Attempted Chocolate Pizzelles: or, Vexatious success pays off with dinosaurs

Some things, no matter how delicious, should never go on a pizzelle iron.

Chocolate Waffle Iron Cookies 1½ c sugar 1 c butter 4 eggs 2 c flour ½ c cocoa 2 tsp vanilla Cream sugar and cocoa with butter, beating until light. Beat in eggs and vanilla, using your electric mixer to keep beating until it's whipped. Add flour, stirring just until mixed. Drop by spoonful onto a very well-greased waffle iron and bake until done. They will be too fragile to lift out off of the waffle iron. Instead, place a plate under the waffle iron and tip it until they fall out. You may need to give them a starting nudge with a fork to release them after you have the waffle iron tipped upright. Frost (I made a thin glaze and just poured it over). They are better on the second day. Source: Marti Patter, Police Potpourri, Cedar Rapids (Iowa) State Policeman's Association Auxiliary, 1977

Vanilla Glaze 2 tbsp butter 4 tsp hot water 2 tsp vanilla or so 1 c powdered sugar Melt butter, add hot water. Stir in vanilla, then add powdered sugar. Whisk until smooth. If you have one of those glass measuring cups with a pour spout, you can easily mix this in the cup and then pour it out on all the cookies.

After a surprising run of success with our pizzelle iron, I thought it might be nice to branch out a bit. Also, it might be fun to get chocolate involved. And so, we decided to make the waffle iron cookies that Lace Maker sent to us a while ago. They were so delicious and so easy (albeit a little tricky to get off the iron). 

But this time, I wanted to make pretty waffle iron cookies. Also, I wanted to play with my new pizzelle iron. I told myself that a pizzelle is basically a waffle. And a waffle iron is a waffle iron, whether it has pretty flowers or a grid of squares. The recipe should feel right at home cooking in one... or so I believed.

And so, I mixed the batter. I then put so much cooking spray onto the iron that I could have used it as a candle. I then put about the same amount of batter that has generally been right for this iron. The moment I closed it, a hot mess sputtered out on all sides.

On the bright side, the batter leaked out of the iron before I had the chance to get it onto the stove burner. After holding the iron over the trash can and scraping off the molten cookie dough, I put it on the stove and let it cook. Upon opening the iron, I found... this.

At this point, I could have gotten out the normal waffle iron and cooked the rest of our cookie dough in it. After all, that worked perfectly last time. Furthermore, the recipe's title tells us to use a waffle iron. But while I do have the occasional spurt of intelligence, I also have ill-timed flareups of stubbornness. This was now a challenge.

For our next attempt, I used less batter. I also kind of hover-held the top of the iron so that it couldn't squeeze our cookie to death. We sort of succeeded here, even though the cookie looks like a random smudge of batter that landed on the waffle iron.

Because I was too lazy to get out a timer, I was following the instructions I got over the phone from Fante's kitchen to say one Hail Mary per side. I don't know if I was timing the cookies or if I was praying for them to let go of the pizzelle iron.

Whether by divine intervention or by improving with experience, our cookies were slowly but steadily improving. But producing intact cookies on a pizzelle iron was an irksome process. I couldn't let go of the iron while we were cooking them. To prevent the iron from pressing all the batter out like it did the first time, I had to place one finger pressed between the wooden handles to keep them ever-so-slightly spread apart. (Is this why the iron has wooden handles to begin with?) Granted, when you have to flip the iron every thirty seconds under the best conditions, you don't exactly have a lot of leisure time while you wait. But I have never been so pinned to the stove. 

Really, I brought this on myself. Marti Platter, whose name appears under the recipe in the original book, used a normal waffle iron. When I followed her directions, our cookies were so much easier (and delicious enough to save the recipe). Furthermore, I knew exactly where I had stored the waffle iron after the last time we used it. But for reasons not even known to myself, I persisted with pizzelles. 

After we got a few cookies in, the first one had cooled off. And so, with my one free hand that wasn't caught in a pizzelle iron, I tasted it. 

I was so mad at how good it came out. The outside was almost unnaturally crispy, and the inside was practically fudge. Imagine a cookie made entirely out of the corner piece of the brownie pan. I was hoping it would be terrible, so I could forget the whole enterprise. Unfortunately, they were too good to stop making them. (Reminder: I brought this on myself.)

After making enough of these cookies, I started to get a feel for how much batter would fill the iron without oozing out of it. I was so pleased the first time I got it nearly exactly right.

After a few more of these, I made the perfect pizzelle. It filled the iron from edge to well-sprayed edge. It was exquisite. It was perfection. It was so not worth it.

