Butter-Pecan Pizzelles

Today, we are having a popular ice cream flavor in pizzelle form!

Butter-Pecan Pizzelles ⅓ cup margarine or butter 2 tablespoons milk 2 teaspoons vanilla 3 eggs ½ cup sugar ½ cup packed brown sugar ½ tsp salt 2¼ cups all-purpose flour 1 tablespoon baking powder ½ cup finely chopped pecans Melt butter. Stir in milk and vanilla, and set aside to cool. In a small mixer bowl, beat eggs with an electric mixer on high speed about 4 minutes or till thick and lemon colored. With mixer on medium speed, gradually beat in sugar, brown sugar, and salt. Beat until very light. Slowly pour in the cooled margarine, milk and vanilla, beating well the whole time. Sift in the flour and baking powder. Beat on low speed until combined. Then fold in pecans. Cook on a pizzelle iron according to the manufacturer's directions. Makes about 40. If you want a smaller batch, you can easily reduce the recipe to one-third the original quantities. Try these with a scoop of ice cream and a drizzle of chocolate sauce. Source: Fante's Kitchen

After making a lot of pizzelles, we are venturing into the more specialized recipes on Fante's website. With no further stalling, let's look at today's title ingredient, all ground up and ready to go!

The recipe started out the same as our other pizzelles. After beating our eggs until they were a beige cloud of air, we added our other ingredients. But at the end of the recipe, our resulting batter was far too runny. Fortunately, Fante's site had advice for this very problem: add more flour.

Other people may think it's obvious that you can fix a runny batter with more flour, but pizzelles are still new to me. I didn't know if I was allowed to attempt such a mid-recipe repair, or if such actions would ruin everything. 

After confirming that we are allowed to add more flour and then doing so,the batter was pretty and promising. The word "velvety" came to mind. It tasted like a batch of really good blondies.

And so, it was time to add the recipe's entire reason for taking over the countertop: the pecans.

The pecan-infused batter tasted so good that I wanted to forget about the pizzelle iron and dribble it over ice cream. But I decided to cook it anyway.

Our pizzelles came off of the iron without clinging or falling apart, which is always a good sign.

I liked these, but I think I ground the pecans too finely. I wasn't even sure if you could taste the pecans, or if I was wishfully imagining the flavor into the pizzelles. Others told me that the pecans were noticeably present. But I wanted more from them. After all, what was the point of adding all those pecans if they became so tastefully subdued? Pecans aren't the most expensive thing in the store, but they're not the cheapest nuts on the aisle either. If I add a lot of pecans to a recipe, I want people to know they're there.

I made another batch of them without putting the pecans through the spice grinder first. In a happy happenstance, the tiny pecan pieces were cheaper than the big pecans. I love when the lazy way is the cheapest. I also didn't bother toasting the pecans as specified in the original recipe since I figured that would happen on the stove anyway.

Our pizzelle batter came out just as nicely as it did last time, but things went awry when we cooked it. The pecans stuck to the metal and ripped the pizzelles apart when I opened the iron. Despite my generous use of melted shortening, I had to take a wooden skewer and gouge out each groove one at a time. As I dropped the hot shards of ruined wafer into the trash, I muttered to myself that pecans may grow on trees but the money to pay for them does not.

I think the ragged edges on the surviving pizzelles show how much they tried to misbehave on the stovetop.

Upon tasting these, I was so galled at how amazing they were. I couldn't allow myself to discard the batter. They were butter-pecan bliss. They were everything I imagined when I saw the recipe title. In fact, I dared to think that I might make these again.

If we look closely, we can see that the pecans came into direct contact with the iron and got toasted to perfection.

I think this recipe might be better suited to an electric pizzelle iron (just because it's a bit finicky, and electric irons look so much easier to use). But even though I don't have one, I will not swear to never make these again. They were too delicious to throw out the recipe.

Since this recipe is as finicky as it is fantastic, I'm going to file it under "If I make this, you know I like you."