Electric Pizzelles: or, Dabbling in modernity

I hate when someone happens to check the porch before I do. I can't lie about where my splurges came from.

 

I liked the idea of electrical pizzelles even after our first attempt was a bust. For one thing, standing over a hot stove with a waffle iron isn't as fun in hot weather. I also like cooking with friends, and not all of them have suitable stoves. And all my Italian friends and their mothers keep giving me weird looks for doing this on the stovetop.

This particular model (and its sales price) seemed perfect. As shallow as this sounds, I liked that it was not made in Ohio.* And it looked so darn cute. If you're going to end up staring at a waffle iron lid while waiting for things to cook, it may as well look nice on top. And I loved the designs inside this one. They remind me of handmade doilies.

 

This one also looked better suited for pizzelles than the first one we bought. It has very sturdy hinges. (I checked the pictures before I made that final buying click.) Therefore, in theory we can squeeze it tightly shut and get pizzelles that are as thin and crisp as our stovetop ones.

And look at the handles! Our pizzelle iron/sandwich press has thin sheet-metal handles, but this thing has big chunky rods. So I don't think this one will bend or flex like our first one did.

I found the instructions online. In addition to telling us how to use it, they put a handy pronunciation guide right on the front cover:

Naturally, I had to use this the very night it arrived. Who has the patience to let their new toys sit untouched? I soon found that due to a particularly bad combination of short power cords and inconvenient socket placement, this would only work if I perched it over a stove burner. 

After getting the iron steady on its feet and within range of a socket, it was time to choose its first recipe. The first thing you make on any new kitchen implement sets the tone for its future life on your countertop. I made Fante's recipe because it's hard to go wrong with Philadelphia. Besides, we used beef fat instead of shortening in the batter, which was a perfect match for is iron's beefy hinges.

I'm always surprised at how quickly you can mix pizzelles. Maybe it's because any recipe that involves clearing most of the countertops feels like an event. But sooner than I thought, we were putting our first-ever splots of electrified dough onto the iron. It was both momentous and anticlimactic.

The instructions made it look like these would cook almost instantly, which I figured was just marketing hype. But sooner than I thought, the smells coming off of the iron had lightly-toasted overtones. I opened our new electric treasure to find that my pizzelles were clinging to the lid. I managed to get them off of the iron with almost nothing staying behind. But since hot pizzelles are as sturdy as wet toilet paper, they looked like this.

Not bad, but I'm not thrilled either.

Our next pair of pizzelles was... well, they're not the best. But they did come off of the iron intact. And as a bonus, they pulled out the crumbs that the first ones left in the grooves and notches. 

Things got better with each attempt. Before I could realize how fast we were cooking, we had used up all of the dough. Six pizzelles may seem like a paltry amount, but I cut the recipe down to one-sixth the original amount. Then, two of them went directly into the trash because they stuck to the iron and then tore apart. Lastly, because I haven't worked out the right amount of batter per pizzelle, I kept putting too much on the iron. So, more than a few would-have-been pizzelles oozed out and got scraped into the trash.

First-time foibles aside, I liked making these. But I wasn't impressed with the results. They just weren't as nice as the stovetop ones. But as I told myself, this is my first time making pizzelles the modern electric way. And my first stovetop pizzelles were not very good either. So with that in mind, I will not say that electrical pizzelles are inferior. I'm just not very good at making them yet.

Of course, you can only get better at electric pizzelles if you make them again. But when I plugged the iron for more fun, it stayed cold. At first I thought I had accidentally plugged in something else (all those power cords look the same), but I checked and I didn't. So, I tested every problem I could think of, starting with the easiest to fix. 

First, I tried a different power cord. (This iron uses the same detachable power cord as most percolators.) When that didn't help, I undid those two big screws on the lid to see if anything looked visibly wrong in there. Everything under the top cover looked fine, even though I didn't really know what I was looking for. Next, I took off the bottom plate. 

Before looking in there, I had thought it might be the thermostat on this thing because there's nothing else in there to go wrong. Really, aside from the thermostat switch, this is basically an incandescent bulb if you're drawing up a wiring diagram. So as I unscrewed the bottom, I was worrying about whether I would have to figure out the cutoff temperature of a pizzelle thermostat, or whether I had bought an overpriced dust collector. But that part looked fine (or at least, I didn't see any big burn marks). 