All good things must come to an end, whether they're bad ideas or not. We soon reached the end of the batter. As often happens, our final cookie was a runty one made of all the spatula-scrapings we could get off the bowl. In this way, our chocolate pizzelle cookies made a perfect cycle-- from too-small cookies, to perfection, and back to puny cookies at the end. 

As soon as someone tried one, he said "Uh, you're going to do these again, right?"

I said "NO!"

Then I gave it some thought and added "At least, not on this iron."

If you see this and want chocolate pizzelles, there are plenty of recipes out there for them that will grant your wish with greater ease. Or, if you think this recipe looks so good (and it is), you can avoid all this trouble if you use a normal waffle iron. Sometimes, following the directions is the best way. But I have to admit, this was so much more photogenic.

But the cookies looked pretty (well, some of them) and tasted delicious. I wrapped the good ones in one of my special cookie-giving containers for our neighbors up the street who have once again put a twelve-foot Christmas skeleton in their yard. This year, Al CaBone (that's his name) is joined by an even taller skeleton with pumpkin head. The neighbors weren't home at the time, so I awkwardly stuffed the cookies in their mailbox and hoped they weren't gone for two weeks or something.

I may seem like a cheapskate to give away cookies in a bag on a paper plate, but I consider it part of the gift. Not only are we letting people have cookies, we also liberate them from any guilt over whether they should bring the container back.

I was originally going to write that for all our frustration (and the time we spent gouging out pieces of burnt-batter), today's ill-advised adventure at least had a happy ending because chocolate was involved. But things ended even better than I thought. A few days after leaving a batch of cookies at Al CaBone's house, we found this on the porch. The note in the card said "We thought you Al's pet dino could brighten your home! He doesn't eat much but he's fun to play with."

 Never underestimate pizzelles.

Peanut Butter Blossoms: or, The most psychologically powerful cookies I've found

I wasn't going to write about these at all, but they had an astonishing power over anyone who came within smelling range.

Peanut Butter Blossoms ½ cup white sugar ½ cup butter, softened ½ cup packed brown sugar ½ cup creamy peanut butter ¾ tsp baking soda ½ tsp baking powder 1 egg 1½ cups flour Additional sugar for rolling About 36 Hershey's Kisses, unwrapped Heat oven to 375°F. Have cookie sheets ready (lined with parchment paper if desired). In large bowl, thoroughly cream the butter and white sugar. Beat in the brown sugar, peanut butter, baking soda, and baking powder. Add the egg, beat until light. Stir in the flour. If the dough is sticky, add a little more flour. Shape dough into 1-inch balls; roll in additional granulated sugar. On ungreased cookie sheets, place about 2 inches apart. Bake 8 to 10 minutes, or until edges are light golden brown. When you remove them from the oven, immediately press a chocolate into the center of each cookie. Remove from cookie sheets to cooling rack. Source: Betty Crocker

Today's recipe starts with leftover Christmas candy. My family has a glorious tradition of giving everyone an insanely huge bag of assorted candies every year. We may not have selection boxes on this side of the Atlantic, but we find a way to ensure that everyone gets an all-American dose of sugar anyway. 

I decided to use the extra Hershey's Kisses for something better than slowly eating them throughout the next month: cookies! After all, is there a better way to do away with the fruits of the holiday season than encasing candy in more sugar with a lot of butter added in?

I've always thought this recipe was too tricky to bother with. For some reason, I was under the impression that you had to reach into the oven and insert the chocolates at just the right time, when they were almost but not quite done. It always seemed like getting the chocolate and cookie to fuse together was a matter of delicate timing. 

But as it turns out, you only need to shove the chocolates into the cookies as soon as you remove them from the oven. As long as you remembered to unwrap the candy at the beginning, there's no "knack" that only comes from several batches of practice.

As aforementioned, I wasn't going to write these at all. There's no suspense or drama in saying "I pulled a recipe from the Betty Crocker website and it came out fine." But the real surprise was the amazing response I got to these. One person plucked a single cookie off the platter, wandered off with it, and soon returned to load a whole plate with a pile of peanut butter blossoms. I tried to save some of these to give away, but that simply did not happen. 

But I haven't gotten to the most unprecedented part of this recipe: the way I was asked to make more of them. I woke up the next day to find the crucial ingredients casually sitting on the countertop, still in their grocery bag. 

This has never, and I do mean never, happened before. I regularly gotten recipe requests and dutifully write them onto the next week's grocery list, but no one has ever decided that cookies could not wait until the next supermarket expedition. No one ever fetches ingredients for me. What could I do but give in to popular demand?

Also, I have to credit the Betty Crocker people for their recipe testing and writing skills. My cookies looked exactly like theirs on the first attempt. I didn't do any special baking tricks or anything, I just followed the directions as written. It takes a lot of skill to write a recipe so that someone following along at home can get it exactly right the first time.

