Honey Nutmeg Pizzelles

It's always a good time to make pizzelles! (Well, almost.)

Honey-Nutmeg Pizzelles 3 eggs 1½ cups flour* ½ cup sugar ½ cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled ¼ cup honey 1 tsp. baking powder dash dried ground nutmeg Combine eggs, sugar, butter and honey together. Whisk well. Sift dry ingredients together and mix into the wet mixture. Mixture should be thick enough to drop from a spoon. Add more flour if it isn't. Bake on pizzelle iron. *I ended up using two cups of flour. Source: Fante's Kitchen via the Wayback Machine

Today, we are returning to Fante's pizzelle page. They seem to have taken it down after a website renovation, but fortunately the Internet Archive has preserved all their recipes and helpful advice. Above this one, they wrote "The aroma from these cookies as they bake will have your mouth watering!" I've never made honey-nutmeg flavored anything, and was really excited.

I was a little suspicious that this recipe didn't demand an electric mixer. Every other pizzelle recipe I have made has started with whipping the eggs until they turn into a bowl of foam. Of course, I've only made five recipes. And the people who have a kitchen supply store in the Italian Market of Philadelphia know a lot more about pizzelles than I do.

This one looks as simple as making muffins: mix dry ingredients, mix wet ingredients, then stir it all together. The recipe specifies that the eggs must be beaten before adding them. I usually skip that step (mixing everything seems to beat the eggs well enough). But today, I followed Fante's directions and beat the egg first. We do not contradict the people who told us how to use the pizzelle iron in the first place. After melting the butter, we had everything in separate bowls, ready to stir together.

The batter looked slightly gelatinous in a way that I haven't seen in my previous pizzelles, but five recipes are hardly a vast breadth of experience to draw from.

And so, only four minutes after I was done measuring everything, we were ready to heat up the iron! This is the first time I've wished I started heating it before mixing the batter. With all our other recipes, I would have been wasting gas while whipping eggs.

As an amusing side note, some readers may remember when conservative pundits had a short flareup of squawking over gas stoves. At the time, I was talking about it to a part-Italian friend of mine who is a climatologist. I said that it seemed like no one who was turning gas stoves into a crusade actually did any cooking at home. He paused awkwardly, and then said "I cook for myself all the time, and I don't like gas stoves." Then he started to pick up speed. "As a scientist, I think that---"

"But how would I make pizzelles?" I cut him off.

Over the phone, I could hear the scientist and the Italian fighting inside his head. Eventually, he managed to say "Uh, that's a good point."

Back to the recipe, today's pizzelles turned a lovely golden brown, and they did so a lot faster than all our previous ones. I think it's the honey, which apparently caramelizes a lot faster than sugar does. 

The fast browning was really nice when impatience struck, but it meant that we didn't have much time between perfectly cooked and completely burnt. We also made a lot of pizzelles that were perfectly golden on one side but very pale on the other. When they came out right, they looked so, so pretty.

That really dark one in the back cooked only 5 seconds longer than the other ones.

As delicious as these are, they didn't really taste like honey. I shouldn't be surprised-- they only contain a quarter cup of the stuff. But even if the title ingredients were barely detectable, these were so good. Since the honey made them turn brown faster, the pizzelles could reach that perfect color without all the spices cooking out.

 

I would definitely recommend this recipe. They have that exquisite taste that tells you they're definitely homemade. If you want to pretend you got a pizzelle recipe from your cousin's coworker's former college roommate from Italy, this one will make people believe you. Of course, we at A Book of Cookrye make no promises of whether that would work on any actual Italians.