Cinnamon Wafers: or, Getting to know our new archaic kitchen implements

This recipe starts with the waffle iron I never got to borrow.

Cinnamon Wafers 81g white or brown sugar (about 5 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons) 75g butter (a sliver more than 5 tablespoons) Cinnamon to taste ⅛ tsp salt (if butter is unsalted) 115g flour (about 1 cup--- you probably won't use it all) Cream the butter, sugar, cinnamon, and salt, beating until very light. Add enough flour to make a dough that is firm but not dry. If you add too much flour, you can add milk (one spoonful at a time) to fix it. Let the dough sit in the bowl for 30 or so minutes- it will be less crumbly and easier to work with. Roll into small (1 inch or so) balls, then roll each one flat with a rolling pin. Cook on a preheated pizzelle, krumkake, or wafer iron until done. To remove crumbs, let the iron cool off, then clean it with an old toothbrush. Maladapted from Wikipedia

I was visiting my then-significant other (the "then-" prefix is foreshadowing), and his mother had made pizzelles. For those who are unfamiliar with Italian cooking, pizzelles are practically an event. "My mom made pizzelles" isn't a casual statement. It is an announcement of grave importance. From my brief visits to people with Italian relatives, it seems that pizzelles are practically a ritual that happens to produce food.

Anyway, his aunt said that she had her mother's (viz. my ex's grandmother's) pizzelle iron in the basement. Sure enough, there it lay in a neatly labeled plastic storage bin next to the box of cookie cutters, carefully stored with a sheet of wax paper pressed inside it. In a clear plastic bag neatly affixed to the handle, we found his grandmother's recipe in her handwriting. 

Naturally, I wanted to use this as soon as I saw it--- even though there were already pizzelles upstairs. The pizzelle iron had lodged itself in my mind. Some months later, I asked if he might borrow the pizzelle iron from his aunt who currently has custody of it. I never dared think she'd give it away, but I hoped she might lend it to her own kin. She wouldn't. I was like "But you're her own nephew! And it's not like we're asking to keep it!" 

Nevertheless, there would be no pizzelles made on that iron. Seeing perfectly good cookware boxed away like barely-wanted collectibles makes me a bit sad, but my friend's grandmother's pizzelle iron is fated to rest unused in the basement.

You might think that would be the end of the matter, but I patiently waited until my birthday rolled around and I was asked what I wanted. I said I wanted a stovetop pizzelle iron. And of course, I wanted to make the first batch of pizzelles on it together.

Purely for the heck of it, I searched for "stovetop pizzelle iron" on Ebay, and several irons just like the one in his aunt's basement turned up on the first page of results. In other words, getting a matching pizzelle iron was about as difficult as finding an avocado-colored Crock Pot just like someone's great-aunt used to have: not an instantaneous find, but easy nonetheless.

When I announced my birthday wish, he said "But I have my mother's."

"I don't care."

"Hers is electric."

"So?"

"My mom's makes two at a time."

"I don't care!"

(This sounded a lot more banter-y than it probably looks when written down.)

He didn't get me a waffle iron just like his grandmother's, but I was given this instead. I would later find out it's Norwegian instead of Italian, but I don't mind. Sometimes if you beg and badger hard enough, you get the present you want. Or at least close enough to it.

To get acquainted with our new friend, I decided to make the most low-stakes I could think of: instant waffle mix. We promptly discovered that one must be very careful when rationing batter on a stovetop waffle iron. On electric ones, any excess batter harmlessly oozes out and makes an inconvenient mess. However, this heirloom-quality piece of kitchen history had fire directly underneath it. On our first attempt, I saw the batter seep out of the iron and thought "That will be annoying to clean up---- SHIT SHIT SHIT OH SHIT"

After the smoke cleared away, I tried to convince myself that the singed edges were rustic.

 

A few days after I got the iron, my not-yet-ex called and asked how it and I were getting along. I told him that I had reconstituted waffle mix so that I could first get accustomed to the iron before making anyone's grandmother's pizzelle recipe. His voice got very dark.

"That is not how you make pizzelles." From the menacing tone in his voice, you'd think I told him I'd smashed his mother's homemade cake to make cake balls.

Regardless of how sacrilegious it is to put pancake mix on a pizzelle iron, I couldn't bring myself to make his grandmother's pizzelle recipe. I would feel perfectly comfortable making any other pizzelle recipe I found online, but I didn't want to posthumously disappoint his grandmother. This brings us to a recipe I found purely accident on Wikipedia.