I soon found the problem: One of the wires had disconnected itself from the heating element. The real surprise here is that this held up long enough to make a batch of pizzelles in the first place.

You don't need to be an expert to surmise that the bare wire should be connected to something.

My electrical experience is limited to occasionally buying one of those lamp rewiring kits from a hardware store, but I knew this would be a basic job for someone who knew what they were doing. And so, I went to the one shop that still does appliance repairs. I've been there so often that he just asked "What have you broken this time?" 

He didn't even bother taking it to the back of the shop. Instead, he propped it up, told me to hold it still, and resoldered it on the front counter. Naturally, we couldn't wait a single day before cooking with electricity again. 

Now, I've been watching a lot of videos of people using electric pizzelle irons since I don't have anyone to drop by and show me how. And I've noticed that people don't grease the iron before every single splot of dough. And so, I put our next pizzelles onto an absolutely dry iron. Even though this apparently works for everyone online, this happened.

I gave the iron one more chance before basting it with grease, and the pizzelles didn't tear apart. They also didn't let go.

This time, I could gently peel them off intact. For the first time, all those recipes that say "remove with a fork" made sense. A spatula was too blunt an instrument, but a dinner fork is perfect for carefully sliding and jimmying under the hot waffle.

Because practice makes perfect and it's always a good time for cookies, I made another batch very soon thereafter. This time, I decided to grease the iron for the first ones, but not thereafter. Also, I thought that perhaps this wouldn't be such a drippy, messy process if I lightly brushed on the shortening instead of slathering it on. And... well... we were almost successful.

After just a few batches, I'm beginning to understand why so many instruction manuals say to throw out the first pizzelles. The rest of them came out all right, but the first ones seem to love tearing apart. 

At first I hated the ragged-looking edges, which don't happen on stovetop pizzelles because any excess batter-drips burn off instead unless you're quick to scrape the iron with a knife. But while I was making these, a friend of mine happened to text me a picture saying "Mom made pizzelles last night!" And wouldn't you know it, his mother's pizzelles at had ragged edges too.

Even after just a few times, making our pizzelles electrically had proven easier than doing it on a stove. It felt like I was just zapping pizzelles into existence. I didn't even realize I had reached the end of the batter. 

I'm getting the knack of using this thing, but I think I like making them on the stove better. This isn't some weird sort of stovetop purism- I just think it's more fun. For one thing, it feels weird to me to carefully focus on a tiny waffle iron instead of a whole stovetop. And also, I can't get the pizzelles to stop having raggedy edges, and that irks me. It'd be nice if they had packaged it with a matching round cookie cutter so you could quickly trim them while the dough was still hot and soft.  

I'll use this at least a few more times before I decide if I like it, but it may go back into the world to find someone new.

*For those who missed it, I got into making pizzelles after a bad breakup with someone whose family is from Ohio, which has left me salty about the entire state.↪

Blueberry-Oatmeal Muffins: or, They're worth all the bowls

We needed something to bake right on the first attempt.

Blueberry-Oatmeal Muffins Heat oven to 350°. Line a cupcake pan with papers, or coat with cooking spray. Mix, and let soak 10 minutes: ½ cup buttermilk or sour cream (If using sour cream, add about 1 or 2 tbsp more. If you have neither buttermilk nor sour cream, mix 1 cup milk and 1 tbsp lemon juice, let stand 5 minutes before adding the oatmeal.) ½ cup rolled oatmeal While the oatmeal is soaking, combine: ½ cup all-purpose flour ½ cup whole-wheat flour 1½ tsp baking powder ¼ tsp baking soda ¼ tsp nutmeg ¼ tsp salt Sift them together, or stir with a fork or a whisk to mix and fluff up. Next, thoroughly beat together in a large bowl: 1 egg ¾ cup brown sugar 1½ tsp vanilla 2 tbsp water Add the oatmeal mixture, and mix well. Then gently mix in the dry ingredients. Lastly, add: ½ cup blueberries, or more if desired (if the berries are shrunken and partially dried out from being in the refrigerator too long, you can add a lot more) Save a small handful of berries to sprinkle into any muffins that don't have enough (like when you're scraping the last of the batter off the sides of the bowl). Stir 10 strokes, or just enough to disperse the berries. Fill muffin cups about halfway full. Bake 20-25 minutes, or until they spring back when gently pressed in the center. Note: This is a great recipe for blueberries (or any other berries) that have gone squishy or otherwise passed their prime. Source: some mid-2000s refrigerator calendar

After the chocolate dot cookies drove me to flour-induced madness (even though they came out all right in the end), I wanted a recipe that would work exactly as written. Which brings us to today's recipe.

