Italian Delight (featuring canned corn)

I was going to talk about how there's no way this could possibly be Italian. But the last time I did that, someone in the comments pointed out that the recipe in question was actually a pretty faithful copy of an actual recipe from Italy.

Italian Delight 8 oz shell macaroni 1 pound ground beef ¼ cup olive oil 1 large onion, finely chopped 1 clove garlic, pressed or finely chopped 1 green bell pepper, finely chopped 1 12-oz can tomato paste 1 16-oz can of corn, drained 1 can mushrooms (or 16 oz fresh sliced mushrooms) 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce ½ cup grated cheese (use a cheese that melts well) Cook the beef in a large frying pan. Then remove it from the pan, drain it, and set aside. Add the onion, garlic, bell pepper, mushrooms, and olive oil to the hot pan. Cook until the mushrooms are done. Then stir in the tomato paste and Worcestershire sauce. Add salt and pepper to taste. Stir in the meat, cover, and simmer. While the sauce is simmering, heat oven to 350° and cook the pasta in salted water. Drain the pasta and mix it with the sauce. Pour into a large casserole coated with cooking spray. Top with cheese and bake about 20 minutes. Mrs. Anna D. Wendt; 233 North Street, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange; 16 August 1935; page 8

I'm kind of fond of recipes from before people started worrying about "authenticity." Italian food crossed the Atlantic, got filtered through the grocery stores that didn't have half the ingredients, made its way to areas where no Italian-American person ever trod, and gave us recipes like this. It starts out with an all-American mound of beef.

So many older recipes with browning beef. If you had no idea what to cook on any given night, you only needed to put hamburger in a frying pan and then see where the contents of your refrigerator took you.

Mrs. Anna D. Wendt directs us to use a half-cup of olive oil-- which is a lot of oil for a single pan of food. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange printed the submitter's address under each recipe. (This will be relevant to the cooking oil very soon.) I'm always curious to see what sort of house begat any given recipe.  And so, as I can never resist doing, I looked up Mrs. Wendt's house on Google Street View. Mrs. Wendt's neighborhood is near the river that runs through town. Ignoring the appalling real estate prices of today, it looks like it was initially home to people who worked in the various warehouses and commercial docks on the water. 

This brings us to the excessive amount of oil that starts the recipe. Since I don't need to come up with enough calories to sustain a family working laborious jobs, I cut the oil in half. It still made a respectable slick in the pan.

Because I love modern conveniences as much as anyone else, I used frozen bell peppers and frozen onions. I could have properly weighed them out, but instead I eyeballed what looked like one onion and one bell pepper's worth of frozen vegetable confetti.

Our next ingredient caused problems: canned mushrooms. I usually like to follow recipes as written. After all, why bother with someone else's instructions if you intend to ignore them and cook as you always do? Also, as I have often said, following a recipe as written means I can blame someone else when things go bad. But I refused to ruin beef with canned mushrooms. They are bitter, slimy, and revolting. I try to keep an open mind and try things before I don't like them, but I refuse to touch canned mushrooms.

Things were looking good so far. The vegetables had exuded a lot of flavorful juices as they cooked- almost enough to turn this into a vegetable soup. It may look like I added water, but everything in the pan came from the vegetables cooked in it. 

I forgot to purchase fresh garlic, so I had to cheat a bit and use powdered garlic instead. When I stirred it in, the skillet exhaled the scent of the best garlic bread I can imagine.

And now we get to the tomatoes. You may think that spaghetti sauce made with canned tomato paste sounds (to put it delicately) inauthentic. But is canned paste really any worse than the pasty-pink out-of-season tomatoes you can purchase these days?

The taste of the sauce reminded me of the lasagna an ex-roommate's mom dropped off when we were in college. You could tell upon the first taste that it had been lovingly assembled from canned tomatoes with cheddar cheese on top. And while it was as "inauthentic" as you can expect such a creation to be, it really hit the spot after getting all our posessions up three flights of stairs.

 

At this point, we were ready to get out the most expensive part of this recipe: the beef. It was surprisingly hard to see after stirring it into the rest of our Mediterranean fantasy.