Furthermore, with a lot of recipes, one can never get their own attempts to look like the professional pictures at all. Either the kitchen staff did a lot of finicky baking steps for the photoshoot that didn't get included in the official instructions, or the photographers employed a lot of food-styling tricks that made the food look impossibly perfect, or usually both. However, my peanut butter blossoms looked exactly like the professionally-baked ones aside from my tragic lack of studio lighting.

We couldn't wait for the cookies to cool off. Therefore, we discovered that when they're still warm, the heat travels up the chocolate and melts it from base to tip. This caused a few of the cookies to get adorable bent tips:

But more crucially, someone else (I'm not lying when I say it wasn't me) discovered the melted-chocolate sandwich cookie.

One person said "This is the best version of these cookies I've ever had!"

I sent pictures of the peanut butter blossoms all my other friends who like cooking. Every one of them, down to the last person, said they were major nostalgia bombs. It seems everyone but me had these cookies all the damn time as kids. And everyone, without exception, wanted some. I am not kidding when I say I'm adding these cookies to my list of recipes for wooing. Peanut butter blossoms hit a powerful emotional spot I didn't know one could get to when baking.

After making two batches in two days, we finally had a surplus. I wasn't sure if you can freeze them without the Kisses getting that powdery white coating on them (which is still fine to eat, although it detracts from the cuteness). In case anyone is wondering, you can freeze peanut butter blossoms for at least a week, and they will be as good as fresh.

Cranberry Gelatin: or, Surprisingly good places to put celery

Cranberries are in season, which means we at A Book of Cookrye can bring out a recipe that I've sometimes stared at for years.

Cranberry Gelatin 2 cups cranberries 1½ cup water, divided into ½ and 1 cup 1 c sugar 1 tbsp (or one envelope) powdered gelatin* 1/2 c finely diced celery 1/2 c chopped nuts, if desired 1/2 tsp salt Sprinkle gelatin into ½ cup of water, set aside.† Wash berries and coarsely grind them. If you don't have a meat grinder, put the cranberries in a food processor and run it until they are lightly pulverized. Process only about half a cup of cranberries at a time so that they all get evenly chopped.‡ Put the berries and 1 cup of water in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low, put a lid on, and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the salt and sugar, then raise the heat to high until it boils again. Reduce the heat back to low, put the lid back on, and cook 3 minutes more. Add the gelatin and stir until dissolved. Then remove from heat. Refrigerate until partially set. It should be thick enough that the berries don't sink or float after you stir it, but instead stay in place. Then add celery and nuts. (If not adding celery or nuts, give it a quick stir when it's half-set to redistribute the berries.) Pour into molds. Refrigerate until firm. Then unmold and serve. Or, you can skip the unmolding business and pour the mixture into a cute serving bowl. A clear glass (or plastic) bowl will show the cranberries' lovely color better than a ceramic one. *One standard-size (¼-ounce) envelope of powdered gelatin contains a little less than the full tablespoon the recipe calls for. But if you're going to serve this out of a bowl, one envelope of gelatin is fine. You only need a full tablespoon of gelatin if you want this to be firm enough to stand up on its own. †If desired, squeeze the juice from one or two oranges, and add enough water to make ½ cup. Then let the gelatin sit in that. By adding the orange juice after you remove the pot from heat, you avoid boiling away its flavor. ‡You can skip this part if you want. The recipe will come out a little different, but it's good either way. Source: Handwritten note, The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

Like so many of the recipes I've been meaning to get around to, I simply never had an excuse to make it. Well, the grocery store was desperately trying to unload the last of the cranberries that remained from the holidays. That was as good an excuse as any to purchase them and make a lovely.... salad? Cranberry sauce? I'm not sure what this is, and our handwritten recipe giver didn't record a title above the directions.

I've never bought fresh cranberries before. They are unexpectedly white in the middle. When you cut one open, it kind of looks like half of a tiny apple. Also, I've heard people claim that fresh cranberries are unbearably bitter without sugar, but I thought they were just fine. Fresh cranberries might stomp out the flavors of everything else in your fruit salad, though.

Anyway, this recipe begins with our meat grinder! We haven't used it in far too long, and it was nice to get it out and pulverize some produce. I like how when I'm grinding fruits and vegetables, I don't have to worry about cleaning raw-meat germs off the grinder afterward.

Setting aside the cranberries, we had to attend to the gelatin. Our recipe calls for one tablespoon of the stuff. I thought that one tablespoon of it would be the same as one envelope, but I poured our happy hoof powder into a measuring spoon just to be sure. It turns out that one standard-size packet of gelatin is almost one tablespoon, but not quite. Because I didn't want to mess up a recipe with a measurement error, I opened a second packet of gelatin to make up for the deficiency.

