Today we are making more waffle cookies!
| Waffle Iron Shortbread 250 grams (1 cup plus 2 tbsp) margarine or butter 3 eggs 250 grams (1 cup) sugar 2 tsp vanilla, if desired ½ cup cornstarch 18 grams (1 tbsp) baking powder pinch salt About 450 grams (3 cups) flour Melt margarine and set aside to cool. (Or heat it until it's almost melted. Any remaining solid pieces will be soft enough to mix in just fine.) Thoroughly beat eggs, sugar, and vanilla. Mix cornstarch, baking powder, and salt, then place in the bowl along with about half the flour. I think these are also good with a slight bit of cinnamon-- not enough to be recognizable, but enough to add a slight little something extra to the flavor. Start stirring and then add enough flour to make a batter about the consistency of very thick sour cream. Let batter stand about 10-15 minutes. Then cook on a hot, well-greased waffle iron until lightly golden. |
These days, I trust cooking videos that are shot at home more than professional ones. If the lighting looks like it costs more than a kitchen renovation, it's probably a content farm using trick-editing to make worthless recipes look like they actually work. (Also, after watching Russian cooking videos just to see how their kitchens are different from ours, I recognized the words "Das vedanya" at the end!)
This recipe starts with a lot of bowls. Even with a dishwasher, it's annoying to use so much counterspace and later so much rack space in the magic cleaning machine. But it was nice to have everything ready to go before I stirred a single thing together. I hate to admit it, but it was faster than my usual method of measuring each ingredient out as we get to it.
After getting everything together, it was a simple matter of stirring it into one big bowl and then letting it rest. At first I was annoyed about waiting for 10-15 minutes, but it was a perfect chance to clear off the countertops at a leisurely pace.
Some people may recall that we got two Soviet irons and then nearly ruined one of them on the first attempt:
This iron and I have been in a conflicted relationship ever since, but today I decided to get it out because I hadn't used it in a while. I wanted to see if it had decided that it liked life on the other side of a trans-Atlantic voyage.
When I spooned our first mound of dough onto the iron, it looked exactly right. It's so reassuring when your batter looks just like the one in the video. It was firm, but ever-so-slightly drippy in a way that suggested it would easily become runny and spread throughout the iron.
They fell out of the iron perfectly, and were dangerously good.
We made these again for our neighbors who have Al CaBone the 12-foot Christmas skeleton in their yard. For gift-related purposes, I used the heart-shaped iron because they're so dingdarn cute.
For whatever reason, today's batch was like cookie dough as soon as I mixed it. As I mixed, I started to have little crumbly bits even though a lot of the flour remained in its separate bowl. (Instead of pouring it back into the bag, I used it for blueberry muffins.)
As I was waiting for the waffles to cook, I couldn't help noticing that they cast the purchase price onto this thing. I almost thought I could figure out how much this cost in modern money, then I realized that I could never figure out the year this was made.
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| I think it says 4 rubles, 70 kopeks. |
If we could figure out how old this iron is, we could find out how many years' wages it cost in Soviet Russia. But that is impossible because once they started manufacturing something, they didn't change it until they could no longer slap the factory machinery back together. I mean, look at their cars:
And of course, it figures that I can never get the batter amount right until we reach the end of the bowl. We had oozing waffles and incomplete waffles the whole time I was making these (which doesn't matter unless I'm trying to give them away), but the last scrapings of batter finally yielded near-perfection.
Even with a few factory seconds, we happily had more than enough to give away. I always forget that this makes surprisingly small waffles. It therefore stretches your batter a lot. But full disclosure I overcooked some of them on one side. I could lie and pretend we always have perfect cookies, but we don't deceive here at A Book of Cookrye.
I tried doing a ganache drizzle on these, but it looked bad and also didn't taste as good as I hoped. And as much as I like chocolate, I don't think it's very good here. It obliterated the cookies' flavor. Fortunately, we had plenty of bare cookies left for giving purposes.
I think I simply don't like ganache. Like, it's easy, it's photogenic (most of the time), but it turns chocolate into something horribly overwhelming. I might use it as a very thin crumb-coat on future cakes, but I won't use it for much else.
You don't even need to break one open to see how fluffy they are.
In case you didn't figure out these are good when I gave them away with my signature on the card, these are delicious. These are like shortbread cookies that came off a waffle iron instead of the oven. They have that perfect soft texture. And they also had a much better shelf life than a lot of other waffles.
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