We were now one ingredient short of completing our Italian delight. Mrs. Wendt calls for a can of corn or peas. I choose to pretend she never mentioned canned peas. As the can of corn hovered over the pan of beef and tomatoes, I faltered. I tried to tell myself that corned spaghetti would be perfectly fine, if less than ideal. I told myself that this recipe, corn and all, got printed in the newspaper and won a $2 basket of groceries. I told myself that polenta is really commonplace in Italy, so corn is not an alien vegetable to them,and therefore this recipe is more plausible than it seems. I also told myself that this Italian delight came from someone's house, and not some corporate test kitchen trying to shove their products into as many recipes as possible.

Ultimately, I couldn't tip out the corn. It definitely didn't help that most stories about "my awful mother-in-law sabotaged my cooking" seem to involve somebody sneaking into the host's kitchen and ruining the homemade spaghetti sauce (it's almost always spaghetti sauce) with something from a can. 

I didn't think Mrs. Wendt was maliciously sabotaging everyone clipping dinner ideas from this week's Recipe Exchange, but I couldn't ignore the similarity. Maybe she actually liked canned corn on her spaghetti. Or, she may have simply added corn to nearly everything she made, and subjected her Italian delight to the same treatment. Or, maybe she was using canned corn to "volumize" the recipe (as my mother puts it). After all, there was a Depression on and she probably had a lot of kids and a husband to feed.

 

Even though I couldn't bring myself to add a can of corn to a massive vat of spaghetti sauce, I wanted to know if it was any good. And so, I removed some of the pan's contents and added the unbelievable ingredient. The corn kernels, with their bright yellow color, looked horribly out of place. It was like the Italian delight had suddenly sprouted yellow warning lights.

If Mrs. Wendt was "volumizing" the spaghetti with canned corn, she must have had a very large family at home. The Italian delight nearly overflowed the skillet. And keep in mind that I have removed about a quarter of the delight so that I could put corn in a test sample of it.

I thought that Mrs. Wendt had skimped on the cheese, but then again there was a Depression on.

As the cheese melted, it dripped into the pits and crevices all over the the top of the Italian delight, unveiling the corn that it had halfheartedly hidden before baking. I think the corn made it look like a sort of beef-noodle casserole instead of a pasta bake. To Mrs. Wendt's credit, she never said this was a pasta bake but an "Italian delight."

The Italian delight with, um, "corned beef" was surprisingly good. You just had to reframe your mind. It isn't the baked pasta we would make today. It's more like more like a beef-tomato casserole with macaroni in it. Honestly, I would have gone ahead and added chopped celery with the canned corn.

It's easy to forget that even simple things like baked pasta can change a lot in 90 years. I was really thrown off because this was similar to something we'd make today. When I make something so old it's archaic (such as mincemeat with raisins and kidneys), it's easy to act like I'm trying foods from a country I've never been to. But I wasn't prepared for the food to be so similar to modern-day dishes, yet unignorably different. 

But for those who can't countenance corn in spaghetti, here is a plate of the corn-free Italian delight.

The corned spaghetti was good enough that I would have kept the leftovers even if they didn't contain a lot of beef. Like a lot of things we've made from the Recipe Exchange, it's not fancy but it's something you'd love to come home to. In a weird way, the remaining pan of "normal" corn-free Italian delight tasted like something was missing. Or maybe I'm daft-- or both. Either way, after nixing the canned mushrooms, this recipe was a delight.

Copper Pennies: or, Cool off with carrots!

Who would guess carrots could be so good on a hot day?

Copper Pennies 8 ounces of carrots (4 or 5 medium-sized), thinly sliced crosswise ¼ cup canned tomato soup, undiluted ¼ cup sugar 1 tbsp cooking oil 3 tbsp cider vinegar ¾ tsp dry mustard ¾ tsp Worcestershire sauce One-quarter onion (white or yellow), finely chopped One-quarter bell pepper, finely chopped 1 stick celery, finely chopped Lettuce leaves for serving Place carrots in a small microwave-safe bowl. Add a little salt and a spoonful of water. Cover with a dinner plate (or anything that will keep in the steam without forming an airtight seal) and microwave until fork-tender, about 4 minutes. In a medium or large microwave-safe bowl, whisk together all remaining ingredients except the onion, bell pepper, celery, and lettuce. Microwave until it comes to a rolling boil, about 1 or 2 minutes. Remove, and stir to mix. Then add the carrots, onion, and celery. Transfer to a container with a well-sealed lid. Refrigerate overnight. Serve cold. You can serve it on lettuce leaves if desired. Miss Lennee Lacey; The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

 I saw this one in The Cotton Country Collection a long time ago, and always was a bit skeptical. It looked like nothing but sliced carrots with some inadequate attempts to improve them. The recipe may look underwhelming, but it periodically pops into my head when I'm trying to use up the last of a bag of carrots. 