Pictured: one standard-sized packet of gelatin. It is less than one tablespoon.

I wondered if "Jelatine" was a long-discontinued brand of gelatin. If it was, it's thoroughly forgotten. However, a quick search through newspaper archives (thank you to the local library for the free Newspaper.com access) found various recipe pages spelling it "jelatine" until at least 1986.

This is the most recent "jelatine" I found, though I only looked for a few minutes. You should know that this diet dessert was printed between recipes for chocolate macadamia muffins and a "chocolate hazelnut truffle log."

"Southern Living Cooking School," Wichita Falls (Texas) Times, September 14 1986, page 10G

Never let it be said that I don't bloom my gelatin. Our writer didn't tell us to, but people made a lot more gelatin in those days. I think she didn't tell us to soften the gelatin for the same reason no recipe ever tells you "crack open the eggs, save the inner contents, and discard the shells."

While our gelatin sat and softened in water, we could get our main attraction onto the stove.

This is what we came here for.

After stirring the pot for a minute or so, the cranberries dyed our spoon a rather fetching shade of pink.

I always thought this recipe would prove a laborious ordeal, but we had our pot simmering before I knew it. A lot of the recipes from our "get a round-tuit" files have been a lot faster to make than we thought. 

As the timer ticked down the berries' ten minutes of simmering, we wiped up the various errant juice splats and chopped the celery.

Before the cooking time was halfway elapsed, a lovely cranberry smell came from under the pot lid. This may sound daft, but I was not prepared for my cranberry sauce to smell like cranberries. For me, cranberries have always existed in those plastic made-from-concentrate juice bottles or cans of gelatinized sauce. I have never smelled cranberry odor from anything that looked like it was derived from nature.

After ten minutes, we opened the lid to add a lot of sugar. Our simmering cranberries had turned a stunning shade of red. I didn't know you could produce such a vivid color without artificial food coloring. It looked like a pot of Kool-Aid with fruit pieces floating in it.

As directed, we let the cranberries cook another three minutes with the sugar, and then it was time to let the gelatin slither into the pot.

While we were waiting for our creation to semi-congeal in the refrigerator, I realized that I didn't know what I was making. While this would probably be a "salad" by gelatin-era standards, cranberry sauce is basically a gelatin mold. As far as I know, it is the only sauce in the world that can be served free-standing. So, were we making sauce or salad? I sent the recipe to a friend in Wisconsin with an uncalled-for question.

There you have it. We're making cranberry salad. Though perhaps the cranberry sauce/salad divide is about as muddy as the boundary between cupcakes and muffins. 

Anyway, after a bit of leisurely reading with a nice cup of tea, our salad had half-congealed and was ready to receive the completing ingredients. In full disclosure, I wasn't sure about adding nuts to this so I divided our cranberry mixture in half. One portion got the full nuts and celery, the other got celery only.

It was then time to put our cranberry salad into the various small bowls that today must pass for molds. I have to admit, our original writer's handwriting gets a bit hard to read as we reach the bottom of the page. I thought she had written "drive into moulds," which I figured must be a charmingly outdated phrase from the days when we spelled it jelatine. The phrase "drive into moulds" seems appropriate when forcing ingredients to assume all manner of freestanding shapes that they never wanted to be. I was even planning to reintroduce the phrase "drive your gelatin into molds" in future recipes. But someone pointed out that the last line simply says "pour into moulds" in particularly scrawly handwriting.

And here it is, all firmed up and ready to serve! Before I do a terrible job of getting our gelatin out of its first mold, let's have a look at the pretty scarlet color.

Unfortunately, we had some structural failures when we unmolded our jelatine. Half of it stuck to the bowl, and half of it fell out. Despite our almost-successful reassembly job, our salad was not likely to get a commendation in anyone's home economics class.

But before we taste it, we at A Book of Cookrye have a special and favorite way to eat cranberry sauce! (Or cranberry salad.)

You may think macaroni and cheese and cranberry sauce is a weird combination. But really, macaroni and cheese and cranberry sauce is merely lateral move from those cheese-cracker-and-expensive-jelly trays you see at unpleasantly boring business events. (One day I'll find out where they get those extra-bland crackers topped with flavor-free herb flecks.)

But we had two more molds to hopefully liberate in one piece. First, the mini-brick! This time, we dipped our mold (actually a food storage container) in warm water before trying to get the gelatin out of it. Instead of losing a third of our gelatin like the first time, only a small corner of it stuck to the mold. After breaking two gelatins in a row, I wondered: are you supposed to use cooking spray in your gelatin molds? If I do any more gelatins I'll have to look that up.

