Ijzerkoekjes: or, Dutch cinnamon waffle cookies: or, Delicious adventures in recipes I can't read!

Sometimes, it's easier to do things the right way.

Ijzerkoejke (Waffle Iron Cookies) 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 light. Add enough flour to make a dough that is firm but not dry. If you add too much flour, you can add water or milk (one spoonful at a time) to fix it. Cover the dough and let it sit in the bowl for 30 or so minutes- it will be less crumbly and easier to work with. Heat a heavy-bottomed griddle or frying pan over low heat (or very slightly above low).* Roll the dough out a little thicker than a quarter inch (for those who prefer metric, roll it to about about 7 or 8 millimeters). Cut with a round cookie cutter.† Lightly grease the pan. Place the cookies on it cook each side until golden, about 3-5 minutes per side. *If you want to be totally authentic, these are cooked on a stovetop waffle iron that has shallow ridges (like the ones on ice cream cones). If you have a wafer iron with shallow-cut designs, it will work also. But if you have neither and do not fear the authenticity police, a good heavy frying pan will be just fine. †Apparently these are traditionally cut with a cookie cutter shaped like a circle that was cut in half and spread apart. However, they will taste the same if you use a round cutter (or if you repurpose the small circular object of your choice). You can also use use a knife to cut the dough into brownie-sized squares or rectangles. Maladapted from Wikipedia

When last we saw the ijzerkoekjes, I was making them in a wafer iron the way anyone does: insert dough, shut lid, wait until baked. We previously noted that they seemed very European if you're someone who has never been to Europe. As someone who has never been to Europe, I suspected that I was making them wrong. And I was correct.

Purely for the heck of it, I searched YouTube for "ijzerkoekje." I couldn't pronounce it, I couldn't spell it, but I successfully copied and pasted the word. ("Ijzerkoekje" translates, more or less, to "waffle iron cookie.") While I found a fair number of videos, none of them are in English. (This may mean that I am introducing ijzerkoekjes to the English-speaking world, an honor I am surely not up to.) 

I watched a charming video of a grandfather and granddaughter making them together. Because they were so good at showing all the steps with a well-aimed camera, I didn't need to understand a word they said to follow what they were doing. It turns out that I had the method right except when it came to baking our dough.

Unlike every other waffle recipe I've seen, you don't press these cookies in a waffle iron that has a lid. You cook them on a stovetop. Rather than the waffle irons we're all used to, imagine if you had a griddle with a shallow waffle grid cut into it. After using a rolling pin and a cookie cutter on your dough, you put it onto this lidless stovetop waffle iron and cook it one side at a time like you're making pancakes.

I don't know how many times I rewatched that video. Purely for the heck of it, I turned on the captions and let YouTube do its best to translate the video into English. As I expected, I only got sentence fragments. (But it's nonetheless impressive that I got even two words of English captions. The pace of technology can be frightening, but sometimes it's wonderful instead.) As the two people onscreen were pouring ingredients into the bowl, the grandfather was saying something about how everything in the Netherlands was spiced in the old days because the country basically controlled the world's spice trade.

While they briefly showed a copy of the recipe in the grandfather's handwritten notebook, they didn't show an ingredient list. Instead, they had a link in the description to a recipe page. This page had no directions, but it had a list of ingredients that I could copy and paste into Google Translate. This may not be the best way to learn recipes from other countries, but sometimes the adventure lies in bumbling for yourself.

Their recipe is nearly identical to the Wikipedia one, except they add half an egg. "Ah," I thought, "They are people after my own heart!" When you want to cut a recipe in half (or a third, or even less), there's no need to let little problems like "that means I need two fifths of an egg" get in the way. I've gotten so used to subdividing recipes that splitting an egg in half is almost as easy as cracking one open. 

For today's recipe, they halved the egg and still made a lot of cookie dough. This meant that we were going to take the unprecedented step of splitting an egg into fourths. Ever seen a quartered egg?

I really should start buying the eggs that you pour out of a carton instead of getting them in the shell. Then I could easily get out a tiny measuring spoon and dispense precisely two sevenths of an egg if I wanted.

The recipe went along just fine until the time came to add the flour. I watched and re-watched that part multiple times just to confirm, and they just dumped the flour in all at once. A bit of onscreen mixing yielded something like brown Play-Doh. And so, armed with the confidence that I was following along exactly with the video, I tipped the entire bowl of (pre-measured) flour right into the mixer. Our dough turned to sand.

I should have waited a little bit longer to make these. When we got the same cookie-sand on our previous ijzerkoekje attempt, Lace Maker commented that "Thanks to a little googling I found that European flour is made from soft wheat which has a lower gluten content. Lower gluten flour absorbs less water...."

In other words, the recipe was correct. My measurements were correct. But the American flour dried up our cookie dough a lot more than a European flour would have. The recipe I grabbed from Wikipedia calls for "if possible the Zeeland type of flour, i.e. flour from wheat grown in an oceanic climate zone." I had dismissed that note as unnecessary ingredient snobbery, and apparently I was wrong to do so. 