The Cotton Country Collection; Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana; 1972

Unfortunately, I could not get the recipe simply by opening the book I first saw it in. As mentioned in earlier posts, my copy of The Cotton Country Collection fell apart and therefore went to the municipal hereafter, taking the copper pennies with it. However, when I was windowshopping at an antique store with friends, I found a copy for sale. 

You may think I promptly bought it, but you would be wrong. I took it off the shelf, "casually" sauntered to another part of the store where the clerk couldn't see me, and whipped out my phone. The hardest part was discreetly reshelving the book right in front of the clerk and pretending I happened to change my mind.

As I was reading the directions, I realized that we can modernize the recipe with the microwave. Cooking this on the stove is as outdated as the recipe name. (These days, it should be called "copper-plated zinc pennies.") There's no reason to boil the carrots when the microwave will do the job faster.

If you're quartering the recipe like I did, you finish cutting everything pretty quick. After slicing the carrots, we only had to chop these.

Having finished everything that involves a cutting board, we could get to the dressing. The instructions tell us to simply put everything in a pot and boil it. Like the carrots themselves, this seemed easier in the microwave than on a stove. As we got everything into the bowl, I realized I had underestimated how much sugar this recipe uses.

Things looked more normal after getting all the spices in there.

As I removed the steaming-hot tomato dressing from the microwave, it smelled sharply and pungently of the 1970s in a way I didn't expect and can't explain.

And so, after a bit of microwaving and a smaller-than-expected amount of chopping, our copper pennies were ready to stir together and put away. I liked the pretty and bright colors. Also, the vinegary tomato sauce tasted better than I thought it would.

The next day, the colors on the fresh produce had dulled a bit. But the bell peppers and onions were just as crunchy as the day before. (I didn't bother serving this on lettuce because I didn't want to purchase a head of it and let the rest rot in the fridge.)

The copper pennies are downright refreshing after being outside in this heat- like the vegetable equivalent of an iced tea. I expected to say that this recipe is better if you reheat it the next day, but it's surprisingly good served cold. I didn't think I would like it cold, but somehow it works.

Of course, the cooked carrots don't really taste like much of anything, though marinating them overnight in a tomato-vinegar sauce definitely helped. The onions and the bell peppers added all the flavor that the carrots lacked. I think copper pennies would be a really good choice any time people get together in hot weather. Heavy rich foods just aren't as appealing when it's hot outside. (At many summer picnics, the fruit tray gets completely demolished while the decadent cakes sit nearly-untouched all day.)

Picnics and other encounters with people aside, I think this recipe makes a great side dish while it's so hot outside. As a bonus, very little effort goes into actually making this. And if you use the microwave instead of the stove, you won't even heat up the kitchen.

In conclusion, this recipe is a lot better than I expected, and worth making again.

Irish Cream Cheesecake: or, Decadence by Request

Until we in the United States discover this weird foreign concept called "public transit," cars remain a necessity. For this reason, it is always wise to have friends who love to work on cars and also have a weakness for dessert.