Lastly, we have the measuring cup. I thought a gelatin molded in this cup would have geometrical interest. It's not hard to see why.

However, while it fell out of the cup almost completely intact, it unfortunately looked like this.

But let's pretend I wasn't in the business of freestanding gelatins. Let's imagine that I poured my salad mixture into a pretty serving bowl and let it congeal there. (Since the gelatin is a very lovely color, we'll imagine I used a clear glass bowl so that you can really admire that cranberry scarlet.) Having not failed at presentation, how does it taste?

It's delicious. I totally understand why someone wrote this recipe down in a book, and I am so glad I thought to copy it for myself. I would have never thought to add celery to cranberry sauce (or cranberry salad), but cranberries and celery go together really well. I probably should have cut the celery smaller, but that's easy enough to do next time. 

However, I did not like the nuts in this. Unlike the celery, they were hard without being crunchy. And they barely added any flavor. Really, they just seemed like they landed in the gelatin by accident. And after a few days the nuts were soggy like vegetables that have boiled for too long. 

Also, if we were serving this out of a bowl instead of pretending it's a freestanding gelatin mold, we could discover that the cranberry salad is really good on rye toast.

And of course, that meant that a lot of our cranberry gelatin ended in sandwiches like this.

I liked this salad (or sauce) enough to make it again. I couldn't help but to wonder how crucial it was that we chop the cranberries. And so, I didn't bother. At first, I thought the recipe's given amount of water wasn't enough to cook the cranberries without chopping them- even though the pot looked charmingly like a cranberry bog in a TV commercial. Our cranberries cooked just fine, and we did not need to raise the waterline.

As a side note, those cranberry commercials showing those people wading through berry-covered bogs don't show you the swarms of spiders. You know how farmers keep a few semi-feral cats around as pest control? Well, cranberry farmers do the same thing... with spiders. So when people put on their thigh-high galoshes and go into cranberry bogs that are not being filmed for those quaint-looking advertisements, they are covered with literally hundreds of spiders, all of them crawling to the nearest object (or human) to get out of the water.

If you think I am batty for dumping celery into cranberry sauce (or cranberry salad, depending on your perspective), well, you may be right. In full disclosure, I like to take home those long pickles that come on the side of deli sandwiches and do this:

 

 

Shudder if you want, but peanut butter and pickle sandwiches show up in several decades' worth of cookbooks. There is precedent.

Putting aside the pickles, you may think that we made celery cranberry and peanut butter sandwiches out of a stubborn attempt to repurpose all this cranberry sauce. However, the truth is I liked the cranberry sauce more than the jelly I've been purchasing. In fact, when I ran out of cranberry sauce (or salad, I haven't decided which), I made another batch. But I also made it easier on myself by not bothering to chop the cranberries.

Purely because I like testing directions before sharing them, I decided to make this with a single envelope of gelatin, even though it's a bit less than the tablespoon that the directions demand. I was reasonably sure our gelatin would still set, but I wanted to confirm that before saying that it's possible. I also decided to forget about unmolding and just serve it from the container in which it congealed. I couldn't get over what a beautiful color it was.

I realize that for some people, adding celery to the cranberries is like that horrifying moment when you see someone dump a can of green beans into the spaghetti sauce. But I liked the combination a lot. I actually like celery in a lot of things. To me, celery is like the vanilla extract of savory foods. It makes a lot of things taste better, but I wouldn't eat it on its own.

The resulting gelatin wasn't quite as firm as the first batch. I liked it better that way- it seemed agreeably soft instead of bulletproof. So if you want to skip unmolding and let your cranberry sauce firm up in the bowl you will serve it in, I think one envelope of gelatin is better than one tablespoon of it. But for those who want their cranberries to stand on their own, you'll a bit of extra jiggly reinforcement.

I think the salad was a lot better after omitting the nuts. The celery was a perfect crunchy flavor contrast to the sweet and tart cranberries. And it made the salad (or sauce) so substantial that you could put some of it in a small bowl and eat it on its own. Even if you're skeptical of celery in cranberries, I recommend you give it a try. 

Also, this recipe is a lot easier than I thought it would be. For some reason I thought would be a daunting project, but it's mostly just putting things in a pot and letting them simmer for a while. But if you want to be even lazier than that, try adding some chopped celery to a can of whole-berry cranberry sauce. You can either thank or blame me later. 

And for those who don't like celery in their cranberries quite as much as I do, we're going to close today's recipe with the last moment before I greened up the sauce.

Pizzelles: or, Lose the man, keep the recipes!

