to golden perfection and fell right off of the iron. After such a frustrating evening, I really needed that.

After a few near-perfect pizzelles made me feel better about life, I decided to be a bit daring and get out the snowflake iron. To repeat, you're screwed if your pizzelles stick to this thing. Or at least, you can't dislodge them intact. So I only use it if I am feeling really confident. Things got a little scary when I saw how wispy our first pizzelle was in the center, and I feared that I had ruined it by squeezing the iron too hard.

But to my delight, the pizzelle fluttered out completely intact-- even the dangerously thin center part. After this, I will forever swear by melted shortening, and never use cooking spray on a pizzelle iron ever again.

I'm tempted to say that a good batch of pizzelles fix a crappy mood. But I should also warn that a failed batch of them can add a special sort of misery to your night. So, I don't necessarily recommend making pizzelles for stress relief. If the recipe comes out right, you'll go through the rest of the day humming happy little tunes to yourself. But if things go awry at the iron, you'll feel rotten for quite some time.

As for the chocolate pizzelles that brought us here, I don't know if I recommend making them or not. They tasted so good that I very nearly want to say that everyone should try them at home. But at the same time, they were very irksome to get off of the iron. I'm not sure if these would be better on a nonstick iron since I don't have one laying around. Sorry to end this on such a mixed review, but these were exactly as delicious as they were frustrating. 

 

The Flavor: or, Here comes 2025!

We at A Book of Cookrye are giving 2024 the sendoff it deserves: with questionable cocktails from Tumblr!

The Flavor 1 can Cranberry Mike's Harder 1 bottle cucumber-lime Gatorade Pour the two into the same glass. Serve and contemplate how peculiar it tastes.

 

Did you know they make cucumber-lime Gatorade? I sure as heck didn't! I thought cucumber-lime would make a better lotion scent than Gatorade, but then again I never liked Gatorade. 

I could get into the measurements and all that, but that seems quite inappropriate for the recipe at hand. Instead, I just held one bottle in each hand and poured. I was surprised at how dominant the cranberry's color was. Like, the green Gatorade barely changed the color at all. 

I have to admit, I was super hyped for this bizarre flavor experience. I wanted to experience the strange. I wanted to taste the ineffable. But instead I was like "This tastes like church punch." 

If you've ever been to a Sunday children's social where they poured Hawaiian Punch and Sprite into a large bowl, you already have a good idea of what this tasted like. Except this also had undertones of cucumber. And I don't mean it tasted like artificial cucumber flavoring. I would have believed anyone who told me that the water had cranberry slices floating in it. 

I should note that when drunk on its own, the Gatorade merely tasted like Gatorade. You couldn't detect any cucumber until you mixed it with the cranberry. I also want to point out that it was a lot better with the alcohol in it. Maybe you have to be slightly schnockered to think Gatorade is any good.

I didn't finish my drink. But since I chose the wineglass, I filled it with Diet Coke and felt slightly classier for it. Well, we can't run away from the New Year, so may it be full of, um, flavor!

Spritz Cookies: or, The instruction manual is better than the thing it came with

I had to find out: Would I have a monogamous relationship with these cookies?

Spritz Cookies 1 cup shortening ¾ cup sugar ¼ tsp salt ½ tsp baking powder 1 egg 1 tsp lemon extract (or flavoring of choice) 2¼ cups sifted flour Heat oven to 400°. Have ungreased cookie sheets, a thin metal spatula, and cooling racks ready. Cream the shortening, sugar, salt, and baking powder. Beat in the egg and extract. Continue beating until very light. Then stir in the flour, mixing gently until all is combined. Put through the cookie press onto ungreased sheets. Bake for 10-12 minutes (mine were done in 6). Immediately upon removing from the oven, use the metal spatula to transfer the hot cookies to a cooling rack. Source: Mirro cookie press instruction sheet

Apparently whoever owned this recipe page made these cookies a lot. We have a note of what I think is the first year they made them. We also have two changes to the amount of flour, which appear to be in two different people's handwriting.