Way back in the day, my mom had one of those big calendars on the refrigerator to keep track of who had soccer practice and who had marching band on what days. It was interspersed with household management tips and recipes. I thought these blueberry muffins looked good enough to copy down the directions, but then I was just never in the mood for blueberry muffins. And after a while I forgot the piece of paper was tucked in the cover of one of my cookbooks. But this week, we had a lot of blueberries go soft and squishy on us. They were still perfectly good to eat, but no one wanted to.

This recipe demands a lot of bowls and a surprising amount of countertop acreage. You definitely want a dishwasher at hand. 

Getting down to ingredients, this recipe uses a lot of brown sugar. You can definitely tell this it comes from before "The Great Muffin Disillusionment:" that moment when we all collectively realized that stirring fruit into cake batter does not make it healthy.  

Meanwhile, ten minutes of soaking time had turned our oatmeal and sour cream into spackle. I'm not sure why we were supposed to soak them ten minutes, but I'm guessing the muffins don't bake long enough to soften the oats.  

And now, less than a minute after we finished getting everything into separate bowls, we started putting it all back together. At this point I noticed there's no butter, shortening, or oil in the recipe. Maybe the absence of fat makes these muffins instead of uniced cupcakes. At first I thought that just cutting the fat out of a cake recipe would ruin it. Then I thought that the war cake only has a couple of spoonfuls of shortening in it, and it is always delicious.

I ended up nearly doubling the berries because (as aforementioned) ours were squishy and sad. I know I might have ruined the recipe, but it beats freezing half-expired berries and then forgetting they're lodged behind last month's casserole. But as you can see, we didn't overload the batter with fruit. Maybe the original recipe writers were a little bit too parsimonious with their berry allowance.

The batter tasted really good. So even if these had a terrible texture after baking, at least the flavor would be right.

These were unexpectedly popular in the house. I kept seeing everyone go back to take just one more off the countertop. Within a few hours, the top of the trash can had a little pile of empty cupcake wrappers. I was asked to make them again the next day. "But we don't have any more expiring fruit!" I objected.

"We could... uh... make them with fresh fruit." Well to my nickel-counting self, that was heresy. But since no one else had near-dogmatic objections, I committed fresh berries to the oven. It may be extravagant, but what could I do but give in to popular demand?

As you already surmised, these were really good. They are surprisingly light and airy. They tasted a lot like granola bars-- the good ones that don't try to pretend they're good for you. You could argue that I put too many blueberries in them, but I think they were better this way. They kind of turned into mini cobblers, and also they tasted better because I had the happiness of knowing that I had avoided wasting fruit. 

And even if you buy fresh fruit just for these, they're too good to worry about it. 

Sachertorte: An unexpected revisit

Sometimes you get to find out how a recipe should have been done.

A while ago, I went out to visit a friend who had just finished a particularly nasty semester of grad school. To reward himself, he had ordered a sachertorte from the actual Hotel Sacher in Vienna. If you're willing to pay over $80 for a single cake, they will ship it to you in a cute wooden box. 

This cake came pre-cut into some really big slices. Like, those are some American-sized wedges of cake. I guess if you're paying $80 for a cake, a small sliver will not do.

 

Having made a sachertorte quite some time ago, I was really curious how my attempt compared to the real thing. And... well, the Hotel Sacher's tasted just like the one I made. I shouldn't be surprised. I got the recipe from a book called Austrian Cooking and Baking by Gretel Beer, an Austrian cookbook writer. She would have definitely known how one of Austria's most famous cakes should taste. 