Irish Cream Cheesecake 1 pie pan or 9" round cake pan, lined with graham cracker crust 1¼ lb. cream cheese 1 cup minus 2 tbsp sugar 4½ tsp flour ½ tsp vanilla 2 eggs 1 egg yolk 2 (50mL each) mini-bottles Irish cream, or 7 tablespoons Heat oven to 300°. Combine the cream cheese, sugar, flour, and vanilla in a large bowl. Mix well. Add the whole eggs and the yolk, one at a time, beating well after each. Then mix in the Irish cream. Pour the batter into the crust. Bake the cheesecake until it jiggles just a bit in the center (for me, it was about 40 minutes). Chill for at least 2 hours. When the cheesecake is firm (or at least firm-ish), make the hot fudge sauce and spread it on top. Return the refrigerator and chill overnight. Remove from refrigerator about 30 minutes before serving. The World's Best Hot Fudge Sauce ½ cup heavy cream 3 tbsp butter, cut into small pieces ⅓ cup granulated sugar ⅓ cup dark brown sugar Pinch of salt ½ cup cocoa powder Place the cream and butter in a medium-size bowl. Microwave it 10 seconds at a time, stirring well after each time, until the butter melts. Stir in the sugars. Microwave it for 10 seconds at a time, stirring well after each time, until the sugar is completely dissolved. Taste and check for undissolved granules. Whisk in the cocoa powder and salt, beating hard to break up any cocoa lumps. (If any stubborn lumps remain, use a rubber spatula to press them against the sides of the bowl.) Note: You may a bit of extra cheesecake batter that doesn't fit in the pan. If so, you can put one or two paper liners into a cupcake pan (depending on how much batter you have), and press a little bit of crumb-crust mixture into each. Then pour in the batter, filling each one about two-thirds full. Bake them alongside the cheesecake. Or, you can freeze the unbaked cupcakes as described here and bake them whenever you want. Cheesecake adapted from The Unofficial Mad Men Cookbook, Judy Gelman and Peter Zheutlin, 2011 Hot fudge sauce from Maida Heatter's Book of Great Chocolate Desserts, Maida Heatter, 1974

When my brakes were due for replacement, I asked a friend if he would, um, "help" me in exchange for the dessert of his choice. This cheesecake was the result. We previously met this recipe when we stacked it in the Saint Patcaken. Since we are making today's cheesecake as payment, we stirred in not one but two mini-bottles of Irish cream.

You can tell how divine this cheesecake will be when you swirl the batter with a spoon. It just feels good. The hardest part of making it was resisting the temptation to get out a spoon and eat it before baking.

Because I really wanted to show my appreciation for the automotive aid, I decided that this cheesecake should not be served bare-topped. Instead, it would be covered with hot fudge sauce. The first drips of chocolate gave the cheesecake an upscale, monogrammed look.

But we all know that chocolate-flavored automotive thanks should never be rationed. We poured a lot more hot fudge sauce on top before setting our sweet compensation in the refrigerator.

The next day, the cheesecake had become everything I hoped for. (We may have cut our sample slice before it was fully chilled.) At any rate, my friend who so generously "helped" with my brake job did not feel shortchanged.

So, if you need to pay for favors with dessert (or if you want to do a big favor to yourself), prepare space in your refrigerator for an Irish cream cheesecake. You will only regret that you gave it away.

Heresy

Sometimes the best gifts cost nothing.

Before we proceed: if you have strongly held beliefs about the correct preparation of steaks, you may want to come back tomorrow when we'll have cheesecake instead of blasphemy.

In what I can best describe as beautiful solidarity among the financially pinched, a special promotional code has been getting passed around my friends. You know those meal kit services that send you once-a-week boxes of ingredients and recipes? Well, there's a meat company that does the same thing. As one might expect when having meat shipped on dry ice to one's house, they ain't cheap.

However! If you get a refer-a-friend code, your first order is only $10. But that nearly-free order of meat comes with a dangerous trap: if you forget to cancel your membership, your auto-renewing order will viciously attack your bank account the next month. (I did not forget to cancel.) I don't know who first got this magical meat code, nor who they got it from, and I don't know how many people had it passed to them before it reached me. But since the meat people apparently don't get suspicious when multiple accounts go to the same shipping address, everyone in the house got a $10 meat order before passing the code on to someone else who could use a bit of a meaty windfall. For all I know, by the time I write this, somebody who lives a thousand miles away is getting their ten-dollar happy box after the code made its way to them.

When the box of meat arrived, I carried it to the kitchen. Everyone stared it, backing away slowly as if it was a trap. Eventually, one of us dared to cut the box open. With no small amount of reverence, we beheld the insane amount of vacuum-packed dead cow that had reached our doorstep. I had ordered a lot of ground beef because it's been a long time since I made a good meatloaf. After seeing that this magical meat offer was everything we hoped for, the others in the house ordered steaks which arrived in another box a short week later.

As much as I appreciated that they ordered a steak just for me, I honestly don't like steaks. And so, when it was time to put them on the grill, I politely asked them to put mine in the freezer and I would cook it later.