This festive season is a great excuse to bake our way through our feelings!

I may have lost the man who bought me the Norwegian wafer iron, but first I got his Italian grandmother's recipes.

Pizzelles 1 stick (½ cup) margarine* 3½ to 4 cups flour 2 tbsp baking powder† 3 eggs 1 cup sugar 1 tsp vanilla (and other flavorings of choice) Melt the margarine and set aside to cool. Sift together the flour and baking powder, set aside. With an electric mixer, beat the eggs on high speed until foamy. Then gradually add the sugar, beating the whole time. Continue beating for another 3 or so minutes, or until thick and cream-colored. Add the margarine and the vanilla, and beat for another minute or two. Lastly, reduce the speed to low. Mix in enough flour to form a firm dough that can be shaped in the hands. Mix only until all is combined- do not overbeat. (If you're worried about overmixing and toughening the dough, set aside the mixer and stir in the flour with a spoon instead.) Bake on a hot pizzelle iron according to the manufacturer's instructions. *use the margarine that comes in sticks, not the spreadable kind that comes in tubs. †Yes, tablespoons. The "b" in "tbsp" is not a mistype. Note: If using citrus rind, put it in a small bowl with the sugar. Then rub and pinch it between your fingers to release the flavor.

When my not-ex-at-the-time's mother found out I like to cook, she immediately got out the recipe box in which resided all of her Italian mother's recipes (in her own handwriting) and insisted that I whip out my phone to take pictures of them.

In retrospect, I should have been suspicious when his mother immediately liked me so much. Every time someone's parents were that grateful to meet me, their offspring proved defective.

Anyway, back to pizzelles. It took me a long time to work up the nerve to make these. After all, this is someone's Italian grandmother's recipe. You don't mess with Italians, even ones with faulty progeny. I didn't want to bodge the recipe and then be cursed from beyond the grave. Even after I had a wafer iron in my hand, I was too nervous to give the recipe a go.

The pizzelles lurked in the back of my mind like an unfinished project. I even started looking at pizzelle irons on Ebay, telling myself that I would never buy one. Here's how well that went:

I don't normally do unboxing photos, but I have to commend the person who packed this. Many sellers just slap a wad of bubble wrap onto something and assume it is safe. But this seller packed our pizzelle iron marvelously. Please note the styrofoam lining that was placed against the sides of the box before filling the center with confetti and pizzelles. 

You might think we simply dug out a pizzelle iron from inside the paper, but instead we found a plastic-wrapped mummy. Also, the seller had lashed the merchandise to a long piece of styrofoam in case all the other padding wasn't enough. After we unwrapped it, we found... a thoroughly immobilized pizzelle iron.

After further unwrapping, our treasure was finally free! Again, I have to commend the person who packed this. I've always believed you should pack things as if you were going to throw the box down a flight of stairs. After all, if you want a 20-pound package sent across the continent in four days for the price of a mediocre pizza, do you really think they can afford to lovingly caress your precious cargo throughout its journey?

And so, with great delight, we opened our pizzelle iron and beheld the pretty design in it.

Does it look familiar?

You may think I obsessively tried to find a pizzelle iron just like my ex's grandmother's, but I didn't. It turns out this is a really common design. In fact, it was one of the first listings that I saw when I recreationally searched Ebay for "stovetop pizzelle iron." So, finding this specific pizzelle iron is less like "I had to track down an ice cream mold from this one metalworking shop that was in my great-aunt's hometown in 1913," and more like "I wanted an avocado-colored Crock Pot just like my mom had." In other words, it was relatively easy, but not instantaneous.

Even after finding the iron I wanted (multiple times), I thought I was safe from buying one. They were always priced dangerously close to a hundred dollars. And so, secure in the knowledge that everything was too expensive to tempt me, I would flip through listings of pizzelle irons, admiring the pretty designs whenever I needed mental breaks from looking at words on a screen. Then someone in Ohio insidiously listed this one in my price range.

Our fate was sealed. We would have my ex's grandmother's pizzelles. They start with margarine.

Tastes like semi-stolen heirlooms!

As aforementioned, I have been trying to work up the nerve to make this recipe for quite some time. Because of that, we've had an embarrassing number of boxes of margarine pass through the refrigerator. Every time I purchased the margarine, it would sit in the back of the bottom shelf, waiting for me to work up the nerve to take on the recipe that put it into my shopping cart. But my courage would fail, and I would reluctantly use the margarine in other recipes as it threatened to expire. But that will happen no more. 

Every time I bought yet another box of it, I did consider that margarine doesn't seem particularly Italian. But I'm not someone's Italian grandmother writing down recipes.