Have you ever heard of ijzerkoekjes? I hadn't either. The Wikipedia page reads like the primary author did not speak English well but really wanted the non-Dutch-speaking world to know about ijzerkoekjes. ("Ijzerkoekjes" translates, more or less, to "waffle iron cookies.") The article notes that these have a "high calorie density, suitable for sailors and others on the sea." 

For those of you whose Dutch pronunciation just as nonexistent as mine, here is Google Translate telling us how to say the name of today's recipe.

I would say it feels like a big honor to possibly introduce this recipe to the English-speaking world, but I am quite sure I will make them wrong. 

Ineptitude aside, I really wanted to try these cookies that someone wrote onto a Wikipedia page. Apparently someone really wanted to put this recipe out for the non-Dutch world. Therefore, the recipe needed to come off of the computer screen and into the kitchen. Anyway, we had the iron, we had the recipe, and we were (hopefully) ready to go!

The recipe seemed simple enough: basically shortbread with cinnamon in it. However, the original ingredient amounts make a lot of ijzerkoekjes. Naturally, we scaled the recipe down a lot. Since the recipe uses no eggs, it was delightfully easy to cut the recipe to whatever tiny quantity we wanted. Also, because the recipe gives the ingredient by weight, rescaling the ingredients was easier than usual. (Apparently we in America are among the very few who measure flour by volume.)

Things went swimmingly until we added the flour, at which point our ijzerkoekje dough turned into a crumbly mess. 

At first I thought it was supposed to look like that. Then I saw that the next instruction is to get out a rolling pin. Well, there was absolutely no way we could turn this into a rolled-out anything. We could have crumbled it up and sprinkled it onto a fruit cobbler, but it was not going to become cookies. I decided to cheat and add little splashes of milk until the dough was fit to act like the recipe purported.

I've never made cookies on of these stovetop irons before, so I rolled the dough into a sort of tortilla-looking thing and laid it into place. At this moment, as I closed the sizzling-hot iron on our dough, I realized that I had no idea how long to leave the cookie dough in it.

The dough pushed the iron up a lot more than I expected. I've never considered the uneven thickness of waffles before. But if you give it any thought, the waffles must be a lot thinner on the side of the iron with the hinge, and a lot thicker on the side opposite. After all, when the batter pushes up the top of a waffle iron, the iron doesn't lift straight up. Instead, it opens like Pac-Man, with one side rising while the other does not. I saw results of this when I opened the iron to reveal our first-ever wafer on this iron. One side was beautiful, the other was burnt.

The cookies were floppy and fragile as wet toilet paper when it was hot, but became extremely rigid once it cooled.

We also learned that fifteen seconds of cooking time can make a dramatic difference in the cookie.

Here I must note an interesting insight into human psychology. Every single person I showed these to (and I sent pictures to a lot of people) asked if I had tried making a bowl out of these. I would love to know why everyone wanted to see these as bowls. 

Since I also wanted to make a cookie bowl, I rummaged the cabinet and found a bowl suitable to drape the next wafer onto. And of course, we filled it with ice cream.

Despite my cooking ineptitude, our definitely-not-ijzerkoekjes were really good. They're deliciously crunchy, lightly spiced, and perfect with tea or coffee.

I want to say they taste "very European," but I haven't been to Europe to try the food. However, they seem like something you'd get here in America from a restaurant that has "Euro" somewhere in the name. In other words, someone who has never been to Europe might say they're "quite continental."

And for those who want a bit of "euro flair" but have no idea what that is supposed to mean, we found that sticking shards of cookie into ice cream was adorably presentational. Also, when the ice cream soaked into the cookie, it was delicious.

After several batches of delicious cinnamon wafers, I was confident enough in my stovetop-iron abilities to give them away. Also, our cookies tasted so good that we kept eating them before they had a chance to cool off.

However, a quick glance at one of the wafer-stacks I gave away shows that I still need to work on my timing. It'd be nice if they all darkened to the same color.

If you want to try this at home, get an electric iron unless you really love doing things the old fashioned way (or if you want to make cookies on a camping trip). 

If you are just as daft as me and want to do this on a stovetop iron, I can't recommend making these on a coil-top stove. No matter what I did, I had cooking spray dripping out from the edges of the iron. If you're using a gas stove, it is easy to turn off the flame and use a fork to push a paper towel around the burner and mop up the grease. If you attempt this on a coil-top stove, you will set the paper towel on fire (unless you wait for the coil to cool off first). 

But with that said, these were absolutely fantastic. We've already made them multiple times. They're crisp, buttery, perfectly spiced, and entertaining to make. Of course, I am biased because I think waffle irons are fun for the whole family. However, people who don't share my views on kitchen devices also liked these a lot. After all, we had to give these away before we ate all of them ourselves.