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.

Molasses Cookies: or, More amazing recipes from instruction manuals!

Once again, we are borrowing recipes from people selling kitchen toys on Ebay.

Molasses-Spice Cookies ½ cup shortening ½ cup sugar ¼ tsp salt ¼ tsp baking soda ¼ tsp allspice ¼ tsp mace ¼ tsp cloves ½ tsp cinnamon ½ tsp ginger 1 egg ¼ cup molasses 2½ cups flour Heat oven to 375° Have ungreased cookie sheets, a thin metal spatula, and a cooling rack ready. Cream the shortening. Add sugar, salt, baking soda, and spices, cream well. Thoroughly mix in the egg, then the molasses. Beat until light and well-whipped. Gently mix in all but a quarter-cup of flour. Dough should be firm like modelling clay, and not at all sticky. Add the remaining flour (and possibly a bit more) if needed. Put through a cookie press onto the (ungreased!) baking sheet. Bake 8-12 minutes, or until slightly darkened at the edges. Immediately after you take the cookies out of the oven, use the spatula to remove them to a cooling rack. If you don't have a cookie press, you can shape the dough any way you like. You can use a rolling pin and cookie cutter. Or, you can roll the dough into little balls and flatten them between your hands. Or, you can use a cookie stamp if you have one. Or, you can roll the dough into little snakes and form them into whatever shapes you like (rings, pretzels, spirals, stars, etc). Source: Mirro cookie press instruction sheet

I have been looking for new recipes to put through my squirt gun. Even though we had one really good recipe fall out of a box while we were pruning clutter, you can't always count on cookies to find you. I found someone selling an older cookie press online. They had photographed the entire instruction sheet to prove that it was intact. This included the suggested recipes. Naturally, I saved the images and then hastily closed the page before I could be tempted to buy it.

Today's recipe was perfect for me. It involves excessive amounts of molasses and our new cookie caulking gun. I could hardly wait to bring the stand mixer into this too.

I don't know if the cookies need this kind of excessive whipping. or if I just like playing with electric mixers. But the well-whipped cookies came out great the first time, and now I'm afraid to try any other way.

And now we get to the most exciting part of this recipe: pouring in a lot of molasses. I love any excuse to use excessive molasses, up to and including pouring it all over waffles. And just look at those beautiful brown swirls!

The molasses tinted the dough to a light honey color rather than the dark brown I hoped for. I began to suspect that the recipe writers had restrained themselves to a polite amount of molasses in some misguided pursuit of moderation and good taste.

If we look away from the recipe and read the general directions at the top of the sheet, we are told to set aside some of the flour (say, a spoonful or two) when mixing it in. In their own words, "Due to variations in flour and the size of eggs it sometimes becomes necessary to omit some of the flour or to add an additional one or two tablespoons."

I really like that they wrote this. A lot of people (including my past self) think you merely get your measurements right and all comes out perfect. This is annoyingly common among those smarmy men who upload baking videos that involve a whiteboard covered in math and mansplaining. But in reality, even the most regimented industrial bakeries must vary their formulas from one batch to the next. If the people in the Twinkie factory have to tweak the recipe from day to day, so do the rest of us.

The flour darkened the cookie dough to a more acceptable color. It may not show in the pictures, but just take my word for it because my phone hates the kitchen lights for some reason. I will always be surprised when white flour (of all things!) adds a brownish tint to recipes.

And so, it was time to load up our dough contraption and start squirting! 

On a recipe group I'm in, somebody said that it's easier to use one of these dough presses if you don't grease the baking sheet. This sounded like blasphemy, sacrilege, and heresy to me. It also meant I would actually have to wash the pans. But when I've use paper (ungreased or not), only half of the cookies only stayed where I tried to put them. I've been getting a little tired of dropping cookie misfires back into the mixing bowl.

I haven't baked cookies without paper or foil under them for multiple years. After scraping far too many stuck-on cookies off of bare pans, I swore never do that to myself again. But I was personally reassured that if I use a thin metal spatula to promptly get the cookies onto a cooking rack upon removing them from the oven, they will not stick. I found it reassuring to have a specific person to blame when my cookies inevitably glued themselves to the pan and required a chiseling job.

But even though other people and the instruction sheet told me not to grease the pan, I didn't believe them. Instead, I reconciled myself to sacrificing the first batch of cookies after they almost certainly fused themselves the pan. After making peace with impending failure, I decided to play with all the little stencils. I've been steadily making my way through all the designs that came with the cookie gun. This one really raised my curiosity. I couldn't begin to imagine the cookie it would produce.

At first, I merely got spaghetti-like extrusions. They flopped about uselessly when I lifted the press away from the pan.

I don't know what to do when these things don't work. Our cookie press doesn't have any adjustment knobs to tweak when cookies don't come out right. It only has one lever on top that pushes the dough out. When I did get a cookie out of that stencil, it looked, um, like this.

I don't think I will reuse this one in the future.