And furthermore, this was easy to make, so I didn't really have a chance to mess it up. Granted, I flubbed the icing immediately thereafter. But the cake itself didn't have any finicky steps or other ways to accidentally ruin it.

The whipped cream hides the bad icing beautifully.

And so, if you want to have a genuine Austrian sachertorte, the recipe from Austrian Cooking and Baking is just as good as what you'd get if you ordered it from the home country. Gretel Beer's recipe is almost certainly not the one they use, but you won't taste the difference.

If you live in the US and really want a genuine imported Austrian cake in a stamped wooden box (or just don't feel like making one for yourself), you better order fast. The Austrian postal service (and over 80 other countries) has discontinued all parcel shipments to the US because a certain special someone keeps playing with tariffs, and who knows how long private couriers will continue putting up with this.

Zuurkoolstamppot: or, Kraut Spuds and Bacon

Some delicacies must wait until no one is around to whine about the smell.

Zuurkoolstamppot 750g starchy potatoes (about 1½ pounds), peeled (if desired) and cubed* 250g sauerkraut (about 8 ounces) 100g smoked bacon (about ¼ pound), diced† 1 onion, finely chopped (or one 12-oz package frozen chopped onion) 2 garlic cloves, minced ½ cup milk Butter to taste (I didn't use any) Pepper to taste Put the sauerkraut in a strainer over a bowl (or the sink) and set aside to drain. Boil the potatoes in salted water until soft. Meanwhile, cook the bacon until crisp in a large frying pan. Remove and set aside, leaving the drippings in the pan. Add the onion and saute until soft. Then add the garlic and cook another minute or two. Next, add the drained sauerkraut and stir long enough to warm it through. When the potatoes are ready, drain and mash them. Add them to the frying pan along with the bacon. Mix everything together, adding milk, butter and pepper to taste. You can also add salt, but taste first because there's probably already enough from the other ingredients. If desired, garnish with chopped chives, green onions, or parsley. *Just round to the nearest potato. This isn't one of those recipes where measurements must be precise. †If smoked bacon is too expensive, you can just add a few drops of liquid smoke when you're mashing the potato. Note: This is really good if you mix in a little mustard (wholegrain if you have it). Source: Retro Food for Modern Times

Today, we are borrowing a recipe from our Pieathlon friend Taryn at Retro Food for Modern Times. It's basically cabbage spuds and bacon except this time, the cabbage is fermented. 

Since I really love sauerkraut, this recipe seemed absolutely perfect for me-- and that's before we get to the bonus onion. But first, bacon!

At first I thought it was a lot of bacon grease for one recipe. But people tend to put truly heartstopping amounts of butter into mashed potatoes on a normal day. So really, bacon grease is a lateral move.

Next, we got to the onion! I took the lazy route and bought frozen chopped onions instead of cutting one up on the spot. 

I've happily let myself get into the habit of keeping frozen chopped onions on hand for whenever I feel something could use a lift. Just like the spices in the cabinet, it's nice to always have onions ready whenever we need them.

While our onion was cooking, our potato was ready to come out of the pot and get mashed. The recipe calls for 750 grams of potatoes, and I decided one of the bigger spuds in the supermarket bin was close enough. Unless you're making a very precise recipe, there's nothing wrong with rounding to the nearest potato.

Moving back to the bacon fat, I think I set my burner a lot higher than Taryn did when she posted this recipe. My onions became a bit artisanally blackened while I wasn't looking. 

Everything smelled divine anyway. (Really, how can you go wrong with onions and bacon?) And when I added the sauerkraut, the steaming vinegar scoured my nose so I could really appreciate the aroma of success.

Soon, it was time to add our mashed potato, which had turned into a surprisingly firm clump in its bowl. If I wasn't making zuurkoolstamppot, I could have unmolded this onto a platter.

The recipe says to add butter to taste along with the milk. I haven't gotten to go grocery shopping in Australia (where Taryn is writing from), so I don't know what bacon looks like there. But here in glorious America, bacon has so much fat on it that the actual meat sometimes seems like it got into the packaging by accident. So, butter seemed superfluous.

This tasted exactly like what went into it. I was in sauerkraut ecstasy. 

