Peanut Butter Spritz Cookies: or, More excuses to play with our toys

Well, after recent unfortunate events, anyone want a cookie?

Peanut Butter Spritz Cookies ½ cup shortening ½ cup white sugar ½ cup brown sugar ½ tsp baking soda ¼ tsp salt 1 egg 1 tbsp water 1 generous teaspoon vanilla ½ cup peanut butter 1¼ cups flour (approximate) Heat oven to 400°. Have ungreased baking sheets, a thin metal spatula, and a cooling rack ready. Cream the shortening, sugars, baking soda and salt. Beat until light. Then add the egg, water, vanilla, and peanut butter. Beat until fluffy. Sift in the flour and mix. Put the dough through a cookie press onto the ungreased baking sheet. Bake 10-12 minutes, or until golden on the edges. (Mine were actually done in 5.) When they come out of the oven, immediately transfer to the cooling rack using the metal spatula. Source: Mirro cookie press instruction sheet

Mirro cookie press instruction sheet via Ebay

Everyone in the house has gotten excited about extruded cookies. I've never seen a modified caulking gun get such a happy reaction. But of course, I don't want to simply make the same recipe over and over again. And so, with everyone in the household within an earshot, I read the recipes from the instruction sheet I lovingly "borrowed" from someone selling a cookie press. I then asked which I should make next. I can't lie, I was glad everyone wanted peanut butter cookies because I wanted them too.

Unusually, the recipe writers have us adding the peanut butter after creaming the shortening and sugar. Most peanut butter cookie recipes tell you to cream all your fats together at once. But who am I to argue with a small army of home economists?

I altered the recipe in two tiny ways. First, I did not use hot water. As we have learned from watching a lot of Ann Reardon videos, dumping hot water into cookie dough (or cake batter) melts your butter. This means you lose all those air bubbles you whipped into it. We used room-temperature water instead.

Second, I tasted the batter and thought "this desperately needs vanilla". It was bland without it. I'm still new to using one of these dough squirters, so I don't know what recipe changes will lead to limp cookie dough that refuses to stay spritzed. But I figured I could safely risk an uncalled-for spoonful of vanilla extract. Everything seemed to go well, but we soon had a lot more dough than I planned. 

I thought that by now, I have gotten pretty good at reading an ingredient list and estimating how many cookies (spritz or otherwise) any given recipe will yield. But as our ingredients merrily spun in the mixer, I began to think I should have used a bigger bowl. Our beaters were unnervingly submerged, and I began to fear burning out the motor. 

Really, I brought this excess of cookies on myself. If I had read all the way to the bottom of the recipe, I would have seen that they clearly printed "yield 6 dozen."

In short order, it was time to start extruding! 

Those who saw our molasses spritz cookies will recall that one particular stencil, which was merely a collection of round dots rather than an interesting shape, produced what easily-amused onlookers described as "a cosmic horror of boobs." In case you missed it, the cookies looked like this:

I'm only a bottle of food coloring and a tiny paintbrush away from getting banned from the church social.

With the above cookies in mind, every cookie press I've seen online has a Christmas tree among its stencils. (Apparently normal people let their cookie squirt guns rest in the cabinets until December?) Anyway, the Christmas tree that came with this one is a cluster of dots.

I had to find out how the Christmas trees would look, and the cookie caulker did not disappoint. Arranging your, um, small pointed domes in a triangle does not make the obscenity charges go away.

This was easily the greasiest cookie dough I have ever made. It left a clear film of lard all over my hands and everything it touched. The cookie gun soon had little clear fat-drips trickling down its sides. The cookies left slick footprints on the pan. I had to wipe the pans between batches in order to keep them ungreased as specified in the recipe.

You can see the cookie-shaped fat slicks on the pan.

Our previous spritz cookie recipes kept their shape as they baked, but these spread out a lot. While this gave the flowers extra-rounded petals and made them look really cute, other shapes did not fare as well. The Christmas trees turned into halfhearted arrowheads. And the wreaths looked like they would only be at home at a future proctologist's medical school graduation party. 

I didn't intend to make six dozen cookies. But on the bright side, they were a very easy six dozen cookies to make. This squirt gun is even faster than dropping cookies from a spoon. If (unlike me) you don't feel the need to constantly stop and change the stencil, you can easily push out an entire pan of cookies in like 45 seconds.

As the mountain of cookies slowly grew on the plate, I kept muttering "These had better be good." The ease of pressing out six dozen cookies did not make me feel better about my failure to halve the recipe. I did not want to run the oven and crowd up the dishwasher for crappy cookies.