While the first batch baked, I pressed out the second. The raised sides of this pan gave me pause. They promised to make it difficult to get a spatula in there at a flat angle. But putting those worries aside, we did find out that the star tip makes really cute cookies.

The recipe says to bake 10-12 minutes, but mine were done in about seven. I suspect that different cookie guns dispense different-sized cookies which need different baking times. Maybe this recipe handout was originally boxed with a cookie press that makes big cookies.

After the first batch was ready, I got out the metal spatula and was pleasantly surprised-- amazed, even-- at how easily the cookies lifted right off. Incidentally, it felt weird to use this spatula indoors. We only ever use it for grilling, hence the permanent burns.

The plain round cookies are the misshapen ones. I got tired of putting the dough back in the press, so I reshaped them with my hands instead.

Getting the cookies immediately off the pan had an unexpected upside. It didn't matter if the smaller cookies were done while the bigger cookies were still raw. You could remove some of the cookies as needed and let the others resume baking. The half-baked ones didn't have time to cool off before returning to the oven.

Here are our cookies on the cooling rack, with the astonishingly clean pan behind them. 

Most of the cookie shapes came out rather nice. However, the ones from the irksome stencil looked malformed at best. A passing person, lured by the kitchen smells, said "It looks like a cosmic horror of boobs." The weird cookies even made our six-petal flowers look bad by association. 

Setting aside the cookies that unfortunately came out just like they're supposed to, I will have to get a bigger rack if I make spritz cookies a lot. I only bought this one for baking fish sticks in the toaster oven. I never thought that a small cookie press would require paraphernalia and threaten to take over all the storage space in the kitchen.

I have to give our friends at the Mirro recipe development department a tip of the hat and a lot of credit. These cookies were absolutely fantastic. This is the best recipe I've gotten out of an appliance manual since the coffee cheesecake. One person said "These taste professional!" I meant to find out if the spices get stronger the next day (as often happens with gingerbread and related things), but the cookies were all gone by the end of the night.

Slovakian Poppyseed Cake: or, We need to buy poppyseeds in bulk

Everyone who saw this recipe said "I hope you're not taking a drug test."

Poppyseed Cake ½ cup poppyseeds ½ cup milk 1 cup flour 6 tbsp butter or oleo Pinch of salt (if butter is unsalted) 1 cup plus 2 tbsp sugar ½ tsp vanilla 1½ tsp baking powder 2 eggs, separated Grind the poppyseeds. Add the milk, and soak overnight in the refrigerator. The next day, whisk in the flour, and set aside. Heat oven to 350°. Grease an 8-inch cake pan. Cream the butter, sugar, salt, vanilla, and baking powder. Add the egg yolks one at a time, beating well after each. Gradually add the poppyseed mixture, and beat until smooth. Beat the egg whites until stiff but not dry. (They should hold a point, but the very tip should fall a tiny bit.) Fold them into the batter. Pour into the pan and bake for 45 minutes. Top with plain or fancy frosting, according to taste. Florence Ribovich (Hammond, Indiana), Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book, First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union, 1952

Before I made this recipe, I never thought about how much drug tests have become part of our everyday lives. Even people who have never been inside a police station know that a single poppyseed bagel will make you test positive for heroin. And we are using a lot more than a bagel's worth of poppyseeds today.

Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book, First Catholic Slovak Ladies Union, 1952

We've made a few recipes out of the Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book, but until now we've stuck to things like brownies and banana bread. Today we are finally venturing into the eastern European recipes that were only a few pages away from the peanut butter cookies.

I have never seen a poppyseed cake like this before. But while this recipe may be totally new to me, apparently it's very common in eastern Europe. The Slovak-American Ladies' Association Cook Book has three nearly-identical recipes for poppyseed cake spanning two pages. All of them require you to purchase two standard-size spice shakers of poppyseeds.

 

Florence Ribovich doesn't tell us to grind the seeds, but the other poppyseed cakes do. I therefore figured the instruction to grind the seeds was implied. And so, for our first adventure in eastern European cooking, I pulverized enough poppyseeds to make 7 or 8 non-Eastern European cakes. It looked like I was making a cake with potting soil.

I thought the milk would turn blue after soaking overnight, but it looked white and unchanged the next day. When we poured it out, the poppyseeds at the bottom had turned into a peculiar colored slime.

We are directed to add the flour to our poppyseeds and milk, and so I did. It turned into a grayish purple clay. Usually when your cake batter threatens to break the spoon, you have messed up beyond any attempts at salvaging. But since I know nothing about eastern European cooking, I assumed that things were going as Ms. Ribovich intended.

At this point in the recipe, the spoon proved useless. We had to bring in the power tools. With the indispensable aid of our mixer, we managed to turn this into an actual (if rather bizarrely colored) cake batter. I wasn't using the mixer to stir things together so much as chop up the heroin clay until it gave up.