I served this with Swedish meatballs, and the potatoes were a lot better than the beef (which, by the way, was really good). If you have a well-ventilated kitchen or a good aim with a wooden spoon when people come grousing about the smell, you owe it to yourself. 

Swedish Meatballs

Today, we are bringing Ikea into our home!

Swedish Meatballs 4 eggs 2 cups milk 1 cup breadcrumbs 1 cup finely chopped onion ½ cup butter 2½ pounds lean beef* 3 teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon each nutmeg, allspice, and cardamom 4 tablespoons flour 3 cups beef stock or bouillon 3 cups half-and-half or cream salt and pepper to taste 1 teaspoon dill weed, crushed if fresh In a large bowl, whisk together eggs and milk. Add breadcrumbs. Cook onion in 2 tablespoons of the butter until soft. Mix into bread crumb mixture. Add salt, nutmeg, allspice, cardamom and beef. Mix everything thoroughly. (The mixture is very soft.) Let chill for an hour or so for flavors to blend. Shape into 1-inch balls. Refrigerate for a few hours so they firm up. Brown the meatballs slowly in remaining butter, turning them carefully to prevent squishing them. Select a large casserole or Dutch oven with a lid, and put it next to the stovetop. Place the meatballs in it as they come of the frying pan. Add the flour to the pan drippings and cook until lightly browned. Slowly pour in the beef stock, stirring vigorously to prevent lumps. Cook, stirring constantly, until sauce comes to a boil and is thickened. Add cream, salt, pepper, and dill. The sauce will be very thin. Pour the sauce over the meatballs. (If desired, pour it through a strainer.) Place the casserole on the stove, cover it, and simmer 30-40 minutes. Or, bake covered at 325° for 30-40 minutes. You can freeze the leftovers in their sauce, and either microwave them or reheat them in a 325° oven. *You really want to use lean meat for this recipe. The extra fat has nowhere to drain off to. Note: As always, we at A Book of Cookrye make no promises about whether this recipe is "authentic" or not. We are but ignorant Americans. Source: California Beef Council via Old Recipes on Reddit

For the longest time, I thought that Ikea invented Swedish meatballs because I have never seen them anywhere else. Of course, my inner cheapskate never let me buy them. This recipe came across Reddit a while ago, and I decided that I would finally try Swedish meatballs if I have to make them myself.

The recipe calls for "finely chopped" onions. This was a perfect time to use this knife thing I got a couple of Christmases ago. I was able to mince these before they had a chance to thaw.

Next, the recipe calls for "¼ teaspoon each" of the spices, and then says two of them are "optional." Would these still be Swedish without them, or would they just be meatballs? I tripled the spices instead of omitting them.

At this point, it looked like making meatloaf. Here I made the first of two big mistakes: I used 80% beef. If you read the directions, you will see that the future drippings would have nowhere to go as everything cooks.

A few refrigerated hours later, the time had arrived to put the meatballs in a lot more butter than I thought was necessary. 

Every recipe teaches you something new, whether you're prepared to learn or not. This recipe taught me that if you refrigerate meatballs for a few hours, it is so much easier to sear them without squishing them. See? Every single meatball is still meatball-shaped!

Meanwhile, we were supposed to turn the pan drippings into a gravy, at which point I made my second big mistake. I decided that our white sauce looked too runny. I know the directions say "Sauce is very thin," but this was practically water. And so, I added more flour. It was rich, creamy, and soon proved utterly wrong for the recipe. It's supposed to seep between the meatballs, but instead it sat on top. To salvage what I had nearly ruined, I cheated and poured water into the pan, hoping things would magically resolve themselves in the oven.

As the meatballs cooked, I found out why I should not have used 80% beef. You know how I said the drippings had nowhere to go? Well here is the fat, floating on top of everything in yellow puddles! 

On a happier note, our gravy and water fixed itself as the meatballs baked. It had started bubbling fairly early in the baking time. By the magic of convection, it mixed itself into a really nice creamy sauce. You just had to look past the puddles of grease before you could appreciate it.

The meatballs are sharing a plate with zuurkoolstamppot.