To the Mirro people's credit, this recipe works as written. And it produces pretty decent cookies. But they weren't the best I've had either. They had a good flavor (if you added vanilla) and were surprisingly crisp. I think they're the perfect hostess balancing act: good enough that no one will insult your desserts behind your back, but not so good that everyone will quickly eat them all and leave you to suffer the social shame of empty platters. 

But I should note that although this isn't the best peanut butter cookie recipe I've ever made, the quickly dwindling cookie population on the plate told me that a lot of people came back for more. Only this many remained after one night:

If you want peanut butter cookies and insist on making them in cute shapes, this recipe will give you what you need. However, I suggest making chatters instead.

Chocolate Pizzelles: or, Waffles as a distraction from current events

Food may not be therapeutic enough for possibly losing civil rights, but I tried.

Chocolate Pizzelles 2 sticks (1 cup) margarine* ¼ cup cocoa powder 3½ to 4 cups flour 4½ tsp baking powder 6 eggs 1½ cups sugar 2 tbsp vanilla Melt the margarine. Stir in the cocoa powder and 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 dropped from a spoon. Mix only until all is combined- do not overbeat. (If you're worried about overmixing and toughening the dough, set aside the mixer at this point 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. Note: To make plain pizzelles, omit cocoa. Reduce sugar to 1 cup, and baking powder to 4 teaspoons. Add flavorings of your choice. Source: Vitantonio pizzelle instruction sheet

I had been putting the election out of my mind until the day it happened. I would watch the news for a few minutes to stay up-to-date and then do literally anything else. (Of course, I voted. For all the good it did.) As the election got nearer, I would sometimes distract myself by windowshopping antique kitchen things on Ebay. I really liked looking at pizzelle irons because I don't want another one. Therefore, I could admire without any risk of buying anything. I found a lot of people selling the very same pizzelle iron I have, often with the original box and instruction sheet.

I love that they advertise their electric pizzelle irons in the instructions for the stovetop model that you presumably just bought. Like, wouldn't you have gotten the electric one in the first place if you wanted it?

If we zoom in a little bit, they list chocolate pizzelles as a variation of the main recipe.

Vitantonio pizzelle iron instruction sheet via Ebay

But no matter how much you look at waffle irons online, you can't ignore the election on Election Day. Others in the house were refreshing their phone screens all afternoon, and eventually I could avoid it no more. 

I was reasonably calm about the whole business. The last few weeks of bitter conservative racism, the people leaving Trump rallies early, and everything else suggested to me that a lot of people were done with the angry conservatism that has taken over the Republican party.  Really, the transformation of the party has been frightening. Can you imagine them nominating someone like Bob Dole today?

Some friends and I went out to watch the election at a restaurant. I nearly didn't go, but figured it was better than pacing in the house by myself for five hours. When we got back from seeing the bad news on live television, I wanted nothing more than to distract myself with the electric mixer and the pizzelle iron. Some people wash the windows when they hear that a friend has died, I play with with waffle irons.

We bloomed the cocoa powder. I read somewhere that if you heat the liquid from your recipe and stir cocoa powder into it (or melt the fat from the ingredients list if there's nothing else) and then let it cool back down, you get a lot more chocolate flavor out of your cocoa.

The beginning of the recipe went swimmingly. After pouring in the cocoa butter, the resulting mixture tasted just like that amazing mousse from the flourless chocolate cake we saw a while ago. I must admit because I didn't foresee a need for emergency pizzelles, we were out of margarine. I substituted half butter and half shortening. When things later went screwy on the waffle iron, I would wonder if this was why I had problems.

 

After adding a lot more flour than the instructions claimed, we were ready to fire up the stovetop. The first pizzelle came off the iron nearly intact, but it soon proved a fluke. 

The pizzelles could tell my mood and fell apart along with me. Most of them required sharp spatula attacks before they would be dislodged, and left a lot of semihardened dough behind in the deeper grooves. It didn't matter how generous I was with my brushings of melted shortening. The pizzelles would not come off. I didn't have it in me to try to save them, or trim them into cute shapes. It all seemed so pointless.

Most of them came out like this.

I felt really bad about flinging so many pizzelles into the trash. I can't even say I threw them out with profanity. At this point in the long evening, I was just resigned.  

Eventually I got tired of gouging out the pizzelle iron with a wooden skewer after every single one, so I decided to get out the krumkake iron. It has much shallower grooves, so it seemed easier to clean. Our first attempt ripped apart, but at least it mostly let go of the iron.

As I stood over the stove, the whole world seemed quieter than it ever has. The only sounds in the kitchen were the softly blowing gas burner and the ticking timer. I have never actually heard the stove before. At any other time, it would have been a beautiful contemplative experience. As it was, I wondered if the gas has always been so loud.