At this point, our batter tasted like poppyseed kolache filling. Did you know poppyseeds have a taste? I used to think they merely added speckles and textural interest to poppyseed cake. But it turns out they have an nutty, anise-and-pecan-ish flavor. As soon as I tasted a sample, I regretted halving the recipe.

The cake rose a lot in the oven and produced an impressive dome. It would have looked so much better had I baked this in a loaf pan. If you want to bake this cake in layers and stack them, I would reduce the oven to 325°, and also make the batter thinner in the center of the pans and higher on the sides.

Regardless of whether the cake was any good or not, it was a lovely composition of colors. The purple(ish) cake contrasted with the white icing on top. The whole effect gained extra vibrance from the thin band of a surprisingly pretty golden color that separated the cake from the icing.

The cake tasted a lot more normal than I expected. The poppyseeds added an interesting toasty flavor, but their distinctive taste became more muted after baking. I was hoping for poppyseed kolache filling in cake form (especially after tasting the cake batter), but I got a perfectly lovely cake instead.

I must also note that the cake was amazingly soft and fluffy. Any reasonable-sized piece threatened to topple over on the plate. If I cut a slice that didn't threaten to tip over, it was too big for one person. (This is a very good problem to have.) 

So, if you don't mind buying a lot of poppyseeds, I definitely recommend this cake. It's unusual enough to be interesting without being weird. (Well it's unusual where I live, anyway.) But you should probably make sure you don't have an upcoming drug test.

Sandies: or, Using flour as a dye

I made these purely to play with my cookie squirt gun.

Sandies ¾ cups shortening (4½ oz) ½ cup powdered sugar (2 oz) 2 tbsp water ⅛ tsp salt ½ tsp lemon extract 1½ tsp vanilla 1½ cups flour (6 oz) Heat oven to 375°. Line your cookie sheets with ungreased paper. Cream the shortening until softened. Gradually add the sugar. (If using an electric mixer, you can simply put both into the bowl at the same time and beat them together.) Beat until light and fluffy. Add water, salt, lemon extract, and vanilla. Beat very well, whipping until it looks like cake frosting. Sift in the flour and mix well. Put through a cookie press. Or, shape into small balls and press each one about ¼" flat between your hands. Bake 8-10 minutes, or until golden at the edges. Anonymous recipe card

This recipe comes in the same handwriting as the ill-fated stuffed cupcakes, but that didn't worry me.

Our cookies begin with powdered sugar and shortening. I am always a little leery of shortening (even beef fat seems more trustworthy), but at least we would avoid any butter-related failures.

This recipe marks the beginning of the era of lard. We recently ran out of shortening (I tend to be a bit heavy-handed when brushing it onto the pizzelle iron). It proved cheaper to purchase a can of 50-50 shortening and lard than to pay for straight shortening. Since one creepy white fat looks just like another to me, I followed the prices. I've seen some people swear that lard is the magical secret of all their baked creations, and today we will find out.

I noted that the recipe doesn't call for any baking powder. Therefore, the only leavening in these cookies is what you beat into them. I therefore let the mixer run for a very long time to whip a lot of air into it. As I watched the bowl spin, I couldn't get over how white our cookie dough was. The spoonful of tap water did not make it look any better. It tasted like knockoff Oreo filling and looked unnatural.

We usually add vanilla for its flavor, but I really hoped it would dye the dough a bit. I don't trust baked goods that are the color of copy paper. Unfortunately, the vanilla didn't change the color at all. And so, to hopefully give the cookies a more natural tint (and also because the dough tasted a bit bland), I thought of our 1930s sugar cookies and added nutmeg. Our dough gained some brown specks, but it remained as unnervingly white as ever.

Here we get to the most surprising part of the recipe. When I mixed in the flour, the dough turned a (blessedly natural-looking) creamy color. Who knew you could dye foods with white flour?

You can really see the difference when you look at the residue on the beaters from top to bottom. I'm contemplating the bizarre series of events (starting at the lard factory and ending with my electric mixer) that led to white flour being the most colorful part of a cookie recipe.

And now, we get to the fun part: squirting all the cookies through the caulker! I only made this recipe because its directions end with "fill cookie press," so I was so excited that I didn't care that I had to throw a lot of misshapen cookies back into the mixing bowl.

The cookies were perfectly baked on the 8 minute mark, which is exactly at the lower end of the baking time written on the card. However, the oven smelled faintly of ham while they cooked. I don't know if that was the lard, or if I need to clean away the residue of previous dinners. As I hoped, the cookies puffed up very nicely in the oven. Letting the mixer run for an extra minute or six (before adding the flour!) did wonders.

These cookies were a lot better than the list of ingredients made me expect. They are so crisp, yet they nearly melt in your mouth. I don't know if this is a really good recipe, or if the lard made that magical difference. Either way, they were so good that they all disappeared while I wasn't looking.

So, while following the handwriting may sometimes lead to a misfire, usually it takes you to the best recipes you will ever find.