Before going any further, I'd like to pause and make assurances that everyone else's steaks were cooked to that still-red-in-the-middle state, complete with big puddles of coagulate all over the plates. This would be the last time anyone at this house cooked a steak in accordance with all the dictums of meat purists, but it would not be the last time anyone in this house cooked a steak.

Two weeks later, with no witnesses present, I got my steak out of the freezer. The bovine besmirchment could begin.

If you have religious views about steaks, this is your last chance to look away.

You know what I haven't had in a long time? Something I have not found competently made in the entire state of Texas? A good cheesesteak. Everyone here puts some miserable gooey sauce on them, or they make it with these leathery rags of meat, or they find some other way to make people wonder "Why does anybody like these?"

Unfortunately, we didn't have the right kind of bread. (Amoroso's Bakery is a bit too far away.) Sandwich bread seemed too... unworthy. But the rye bread that we had inexplicably purchased seemed good enough. It wouldn't be the same as anything purchased in the greater Philadelphia area. But cow and cheese on rye seemed impossible to argue with.

After putting the meat onto the cast iron griddle and subjecting it to a vicious spatula-chopping that made the kitchen sound like I had taken up blacksmithing, it was time to put this together, complete with provolone on top. It would have looked prettier had I been able to resist eating half of the cheese before draping it onto this... thing.

Our finished creation may look worse than some of the recipes I have coming up, but the steaming-hot meat got the provolone to that perfect temperature where it's almost but not quite melted.

Yes, it looks absolutely terrible. But I did not care. 

Beef sacrilege aside, I was very glad no one else was in the house. This felt like one of those moments when you really need to be alone. I'm not going to recommend using ribeye (or whatever this was) for your chopped sandwich needs. But if some of it randomly lands in your freezer at a cost of nearly nothing, I don't discourage it either.

After so much scrimping and saving, it was downright therapeutic to be so carelessly extravagant. After all, I purchased the pre-sliced provolone for this! I may have desecrated what should have been a high-dollar cut of beef, it felt so damn good. Now I need someone to randomly give me an unsolicited $700 bottle of wine so I can make sangrias.

Second-Stab Saturday: Apple Cookies with invisible apples!

When last we saw the apple cookies, the recipe was a runny, half-burnt failure. I noted that we already have a fruit cookie recipe ready to receive apples. The recipe is even called fruit cookies, so it's perfect for making, well, fruit cookies.

Apple Cookies 1 cup butter, margarine,* or shortening 2 cups dark brown sugar 2 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp cloves 1 tsp nutmeg ¼ tsp salt† 1 tsp baking soda 3 eggs 2 tbsp cream 1 tsp vanilla 4 cups flour 1 cup raisins 1 cup finely chopped apples (no need to peel) White frosting Heat oven to 375°. Have greased cookie sheets ready. Cream the butter, and sugar, spices, salt, and baking soda, beating until light and fluffy. Then beat each egg in thoroughly, one at a time. Add the cream and vanilla, beat well. Next, mix in the flour, stirring just until blended. The dough should be firm enough to shape in your hands. If it's sticky, add more flour. Then add the raisins, nuts, and dates. Roll into 1 to 1½-inch balls. Place 3 inches apart on the pan. Gently pat each one to make it flat and about a half-inch thick. Bake 10-12 minutes. When cool, top with white frosting. These are better the next day. The spices get stronger. *Use the margarine that comes in sticks, not the spreadable kind that comes in tubs. †The original recipe calls for ⅓ teaspoon of salt. But I don't know anyone whose measuring spoons come with a one-third teaspoon. Rounding down to a quarter teaspoon won't hurt a thing. Omit the salt if using margarine or salted butter. Adapted from a handwritten note, The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928 (original recipe here)

I added enough apples to get the same (ish) fruit-to-dough ratio as the previous cookies, and made no other change to the recipe.

As with the original apple cookies, we chopped the apples very finely. Even though the recipe was a failure, cutting the apples into extremely small pieces got them completely cooked in the cookies' short baking time.

Our cookies came out perfect, which I already knew would happen since I've made this recipe before. However, the apple pieces, which had taken on a dull color in the oven, made the cookies look subtly yet unfortunately corn-fed.