In the silent kitchen, I kept grabbing at unlikely hopes, none of which involved any conservatives suddenly taking an interest in the good of mankind. Maybe various influential donors will say "But my investments!" and steer him away from his dumber schemes. Maybe a lot of career bureaucrats in DC have a grudge against him that will get in the way. Maybe the Republican party will finally have a schism--- or at least paralyze itself with petty infighting. And who knows, maybe a lot of people seeing him on camera will cringe. The party can't keep him carefully restricted to the "conservative media ecosystem" if he's in office. 

I began to think about the intricacies of the supply chain even more than I did when the pandemic was at its worst. Everything in the kitchen, from the cocoa powder I was wasting on ripped-apart pizzelles to the paper used to make the flour sack, comes from a complicated, fragile network that reaches to the other side of the earth and then comes back again. The grocery store always seemed so stable until the pandemic hit. Would I be dangerously frivolous if I used the last pound of beef in the freezer on another corn-filled Italian Delight?

Perhaps as a reward for my perseverance, the pizzelle made from the very last of the dough came out nearly perfect. And it didn't tear in half when I opened the iron.

The surviving pizzelles were pretty good. However, we had a very short stack of them despite how much dough I started out with.

I had feared that the cocoa powder would be insufficient, but it added a lot of good flavor. I don't necessarily recommend making them in a deep-grooved iron, because they seem to need spatula assistance to let go. So if you have a krumkake iron, you would like them. And as all of us with any sanity try to brace for the next few years, let's remember:

It is not necessarily true that we're all stuck in this together. Yes, we're all stuck in this, including all those proud flag-wavers who don't know it yet. But all of us who realize we're in this together, are in this together.

Bangor Brownies: or, We finally had too much molasses

I saw the truly insane usage of molasses and had to do it.

Bangor Brownies 1 cup flour 1 tsp baking powder Pinch of salt ¼ cup melted shortening 1 cup molasses 1 egg 2 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted* 1 cup nuts, if desired Heat oven to 325°. Spray a 9" round or 8" square pan. Line the bottom of it with paper cut to fit. Then spray the top of the paper. Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside. Mix together the shortening and molasses. Then add the egg and the chocolate, beating each ingredient before adding the next. Beat well. Then stir in the flour. Add nuts last. Pour into the pan and bake about 15-20 minutes, or until firmly set. Turn out of the pan as soon as you take it out of the oven, and cut with a sharp knife. *If desired, you can substitute 6 tablespoons of cocoa powder. Increase the shortening by two tablespoons. Note: We recommend omitting the chocolate. Instead, add spices like cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. The Metropolitan Cook Book, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, via Mid-Century Menu

The Metropolitan Cook Book, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (via Mid-Century Menu)

As I've said before (and often), I like molasses so much that I pour it onto waffles. And look at how much we're using today!

With normal, molasses-free brownie recipes, the batter isn't this dark until after you've added the chocolate. But this recipe uses a truly glorious amount of molasses. 

I thought I might have a good gingerbread recipe on my hands, so I split the batter in two before adding the chocolate.

As the brownies baked, I couldn't help wondering what made these distinctly "Bangor" brownies. Is it the molasses? I quickly found another recipe for Bangor brownies. Even if you swap the sugar for the molasses, the two recipes aren't the same.

Mrs. Mary Martensen's 1933 Century of Progress Cook Book, via The Internet Archive

And so, I went to Food Timeline and learned that the town of Bangor, Maine figures prominently in the (surprisingly hazy) early history of brownies. The earliest "Bangor Brownies" they had (dated 1912) are completely different from either of the Bangors we have already seen. But it seems like aside from today's recipe, molasses doesn't really go into Bangor brownies.

When I checked on the brownies at the end of the recipe's 15 minute baking time, I grimly suspected that I would soon dump them into the trash. When your hot batter is bubbling and oozing like a pan full of simmering spaghetti sauce, you usually have a failure in the oven. I was utterly furious at wasting chocolate and nearly half a jar of molasses.

I gave the brownies an additional 5 minutes because I figured the oven was already heated and the "brownies" were already in it. Also, I wasn't ready to face the hot pan of ruined grocery money. At the end of the extra time, I found that the batter had set. However, it looked less like brownies and more like hardened mud. I was ready to dump the entire pan into the garbage can, but I didn't want to melt the trash bag.

I only cut the brownies as a formality, but they had a surprisingly good texture. I expected a gummy hardened paste, but they somehow had become a light and fluffy gingerbread. The molasses-only side of the pan was only a few spices away from being really good. This may be worth exploring further.

However, I wasn't impressed with the chocolate brownies. The chocolate and molasses tasted like they were at war with each other. I thought they would meld into something beautiful and they absolutely did not. I never thought I'd say this, but I think this brownie recipe is better without chocolate.