When I shared the cookie press instruction sheet/recipe handout that I nabbed and saved from someone's Ebay listing, a lot of people on the recipe swap group said things like "We only ever made the plain ones!" and "I didn't know there were so many kinds!" And so, I decided to temporarily set aside the thrills of spices and brown sugar to make the plain ones. I wanted to taste the recipe that apparently pops up every Christmas in countless homes. Would I think they were good enough to forsake all others?

And so, as often seems to be the case with spritz cookies, we begin with a mixing bowl full of ingredients and devoid of color. Given how many shortening-loaded spritz cookies, I've made of late, one might think I'm using up the entire can of shortening at an alarming rate. But I've halved all of these recipes for evaluation purposes.

Our ingredients whipped into a white fluff that looked unnervingly well-bleached. You can really appreciate how colorless it was after putting our half-egg on top. 

No matter how many shortening-loaded spritz cookies I make, I can't get over how much the starting mixture tastes like knockoff Oreo filling that has gotten just a tiny bit too old.

After adding the vanilla, egg, and everything else that has a bit of color in it, our mixture was precisely the same color as unbleached flour.

I added exactly as much flour as the recipe instructions told me to, and thought the dough was too sticky to put into the extruder. Like, you could press it into a square pan and call it bar cookies, but any attempt to make cute little cookies out of it would result in unfortunate-looking mounds. 

I was about to add more flour, but then I realized that I've had to add a lot of extra flour to every recipe on this handout. Had I been over-flouring every single batch I've made? Did I even know what this dough should look like? The instruction sheet didn't even have pictures to show me how firm the dough should be. Perhaps the Mirro press was so hard to use because my over-floured dough simply wasn't sticky enough to stay on the pan. 

I then reminded myself that ugly cookies were the absolute worst thing that could happen if I baked the dough as it was. No one would organize a Circle of Judgement for a cookie failure. I further reassured myself that kitchen misfires are not mortal sins. Thus emboldened, I loaded the sticky dough into the press.

The cookie press came with a full set of playing card suits- hearts, clubs, diamonds, and spades. I think it's so charming that people had canasta and bridge get-togethers so often that they needed thematic refreshments. (Heck, there's even a cookbook called Bridge Refreshments.) And so, I decided to pretend I was hosting a bridge party even though I do not like card games. This meant that I could start off my latest struggle with this this finicky press by making diamonds, the most fail-proof shape in the entire stencil set. 

Our first few cookies turned looked into blobs, but we soon figured out how much dough to extrude to make them look just right. After getting the pan halfway covered with successful cookies, I began to think that this press might not be a waste of money. I even imagined using it so often that I could just give the handle a quick twist without looking to see how much dough had come out.

After making a few diamonds, we did the clubs. These almost came out all right, but the little stem had an annoying habit of sticking to the press while the three lobes came out fine. For once I didn't mind when the cookies failed to press out. It meant I could put the defective ones back into the press and play with more shapes without running out of pan space.

All of the hearts came out nearly perfect. I immediately thought of Valentine's Day cookie bags. But after all this success, we were running out of room on the pan and still had to try out the spades. Impatience would not let me wait for the next batch. I was too excited about getting this blasted thing to work (most of the time). And so, I plucked some of the lesser-looking cookies away to make room.

Our spades came out of the press with very little trouble, leading me to think that I had solved all my cookie press problems with practice and reduced flour.

Our pan of bridge refreshments melted in the oven. They didn't turn into flat puddles, but they didn't look like playing cards either. I hate waste, but I told myself that no one would benefit from me eating lousy cookies, just like those starving children in far-off countries never benefit from anyone finishing their boiled peas at home. In other words, no one in the world would feel the happy effects of me doing a calorie penance for my baking misfires. And so, I thanked the cookies for helping me learn more about the recipe (which they did), and let them go to the municipal hereafter.