I have to give credit to Mrs. John Stevens, the creator of the apple cookie recipe. She realized that her cookies (such as they were) looked like specimens that some enterprising ornithologists would analyze to determine a species' diet. Her solution: Hide the cookies with icing. They look really cute with a cover-up, don't they?

I didn't expect to say this, but the apples really didn't change these cookies. You might think the apples softened them, or that they added a lovely tart flavor. They didn't. The cookies were neither better nor worse for having apples in them. I guess if you can convince yourself that blueberry muffins count as a serving of fruit, you can pretend that the apples make these cookies a great source of vitamins. 

So if you have some iffy-looking apples on the counter, chopping them into cookies is not a bad way to keep them out of the trash can. But I can't think of any other reason to make cookies with them.

The Unexpectedly Doughnut-esque Cake: or, Fun with electric mixers!

Sometimes, the greatest gift comes from a thrift store.

Doughnut-esque Cake ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar ¼ tsp salt (omit if using salted butter) ¼ tsp cinnamon* 2 eggs 1 tsp vanilla 1½ cup flour Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9" round pan. Beat butter, sugar, salt, and cinnamon. Add eggs and vanilla. Beat on high speed until it is thoroughly whipped, about 10 minutes. Add the flour, gently stirring just until all is mixed. Spread the batter into the pan and bake 20-30 minutes. It's done when a toothpick in the center comes out clean. When the cake is done, whisk together the icing and pour it on.     Icing: 2 tbsp butter 3 tsp water Tiny pinch of salt 1 tsp vanilla or so 2 tbsp cocoa powder 1 cup powdered sugar In a microwave safe bowl (a 2-cup measuring cup also works), melt the butter with the salt and water. Stir in vanilla. Then whisk in cocoa and powdered sugar. Stir until smooth. Add more powdered sugar if it's too thin, or a tiny bit more water if it's too thick. Pour the icing over the cake right after it's out of the oven, and tilt the pan back and forth to help it spread. Wait until the cake is ready before making the icing. The icing doesn't sit and wait very well-- it hardens instead. *You want to add just enough cinnamon to subtly change the flavor, but not enough that it's recognizable.

One of my friends repairs and sells vintage stereos. He likes to trawl thrift stores looking for future fix-and-sell projects. This thing came to the house instead.

The googly eyes appeared on it while I was asleep.

We don't need a second mixer, but we got it anyway. We left the price stickers on it as proof of how little we paid. Some people love to brag about how expensive things were, but all of my friends boast about how much something didn't cost them. We say things like "It would have been $250, but I found it on the clearance rack! Seventy-five percent off!"

The motor on this thing uses 231 watts at highest speed. For reference, that's like using 4 or 5 handmixers at the same time. To inaugurate our new high-powered silver treasure, I decided to use it for something that you can't do by hand without punishing yourself: leavening a particularly heavy cake batter by beating the snot out of it.

We went with 1234 cake, which is so dense that it sits in the ambiguous zone between cakes and bar cookies. I wanted to see if we could use the mixer to leaven the cake by brute force. When I make this,  I usually cream the butter and sugar until they look like this before adding the flour. It's definitely "beaten until fluffy" as many recipes dictate, even if it doesn't look like it in that large bowl.

But today, I cracked in the egg and turned our new kitchen friend to its highest speed and let it keep running until the batter looked like cake frosting. (Note: I did this before adding the flour. We all know that beating cake batter for ten minutes after adding the flour will turn your cake into a frosted doorstop.)

You could already see a difference as we got the batter in the pan. It looked a lot fluffier than it usually does.

This cake somehow produced a crispy-crackly top layer as it baked, as if I made brownies. I guess I can call this the magic of beating a half-hectowatt-hour into the cake batter: the cake gets shiny on top.

When we cut into the cake, we found that it had a much finer-grained texture than any other 1234 cake I've made. It was still dense in the best way possible, but it somehow didn't seem that way. I also noticed that the slight cinnamon (enough to make a difference, but not enough to recognize) made the cake taste oddly like doughnuts. So I put a thin chocolate glaze on it-- the kind that you only eat on doughnuts at 5AM.

Given how nicely this cake came out, I highly suggest letting your mixer have its well-beaten way with your recipes. The resulting creation is delicate like a cake, but rich and dense like brownies. Also, why would you purchase an electric mixer if you're not going to use it?

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."