Meanwhile, we had to figure out what to flavor our pizzelles with. She only wrote down vanilla, but that seemed a bit underwhelming. I always thought Italian pizzelles had a lot of flavorings in them, not just a splash of vanilla.

Some time earlier, I had asked my future ex what his mom liked to put in hers. He said "I don't know."

I could not hide my disbelief. "You mean you grew up with Italian relatives and never hung around the kitchen to find out how they made everything?"

"Not really...?"

I should have known on the spot that we would never last.

At any rate, I decided to put in orange rind and almond extract. To my ignorant perspective, that combination seemed Italian-ish. Also, the oranges at the supermarket have been really good lately. (I would later find out that apparently anise is considered traditional in pizzelles.)

You can already see the oil coming out of the orange rind barely after we grated it.

I put the orange rind into the spice grinder with some of the sugar to properly pulverize it. However, the rind contained so much (delicious-smelling) oil that it turned our sugar into a paste. Even though our orange sugar wasn't a free-flowing powder, getting it out of the spice grinder was easy. Resisting the temptation to eat it all was not.

Moving on in the recipe, we are directed to beat the eggs "until foamy." I don't know how foamy the eggs are supposed to be, but I decided that meant to let the mixer do this while I get everything else ready:

Things remained gloriously foamy until we poured in the margarine, whereupon the eggs deflated. You can see the high-water mark on the sides of the bowl, and compare it to the shrunken puddle that lies below.

At this point, our pizzelles were almost complete. Let the record show that even though I rarely bother with such things, I actually sifted the flour first. Again, you don't argue with Italian grandmothers.

Our pizzelle dough was thicker than any waffle batter I have ever made. It didn't fall from the beaters so much as slowly slough off in globs. 

But I thought we had probably made it right. The recipe says to "cut into small pieces," which would have been impossible with a batter. Although this was just ever-so-slightly too soft to cut into anything, though one could roll it into balls between the hands. Whether I had made this right or not, it was time to put our dough onto the pizzelle iron.

Or at least, it was time to put it on some sort of waffle iron. 

You know how new waffle irons are maddeningly sticky before they've been used a lot? (Or at least, the ones without a nonstick coating are.) Well, I had horrible visions of gouging out burnt cookie fragments from all those pretty lines in the suspiciously shiny pizzelle iron. And so, I got out our faithful Norwegian friend to bake the first ones. Given the insanely high amount of baking powder, I put only a tiny little ball of dough onto the iron. After it cooked, we had a cute tiny wafer. It also showed the lines on the iron better than our cinnamon wafers ever had. If I knew someone into resin casting, I could have given them one of my ex's grandmother's pizzelles and asked them to copy the iron that made it.

Better a puny pizzelle than one that oozes into the flames below.

With our second pizzelle (is it really a pizzelle if I didn't use the pizzelle iron right in front of me?), I dared to put a little more dough onto the iron. As it puffed up, it raised the lid far more than I would have ever expected.

I had no idea how long to cook this, so I waited until the steam emanating from the iron tapered off. (I had no idea what other signs of doneness to watch for.) When we opened the iron, we were rewarded with the most beautiful cookie patty I've ever made. 

Having proven the recipe on familiar utensils, it was time to make pizzelles on an actual pizzelle iron.

As I laid the iron on the stove, I found that it was is oddly unsuited for a domestic gas burner. Those fin- like protrusions leading to the hinges prevented the iron from laying flat. I would like to point out that the Norwegian iron doesn't have this problem.

Anyway, I had stalled, dithered, and fretted about my recipe-unworthiness long enough. The iron was hot, the batter was made, and the time had arrived! I almost put the iron back and finished cooking the pizzelle dough on our faithful Norwegian friend. But I didn't want to waste the gas that had already been expended to heat the Italian iron. And so, I drenched it with cooking spray and committed myself to going forward.

I put a daringly large ball of pizzelle dough onto the hot iron, almost defying it to spill over the edges and ignite. However, after having made some Scandinavian-looking pizzelles only minutes earlier, I thought I had a reasonable-ish handle on how much the dough expands. 

Also, I figured that while the Norwegian iron has little delicate notches, the Italian one has deep trenches that need to be filled. 

Things got treacherously close to fiery, but our pizzelle (barely) remained inside the iron and unsinged.

After waiting for about 45 seconds, we raised the lid and saw.... this!

I was very suspicious of how well our first pizzelle came out. Maybe my ex's grandmother decided to cut me a posthumous favor as compensation for faulty progeny. Or maybe it's because I used enough cooking spray to practically fry it.

As much as I liked the flower more when looking at the iron itself, I thought the interlocking-squares design looked nicer on the pizzelles. Both sides looked really pretty, but I never thought I would prefer squares over flowers.