This recipe was a lot better than I thought it'd be. The meatballs tasted like a really good breakfast sausage without all the extra grease. (Well of course the meatballs weren't greasy. All the fat was floating on top.) I would never have thought to put dill and nutmeg in the same dish, but it is an inspired combination. 

I think they were a lot better the next day, if only because I carefully put the leftovers in the fridge without disturbing the grease, thus allowing me to pluck the fat out of the pan after it hardened. I mixed them with egg noodles, adding an extra-large spoonful of gravy. It was amazing.

So in conclusion, these are really good. But you definitely want to use extra-lean meat for this recipe. Also, I'm going to try putting nutmeg and dill together more often now that I've learned about it.

Chocolate Dot Cookies: or, They're really good if I can stop ranting

Today, we are attempting chocolate chip cookies from Canada!

Chocolate Dot Cookies ½ cup shortening ½ cup white sugar ¼ cup brown sugar, lightly packed 1 egg, beaten 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup sifted all-purpose flour ½ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon baking soda 1 cup (or 6 ounces) chocolate chips ½ cup chopped nuts, if desired Heat oven to 350°. Have greased or paper-lined cookie sheets ready. Beat the shortening until soft. Gradually add the sugar, beating the whole time. Add egg and vanilla, beat well. Sift in the flour, baking soda, and salt. Mix into the batter. Stir in the chocolate chips. Drop by the spoonful onto the pans. Bake 10-12 minutes. Makes about 3 dozen cookies. Chatelaine's Adventures in Cooking, 1968 via Imgur

This comes to us from Chatelaine's Adventures in Cooking, published by the Canadian magazine of the same name, by way of a recipe swap group. 

Chatelaine's Adventures in Cooking, 1968

From this uneducated foreigner's perspective, Chatelaine's Adventures in Cooking looks like a "standard kitchen text" of Canada.  You know, one of those cookbooks that countless people got as a housewarming or wedding present, or  bought with their first saucepans. If anyone from Canada is reading this, do let me know: is this one of those "I learned to cook from my Mom's copy" books that nearly everyone had?

For various personal reasons, I am suspicious of chocolate chip cookie recipes. They always turn into runny splats unless I add a lot more flour than the recipe thinks I should. But every recipe I've tried came from the United States. Maybe Canada can do better.

Our adventure with Chatelaine starts off with shortening. I am leery of shortening unless I'm brushing it onto a hot pizzelle iron. But after an endless succession of chocolate chip cookies that melted into sad splats onto the pan, I was willing to give it a go. After all, shortening has a higher melting point than butter, which might help the cookies hold themselves together long enough to bake properly.

At the sight of the brown and white sugars almost but not quite commingling, I thought "Look at that Canadian marbling!"

As we reached the end of mixing, I was surprised and delighted to see that this recipe uses roughly equal amounts of chocolate chips and cookie dough.

Now, I was almost willing to risk an entire panload of cookie dough without testing a single cookie first. The recipe seemed sound, and the dough felt right. But after so many runny failures, I don't think I can let myself trust any chocolate chip cookie recipe. Even the recipe on the Toll House bag, the one that literally introduced chocolate chip cookies to the world, turned into sad splats until I added a truly uncalled-for amount of extra flour.

 

When I pulled the cookie out, I was not as surprised as I thought I would be. It's true that the recipe comes from Canada (which seems to endorse it for reasons I can't explain), and the dough didn't seem as "floppy" as all of our earlier cookie failures. But apparently chocolate chip cookies are treacherous business.

And now, I would like interrupt this recipe with a rant.

Whenever I flip through baking and recipe forums, there's always a steady flow of people asking "Why did my cookies come out flat?" (More often than not, it's chocolate chip cookies.) And people will (un)helpfully answer with the same incorrect myths. They'll ask "Did you refrigerate the dough? Did you thoroughly cream the butter and sugar? Did you use a dark pan or a light one? Were your eggs cold or room temperature? Did you set your oven too low?" The "advice" I see the most often is the false claim that refrigerating the dough overnight will "hydrate" the flour, thus allegedly helping the cookies not melt so badly.

I have tried all of those things. I've jockeyed with the oven thermostat. I have gently mixed the butter (or shortening) and sugar, and I have also beaten "until pale-colored and very light." I have refrigerated the cookie dough, and I have also pre-shaped it and then frozen the individual unbaked cookies until ice-solid. And while all of those things can change how the cookies come out, they will not fix a runny dough. 