Unfortunately, Lace Maker's comment arrived after I had already made these again. So instead of making this recipe forearmed with the knowledge of regional differences in ingredients, I had to add little spoonfuls of milk until the dough looked like what they had in the video. All was well in the end, but it took a while to get there.

At this point, we get to the part of the recipe that this semi-ignorant American really got wrong: cooking these. You don't just put them into a waffle iron and shut the lid. You do them on a stovetop (or a griddle). Imagine a waffle iron, but one that only has shallow lines cut into it (like the ones on ice cream cones). Now remove the top half of it, leaving you with a griddle that has a grid etched in it. 

Since I have no such thing, I decided to put these onto the Norwegian iron. While our cookware is from the wrong country, it's always nice to use what's already at hand. And so, I put the iron onto the stove with the lid open, treating it like a frying pan that is in constant danger of tipping backwards.

We then put our first cookie on, and after a few minutes flipped it and saw that it would soon hit the trash.

When I cracked it open, it was still raw and melted in the middle.

We tried a few more cookies "the authentic way," but they were no better than the first. Eventually I decided that I would not waste all of this dough trying not to burn it. Instead, I put the rest of it on the wafer iron and closed it like I had been doing all along. I also put some on the pizzelle iron. I love how sparkly they looked. We may be making these cookies wrong, but rarely has wrong worked so well.

But I couldn't stop thinking about our failure to get these cookies right. And so, I rewatched that charming video again. I had previously skipped over the parts where they were chatting without doing anything. What's the point of watching people talk when you don't understand a word? But I figured that I might be able to get a small bit of advice out of their conversation as delivered by voice-recognition and auto-translation. Among the half-finished phrases, the captions managed to find several repeated mentions of "patience" and also "or else they will be black."

I also did a little bit of poking around on the internet. Of course, every page I found about ijzerkoekjes (except for the Wikipedia article) was in Dutch. But, after carefully keeping in mind that automatic translation is a technological miracle but also fallible, we managed to figure out that you're not actually supposed to cook these all the way through. Instead, they should be golden on the outside but doughy in the middle. (This is the perfect place to note that I like cookie dough more than cookies.)

We also found out that these come with a traditionally-shaped cookie cutter that I don't have. But I also don't have the correct kind of stovetop iron. We decided to make ijzerkoekjes again anyway.

When those nice-looking people in that video talked about having patience, they meant it. If you turn the stove up hotter than a simmer, the cookies will become charcoal-encrusted dough. And so, I turned the burner as low as it got. I didn't know if I was cooking these or merely warming them up.

Given the long, slow cooking time, I have to speculate that these made more sense before we had modern gas and electric stoves. Putting these over a low burner for so long seems very odd. But I can easily imagine setting a waffle iron on one of the colder parts of a cast-iron stovetop while cooking everything else. Or, in the pre-stove days, people may have put a cookie-loaded waffle iron in the corner of the kitchen fireplace while the rest of the food was in progress.

After carefully lifting up one of the cookies, we found it had indeed turned a lovely color underneath. 

Things were looking promising enough to flip them over and cook the other side instead of throwing them out with the other failures. (By this point, the trash can contained a lot of burnt cookie dough.) I can't guarantee that these cookies came out the way they do in the Netherlands, but they certainly looked successful.

With that said, I hate to give a recipe that demands special-order kitchen supplies. And so, I got out a griddle and put a few cookies on it. I saw no reason this wouldn't work, but wanted to make very sure before telling other people to try it for themselves. 

Since the cookies didn't have any waffle-ridges, they didn't have as much of a crispy outer surface area. But that is a tiny nitpick that is not worth bothering with. Obviously, ijzerkoekjes cooked on a frying pan aren't "authentic," but anyone who complains has already made up their snobby mind.

But having made the cookies (somewhat) like they do in their home country, how do they taste?

They are cinnamon-y, buttery bliss. I was furious at how many times I have scraped half-burnt cookie dough off the wafer iron when the easy (and correct) way was so much better. I would have never thought of making stovetop cookies, but these are fantastic. As they cool off, the carryover heat gets to the center and firms them up just a little bit. They turn into something halfway between cookie dough and brownies.

I almost want to say these are ideal for summer when you don't want to fire up the oven. But they're so deliriously rich that I think they're better when it's cold out. And if you have the patience to wait for them to cook over almost maddeningly low heat (or if you just let them sit in the background while you do other things), they are well worth the wait. And if you have the dough already rolled and cut out, it'd be relatively easy to put these on the back burner and let them cook in the background while you make other things.

I will leave off with a quick aid for anyone who wants to make these and tell people what they're called. For those who, like me, don't speak a word of Dutch, here is Google Translate showing us how to pronounce the name of today's recipe.