After I added more flour to the remaining cookie dough, it decided to stop staying on the pan. After scooping up the odd-shaped dough squirts and returning them to the mixing bowl, I gave up on my vintage cookie press. It was time to forget about vintage and get out the one that is more reliable. After transferring the dough from one press to another, I piped out a perfect batch of cookies in like fifteen seconds. I just had to go squirt, squirt, squirt across the pan. (Granted, the lever flexed unnervingly and felt like it would snap off at any minute.) 

So, without intending to, we did a near-perfect press-versus-press test and controlled for nearly every other factor that could ruin the results. We piped the same dough onto the same pan on the same night in the same weather, with the dough at the same temperature. Having eliminated all those other factors (and a few others which I didn't think of), we now know the problem is the Mirro press itself.

But those 8-pointed stars are easy. I have barely started using a cookie press, and I've already learned that the 8-pointed stars always come out fine. So I put in one of the more finicky, error-prone stencils that has a lot of little tiny holes that seem to love to get clogged whenever I use it. The cookies came out perfect.

I really wanted to like the Mirro press. For one thing, it comes with the prettiest little cookie stencils. Also, there was no point in returning it. I would probably lose the entire refund on return shipping. Aside from money matters, I felt like I had failed. After all, this thing was in production for decades. Surely a lot of people got theirs to work. Furthermore, a lot of people online saw mine and said "Oh, we had one of those!" and "We used ours every Christmas!" and "It's a real workhorse!" I doubt people would say such happy things if the Mirro press was a dud.

And so, just like when I made my first pizzelles, I went online and asked for help. One person suggested that I refrigerate the dough so it gets really firm before pushing it out. In addition to heeding others' advice, I decided to carefully read the instructions instead of skimming over it. It said to put the stencil into place with the number facing up. "What number?" I muttered to myself. I looked at a stencil closely, and finally saw it--- barely stamped into the metal, right next to the edge, and too tiny to notice without squinting. 

How could I ever miss that?

I didn't know why it mattered which side faced up, so I looked over the stencils very carefully to figure it out. The holes that make up the designs aren't cut at an angle that would change what happens when you lift the press off the pan or anything. Eventually, I noticed that the stencils aren't flat but slightly curved. This meant we had two things to test: whether I had been inserting the damn things the wrong way up the whole time, and also whether refrigeration helped at all.

Because I didn't want to wait several hours, I decided to test whether correctly assembling the press solved all my woes. Our results were still hit-or-miss, but slightly better than before. The cookies seemed more likely to succeed if I extruded enough dough to ever-so-slightly squish them. With the happy feeling that comes from a nearly 7 out of 10 success rate, I decided to try the stencil that had come out terribly every single time. After carefully installing it number-side up, and making sure to squish the dough under there (it is called a press after all), I got some surprisingly lovely cookies. Since the weather was too hot for the oven, I put all of the cookies back into the canister so I could wait until both the dough and the outside temperature had gotten a lot colder.

They're not great, but they're better than before.

A few hours later, when the sun had gone away and taken its excessive heat with it, I turned on the oven and got our fully-loaded cookie press out of the refrigerator. Our dough had turned to rock. I couldn't get the handle to turn at all. At first I thought it's supposed to be like that, and my dough had hitherto been too soft. But no amount of white-knuckling the handle would force anything to come out. After a few minutes of this, I decided that if the dough was supposed to be this hard, it wouldn't feel like I was about to snap the press apart. And so, I took off the cap and pushed out this perfectly cylindrical brick of raw cookies.

I nearly flung it into the garbage, but unfortunately I tasted it first and it was too delicious for the landfill. I then thought "Maybe I over-chilled it!" I also thought that my vintage Mirro cookie press is far too finicky if I have to temperature-control the dough with such precision.