For our next pizzelle, I decided to try draping it over a bowl instead of laying it flat. Even when hot off the iron and therefore at its floppiest, the pizzelle was too resilient for our edible-bowl dreams.

After the pizzelle had cooled and we laid it on a plate, it was barely curved enough to look deliberate. No one was going to serve a charming and presentational assortment of fresh fruits and whipped cream in it.

After making all these pizzelles, you may wonder how they tasted. And... well, our first batch had an interesting, almost crumbly texture. It reminded me of when we made an entire cake out of egg yolks. I had always thought pizzelles were supposed to be crispy. I also was a bit suspicious of my first batch's pale color. The recipe card says to bake "until golden brown," and ours had remained obstinately yellow. And I could tell that if I had left them in the iron long enough to turn brown, they would have become tooth-breakingly hard. 

It was time to call in the experts.

This led me to Fante's Kitchen, a cooking store in Philadelphia that I used to go to all the time in the fondest dreams that I could afford all the beautiful cookware they had. I remember seeing hand-painted pie birds, ceramic baking dishes that looked more delicious than any food you could possibly put in them, and everything else that I wished I was the kind of cook who used. Heck, when I got it into my head to buy a two-pan balance scale just like Miss Leslie insisted on in her 1837 cookbook, Fante's Kitchen had a box of brass weights to put on it. (However, I hadn't the funds.)

Fante's has an entire page of pizzelle recipes, so I called them during store hours and asked for help and advice. In an attempt to seem more normal, I said I had gotten a stovetop pizzelle iron (true) without any instructions (also true) from my great-aunt (honesty isn't always the best policy) and didn't know what I was doing with it (true). The person who answered the phone said "Just one second, let me ask our resident pizzelle expert."

My first question was "How hot should the burner be under this thing, anyway?"

"You want to be able to say a Hail Mary for each side."

As I was informed, there's no simple "Set the stove to low/medium/high" for these things. Nor can you set a timer and let it dictate your baking. Also, pizzelles shouldn't expand upwards. Indeed, many pizzelle irons have a latch to keep them tightly shut as the batter expands. And with older pizzelle irons that were actually made of cast iron instead of aluminum, the sheer weight of the metal kept them pressed tightly shut. Since mine had no latch, I would need to tightly hold the handles as the batter expanded, which would force it to spread outward without going upward.

If all that sounds daunting, did you know you can just buy an electric iron? It works just like a countertop waffle iron, with a ready-light and everything. I'm not complaining about using a stovetop iron (after all, I deliberately bought the thing). I'm just noting that this can be a lot easier if you want to try it yourself. 

Archaic kitchen things are my idea of a good time— but only when they're a choice and not the only way. Some people forsake all the comforts of civilization to go camping with nothing but a tent and a pocketknife, secure in the knowledge that their car awaits to take them back to their house with plumbing and electricity. In the same way, I use things like stovetop waffle irons because I know that the burner sits on top of a fully-automatic, thermostatically-controlled, self-cleaning oven.

As I looked around online, I noted that a lot of people put their pizzelles on cooling racks instead of dropping them directly onto plates. (Well, there's this one guy who flings them onto the bare countertop. But I don't have that kind of horizontal space.) I had no expansive cooling rack, but I do have a small one I got for cooking fish fingers in the toaster oven.

Anyway, with our new knowledge, we set out to make pizzelles again. We adjusted the heat, we used the cooking spray, and after putting in the batter, we firmly squeezed the iron shut. The batter tried to shove the iron open with more force than I would have expected from a hot flour-and-egg foam. I had to clamp the handle with white-knuckle force. After about the time required to say a Hail Mary, I felt the fight inside the iron go away. The iron's handles, rather than struggling against my fist, went limp in my hand. It almost felt like I had squeezed the life out of my own creation.

The pizzelles were golden-brown and so lightweight I thought they might float out of my hand when I picked them up.

The cooling rack is tiny, but it's all I've got.

I began to think I might be getting the hang of this. I was told the thin parts should be almost translucent. Well, I held a pizzelle up to the nearest light, and it almost looked like the window over some ancient church's altar somewhere in Italy. 

As a reminder, you can buy an electric pizzelle maker and make this a lot easier. If you can operate a countertop waffle iron, you can use an electric pizzelle maker.

While the first attempt at pizzelles was on the better side of tolerable, the second ones were fantastic (if you flicked off any errant singed spots on the edges). I was so glad I kept this recipe. And since my ex doesn't cook, I spitefully told myself that I'm not even family anymore and I'll still have his grandmother's pizzelles more often than he ever will. 

I will be dealing with future men like this: