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, which temporarily made me feel better about everything. 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.