To avoid waste, I hacked the dough into smaller lumps with a knife and kneaded it until it softened up again. After I reloaded the press, I discovered that refrigeration was futile.

To make sure it was the press' fault and not a bad batch of dough, I transferred it to our crappy yet reliable press. I could tell the dough was too hard from the way the handle bent and flexed. Nevertheless, we got a perfectly competent batch of cookies. And so, with great reluctance, I had to admit that I had been outwitted by a cookie press. As soon as we get a suitable-sized box, it's going back on Ebay to bother someone else.

That round one is the last of the dough that doesn't quite make it out of the press. I carefully peeled it off the piston and baked it.

So, the vintage Mirro press is a bust. I'm not going to frustrate myself by trying to use it again. But what about the reccipe?

These cookies reminded me a lot of the ones that come in those blue tins that infamously always contain sewing supplies-- except they were better because they were fresh. If you want a good, plain cookie, this recipe is a great choice. All the same, I can't help feeling bad for anyone who said "This is the only recipe we ever made!" There are so many other cookies out there, even if you look no farther than the instruction sheet!

 

I will definitely make these again, but I wouldn't take this recipe to have and to hold, forsaking all others. And I must give the Mirro people credit where it is due. Their recipe developing department did excellent work.

'Tis the season to shop our way to personal growth

Christmas has seemed laid-back for the past few years, but this year it seems like people really didn't bother. Even the conservative news networks reduced "the war on Christmas" from a major media campaign to a few perfunctory screeds.

Closer to our little outpost, Al CaBone the 12-foot Christmas skeleton did not emerge in the neighbors' yard this year. Further up the street, someone bought one of those leg lamps from A Christmas Story and put it in the window, but they left it turned off all month. Another house a few blocks over still has its Halloween decorations up. (Naturally, I dropped off a batch of cookies and a note of appreciation.) The few houses with a full arsenal of festivity look really out-of-place. As someone who has long hated the mandatory cheer of Christmas, I am fine with this at surface level. But I wish it wasn't yet another sign of how tired we all are from the relentless onslaught of current events.

We at A Book of Cookrye have avoided any pretense of the holidays. I've been telling people our Christmas tree was tired, so we let it stay in its box and rest this year. (Like other people do with Christmas decorations, I drag that line out every year.) Even though the holiday didn't manage to force its way through our door, I decided that this is the season for retail therapy.

For those who haven't followed along, I first got into making pizzelles when my Italian ex caught the seven-year itch right on schedule and ran off with someone barely legal. (I still think I deserved a more original breakup than that.) We had been kicking around the idea of making pizzelles together in our last few months. Instead, I bought my own damn iron and made his grandmother's recipe without him.

Making pizzelles for the first time was an emotionally bizarre experience. You know those stories about people who break up with their fiancees at the very last minute, and end up going alone on the honeymoon they had already booked? Imagine a watered-down version of that. I was simultaneously sniffling that "We were supposed to do this together!" and spitefully muttering that his "I never learned to cook" ass will never taste these even if he gets the recipe card for himself. In the midst of these feelings, I somehow also managed to be giddy about playing with my new stovetop toy.

I wasn't planning for pizzelles to turn into a metaphor for a breakup. But a few weeks after I made my first successful batch of them, I brought a batch with me to visit relatives. As everyone marveled at how pretty they were, I let myself take a long bath in self pity that started with "I am feeding these people my grief." Sometimes misery feels good.

After a fair amount of time and a lot of pizzelle batches, I bought the zigzaggy iron. It comes from the same manufacturer as our first one. I partially bought it just to see what pizzelles made on it looked like. But this was also a careful step towards moving on. My first pizzelle iron was the same one my ex's grandmother had. I hadn't set out to get one like hers, even though it felt oddly satisfying at the time. But now, I had one that looked radically different.