It infuriates me to see these myths persist in various comment sections, because then people try them. And when they don't work, the people baking at home blame themselves and get frustrated.

If your cookie dough is too runny, the only fix is to stir in more flour.

If you think about it, cookies that are supposed to spread are more finicky than almost anything that people bake. If you don't get the dough exactly right, it either turns into a hot runny mess, or it bakes into hardened dough clods. Even things like shortbread, which are supposed to keep their shape, are more forgiving. If you add a bit too much flour to them, they'll just be extra-firm rather than ruined. 

This brings me to my next complaint: I can't stand the myth that if you measure your ingredients exactly right, things will always come out as predictably as a chemical reaction from a science textbook. Reality is messier than a splattered countertop. 

Cookies* are technically "freestanding loaves" if you stretch that term as far as pedantically possible. Most other bread recipes give a range of flour instead of a single-number amount. Or at least, most recipes that are written by actual people instead of content farms do.

When skimming the ingredient list for most breads, you tend to see things like "3 to 5 cups flour" or "3 cups flour (approx)." The directions usually go on to tell you what kind of dough you want (springy, soft and slightly sticky, very firm, etc), so that you can make sure you get the flour right. But in cookie recipes, I have only seen this natural variability acknowledged once. On the Mirro cookie press instruction sheet, they wrote "Do not [emphasis theirs] add all of the flour specified in the recipe before first trying the dough for consistency. Due to variations in flour or the size of eggs it sometimes becomes necessary to omit some of the flour or to add an additional one or two tablespoons." (Of course, it would have helped if they said what consistency the dough should be. But they still did better than everyone else.) 

It is impossible for recipe writers to control for variations in wheat crops, your local humidity, or how much water is in your butter and eggs. Sure, simply saying "mix in two cups of flour" sounds more assured than "add enough flour to make a firm dough." But it is a lie.

Speaking of wheat crops, I think something might be amiss in this year's harvest. Granted, I know nothing about the art and science of wheat cultivation. But it seems like I've been adding extra flour to everything lately. I made a batch of oatmeal carmelitas the other week, and the dough looked like this. Keep in mind that that you're supposed to crumble it over everything else. 

I went to the book and double-checked the recipe to make sure I measured everything right, then I checked it again because I knew something was surely amiss. But either the book has a typing error in the ingredient list, or flour today just isn't what it used to be. I ended up nearly doubling the flour before I could "press into the pan" or "sprinkle remaining dough on top" like the recipe said I should. 

More recently, I made a batch of chocolate waffle iron cookies.  Now, waffles are more forgiving of measuring errors than a lot of other recipes. They are molded in from all sides, so the batter or dough (depending on the recipe) literally cannot go astray while it's cooking. Guess which ones have exactly as much flour as written. 

Also, I have made this recipe as written many times. This is a new failure.

Getting back to Chatelaine's Adventures in Cooking, I added just enough flour that the dough didn't stick to my fingers anymore but was still very soft. It was a lot more than the one or two spoons I expected. But the cookies came out of the oven just fine with their extra dose of wheat. I put one of the sad and flat original cookies next to the extra-floury ones for comparison.

If you take anything from today's adventure of cooking, forget all that business of twiddling with the oven temperature dial or trying to refrigerate your cookie dough to magically "hydrate" it. Just add more flour and your cookies will be fine.

As for today's recipe, these are really good if you like your chocolate chip cookies crispy. They're also very rich, so you feel sated after just a few. For this reason, I think they'd be great for parties. Everyone will like them (well, everyone who likes chocolate chip cookies anyway), but most people will be satisfied after just a few. So you don't need to make a quadruple-batch of them the day before. 

With that said, I think these would be better with a little bit of cinnamon in them. But I'm willing to salute Canadian magazine recipe writers, even if they launched me into a long rant about flour and bad advice. The empty cookie jar tells me all I need to know. 

 

 

 

 

*or more specifically: flour-based cookies that are baked in individual portions on a flat pan, as opposed to bar cookies, anything baked in individual molds, and other types not enumerated here. ↪