But recently, I began to think it's a little weird that my ex's late grandmother picked out my kitchenware. I really like this iron and am not about to sell it. Nevertheless, I decided that I should stop making pizzelles for a dead relationship and start making them for myself. This was around the same time I could finally look at pictures of us without painfully wishing that we were still still hanging off of each other and carelessly laughing.

It was time to choose my own damn iron. I didn't want one from the same company as the other two. In fact, I didn't want it to come from a factory anywhere near Cleveland. My ex's family is from there, which means the city no longer has anything for me.*

Unfortunately, winter is a terrible time to buy pizzelle irons, even if you don't care if they were made in Ohio. It turns out most people restrict pizzelle-making to Christmas and Easter. At this time of year, people want a pizzelle iron and they want one now. As a result, everyone selling pizzelle irons seems to know they can charge a hefty Christmas markup. 

But while I was windowshopping, I absolutely fell in love with one particular design that I saw a few times. To make it even better, it was made in Pennsylvania and not Ohio. However, the painful prices kept me from buying any of them. Despite the prohibitive cost, I was amused to see listings for fifty identical irons, each described as "rare."

 

Purely for the heck of it, I sent one person an offer of half their asking price before falling asleep one night. I drowsed off thinking that they would either reject it or send a counteroffer that I could decide was too high, thus ending the entire business with an unscathed wallet. Instead, I awoke to an email saying that a payment had been automatically withdrawn from my account. At first, I panicked and thought I had been hacked. When the box arrived, I snatched it off the porch before anyone could see that I had sinned.

Pennsylvania represent!

In the privacy of the bedroom, I admired what I had chosen for myself. It is full of stars. Even the flower in the middle has bouquets of stars growing out of it.

The first night when no one was around to ask where it came from, I brought it out of hiding and into the kitchen. Because I couldn't tell whether it was well-seasoned or just full of old gunk, I didn't know whether to try to deep-clean it or not. I went with the option of least effort, and therefore decided it was lovingly seasoned. 

But before I could put the iron over the flames, I had to remove the remains of a very low sales price that was written on it in permanent marker. I was afraid that if I put it on the stove, the ink would permanently burn itself into the metal. If I had only paid $5.49 (plus shipping), I would have let the price remain and then shown it to anyone who got near me while I was using it. But instead, it was an irritating reminder that someone at some point got this for a lot cheaper than I did.

The metal was too porous for rubbing alcohol to remove the ink. Acetone might have worked, but finding where in the garage the can has wandered to often takes an entire afternoon. And so, I borrowed a tiny dab of metal polish and buffed the ink off in a meditative yet frustrating fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, the polished aluminum had such a beautiful shine that the rest of the iron looked dingy and pathetic.

If the makers of Simichrome ever start making skin cream instead of metal polish, the entire beauty industry will go out of business.

Now that the iron was priceless, it was time to make our first pizzelles. But what would our first recipe be? The first thing you make with new cookware is a very important choice, and sets the tone for the future of your kitchen. Because I was moving on from my ex and his family, I ruled out both his grandmother's and Aunt Angie's pizzelles. Instead, I made Minnie's pizzelles because I got that recipe online and have no idea who Minnie is.  And because it's not every day we inaugurate a new waffle iron, I added some beautiful color. (Again, the post-breakup recovery metaphors keep piling up.)

 

 

I've seen a lot of people on YouTube add sprinkles to pizzelles, and they always come out so pretty. After the sprinkles melt and spread with the batter, the pizzelles end up looking like spin art at a carnival.

And so, after such a long emotional journey, I put the new pizzelle iron onto the burner. It needed an unexpectedly long time to heat up. As it got warmer, it smelled hot and musty, like when you turn on the furnace for the first time in the winter.

When the iron was ready, I put a cautiously small spoonful of batter on it. A runty pizzelle is always better than hot batter dripping out the sides. 

Soon enough, the iron emitted a subtly toasty smell that told me its first-ever pizzelle in my hands was done. I lifted the handle to see that our beautiful colorful creation was stuck.

I managed to pry it off intact. This pizzelle felt like a good enough beginning, even if a spatula was needed at the very last step.

The batter hadn't spread as much as I thought it would. Maybe all the grooves in this iron hold more pizzelle dough than the other one? For the next pizzelle, I put a daringly huge mound of batter onto the iron. It stayed completely contained except for one green splatter that popped out.

 

We soon had a small batch of beautiful, colorful pizzelles. I really loved how they all looked tie-dyed.

All of the pizzelles needed a gentle assist from the spatula to come off, but I figured that was because of the sprinkles and therefore didn't worry. But in full disclosure, the melted sprinkles left a hard residue that would not scrub off. I ended up dissolving them in hot water like I do any other melted candy on cookware.

Those melted sprinkles may look like you could pop them off with your fingernail, but that was not the case.

Now, a lot of pizzelle iron instructions have dire warnings to never, ever clean them with water. This includes the stovetop ones even though they have no wiring to ruin. I imagine this is because water gets into the hinges and stays there long enough to rust them. To prevent this, I put the empty iron back on the stove until the steam stopped, and then another 2 minutes for good measure.

But heating a waffle iron is a waste of gas if you don't put something on it. I decided to return to the first pizzelle recipe I ever made, because sometimes you need to go back to where you started. Yes, this meant making my ex's grandmother's pizzelles on my new Pennsylvanian iron. Again, "pizzelles as a post-breakup metaphor" is too damn perfect. Every recovery has a few relapses on the way. (Also, it's a good recipe.)

 

I thought this iron would make adorable mini-pizzelles. It took a few tries to get the dough placement right, but they were ever-so-cute when I succeeded. Again, the pizzelles didn't free-fall out of the iron like the others. This surprised me, because this recipe has proven to be the easiest one that never gives any problems. But I figured that the iron would improve with use.

Of course, it seemed rude to make my ex's grandmother's recipe while rejecting her iron. (Well, not her iron specifically, but the same model.) We have multiple stove burners, meaning that theoretically, this is possible.

Fante's pizzelle guide helped me believe this is possible. They write:

"Consider using two different irons running simultaneously. Borrow one from a friend or relative and prepare both batches ahead. Then, take the phone off the hook, kick off your shoes, and sit down. It takes a lot of coordination and considerable effort to run two different irons at once, but for those challenged for time it can be the best way to get a job done, especially around holiday season."

I'll be honest, I didn't do very well with this. But I can see how with practice, I might become someone who can.

In full disclosure, we had a lot of failures that went to the municipal hereafter.

 

At this point, I had to acknowledge that our new iron had a few problems. Most obviously, one handle was bent. I initially thought this was a deliberate manufacturing choice. The handles are impossible to bend accidentally-- or so I thought. But it quickly got annoying while I used the iron. So, I looked at other identical irons online and saw that mine was the only bent one. You can really see the difference when the iron joins its kindred above the refrigerator.

On closer examination (the kind that is only possible when you're standing over the stove and staring at a waffle iron for a long time), I noticed that one of the hinge-pegs was slowly worming its way to freedom. I tried to hammer-tap it back, and it didn't move.

And so, I took the iron to a local machining shop to see what might be done for it. One of the men took it out of my hands and carried it away. I heard some loud clanging from the back of the shop that sounded just like a medieval movie with a blacksmith scene.  He soon brought it back with a straightened handle and a perfectly reset hinge. (Yet again, the post-breakup parallels keep coming. We couldn't do it alone and had to reach out for help.) They didn't charge me for these highly-skilled two minutes. I was prepared for such generosity and handed them a bag of pizzelles.

Of course, I had to re-inaugurate the iron after getting it fixed. Things seemed to go all right, but the pizzelles kept sticking. I then tried something I read on Fante's website. They tell you to season the iron by brushing it with shortening while it's still cold, and then putting it on the stove and turning it every minute or so as it gets hot. When I did this, I could thwack the back of the iron with a spatula and the pizzelles would slowly fall out. This was an improvement over using a spatula to peel them off as if I was pulling the skin off a fish. 

Then our pizzelles started coming out of the iron with ancient blackened clumps embedded in them, looking like little scabs. With great reluctance, I had to accept that the iron needed to be stripped.

Burnt remains aside, I like the two rings of stars that are surrounded by a waffle-grid of more stars.

If you looked closely, you could see colonies of cinders in the iron's various cavities and grooves. I'm not surprised our pizzelles kept sticking. I'm surprised we ever managed to get them off.

Unfortunately, our iron is made of aluminum. This means that oven cleaner, which usually is a great choice for ancient cinders, would destroy it. Also, a brass brush would scratch it, and a plastic brush was too soft. I looked up guides for cleaning burnt waffle irons, but everything I found was for people cleaning up a single burnt mistake, not several decades of carbon. 

I took my problem to some of my friends who think a broken engine is a fun project, and was introduced to something called "aircraft remover." This stuff so dangerous that my friends required me to read all the warnings and instructions out loud before permitting me to use it. One person said she got a drop of aircraft remover onto a plastic flashlight. The aircraft remover melted a hole in it. 

I donned some protective gear (as we learned during the worst of the pandemic, face shields are surprisingly cheap), took the pizzelle iron outdoors, and applied the solvent as directed. Whenever the breeze took a pause, even for a few seconds, the fumes coming off of it made me dizzy. But the aircraft remover melted our problems away after three 45-minute soakings.

See that gelatinous stuff on the iron? That is aircraft remover. Do not use it unless all else has failed.

Although I got all the small clumps of charcoal out of the iron, I didn't get the shiny, new-looking aluminum I hoped for. I thought about taking it to an engine shop. If anyone knows about getting ancient cinders out of delicate metal without damaging it, it's an engine shop with a few semi-derelict classic cars parked out front. But before finding a mechanic willing to work on a waffle iron, I decided to test it and see if it was clean enough to release the pizzelles. And happily, it was.

Again, the post-breakup parallels keep piling up. I had to use dangerous and drastic measures to dislodge the stubborn gunk. And even then, some stains remained that will never come out.

 

When I made the first post-aircraft-remover batch of pizzelles, I deliberately put a massive glob of dough on the iron. I wanted it to go all the way to the edges and spill down the sides, absorbing any chemical residue that remained after my post-solvent rinsing. I didn't intend to also burn the sacrificial pizzelle, but (again) the metaphor is perfect. This burnt, probably toxic waffle is the deepest step of post-breakup grief. It is the last stop before you start to feel better. And it absorbs toxicity and takes it away.

It went to the trash, but for a good cause.

But now, the iron is fully repaired, ineptly cleaned, and happily baking away! It releases pizzelles and lets them freely fall out. Here is the first batch from after its drastic cleaning. As you can see, somebody got impatient and ate half of one before taking a picture.

As much as I love these starry pizzelles, I have to admit that you can't really appreciate the design unless the light is right. Otherwise, the stars just look like bumps. Again, we have yet more post-breakup parallels. Other people can't always see the beauty of personal growth unless they're looking at you under the right conditions.

And so, in closing, we wish everyone a happy holiday that brings at least a partial recovery from whatever has hit you this year. I hesitate to say "and a happy new year" because a rough time is coming after inauguration day. Instead, we will end with "Best wishes."

*Side note: Cleveland has a surprisingly large Italian community. Two of the biggest stateside manufacturers of Italian-specific cookware (VillaWare and Vitantonio) were based there before every factory in America got abandoned and then converted into upscale lofts. It is speculated that pizzelles are bigger among Italian-Americans than still-in-Italy Italians because the Ohio metalworking industry made it easier for the people living there to start making waffle irons. ↪