Waffle Iron Shortbread: Easy to make, good enough to give away

Today we are making more waffle cookies!

Waffle Iron Shortbread 250 grams (1 cup plus 2 tbsp) margarine or butter 3 eggs 250 grams (1 cup) sugar 2 tsp vanilla, if desired ½ cup cornstarch 18 grams (1 tbsp) baking powder pinch salt About 450 grams (3 cups) flour Melt margarine and set aside to cool. (Or heat it until it's almost melted. Any remaining solid pieces will be soft enough to mix in just fine.) Thoroughly beat eggs, sugar, (cooled) butter, and vanilla. Mix cornstarch, baking powder, and salt, then place in the bowl along with about half the flour. I think these are also good with a slight bit of cinnamon-- not enough to be recognizable, but enough to add a slight little something extra to the flavor. Start stirring and then add enough flour to make a batter about the consistency of very thick sour cream. Let batter stand about 10-15 minutes. Then cook on a hot, well-greased waffle iron until lightly golden. Что бы приготовить? от Алекандра Попова (What to Cook? by Alexander Popov)

These days, I trust cooking videos that are shot at home more than professional ones. If the lighting looks like it costs more than a kitchen renovation, it's probably a content farm using trick-editing to make worthless recipes look like they actually work. (Also, after watching Russian cooking videos just to see how their kitchens are different from ours, I recognized the words "Das vedanya" at the end!)

This recipe starts with a lot of bowls. Even with a dishwasher, it's annoying to use so much counterspace and later so much rack space in the magic cleaning machine. But it was nice to have everything ready to go before I stirred a single thing together. I hate to admit it, but it was faster than my usual method of measuring each ingredient out as we get to it.

After getting everything together, it was a simple matter of stirring it into one big bowl and then letting it rest. At first I was annoyed about waiting for 10-15 minutes, but it was a perfect chance to clear off the countertops at a leisurely pace. 

Some people may recall that we got two Soviet irons and then nearly ruined one of them on the first attempt: 

This iron and I have been in a conflicted relationship ever since, but today I decided to get it out because I hadn't used it in a while. I wanted to see if it had decided that it liked life on the other side of a trans-Atlantic voyage. 

When I spooned our first mound of dough onto the iron, it looked exactly right. It's so reassuring when your batter looks just like the one in the video. It was firm, but ever-so-slightly drippy in a way that suggested it would easily become runny and spread throughout the iron.

 They fell out of the iron perfectly, and were dangerously good.

We made these again for our neighbors who have Al CaBone the 12-foot Christmas skeleton in their yard. For gift-related purposes, I used the heart-shaped iron because they're so dingdarn cute.

For whatever reason, today's batch was like cookie dough as soon as I mixed it. As I mixed, I started to have little crumbly bits even though a lot of the flour remained in its separate bowl. (Instead of pouring it back into the bag, I used it for blueberry muffins.)

As I was waiting for the waffles to cook, I noticed that they cast the purchase price onto this thing. I almost thought I could calculate the cost in modern money, then I realized that I could never figure out the year this was made.

I think it says 4 rubles, 70 kopeks.

If we could determine how old this iron is, we could find out how many years' wages it cost in Soviet Russia. But that is impossible because once they started manufacturing something in the USSR, they didn't change it until they could no longer slap the factory machinery back together. I mean, look at their cars:

And of course, it figures that I can never get the batter amount right until we reach the end of the bowl. We had oozing waffles and incomplete waffles the whole time I was making these (which doesn't matter unless I'm trying to give them away), but the last scrapings of batter finally yielded near-perfection.

Even with a few factory seconds, we happily had more than enough to give away. I always forget that this makes surprisingly small waffles. It therefore stretches your batter a lot. But full disclosure I overcooked some of them on one side. I could lie and pretend we always have perfect cookies, but we don't deceive here at A Book of Cookrye.

I tried doing a ganache drizzle on these, but it looked bad and also didn't taste as good as I hoped. And as much as I like chocolate, I don't think it's very good here. It obliterated the cookies' flavor. Fortunately, we had plenty of bare cookies left for giving purposes.

I think I simply don't like ganache. Like, it's easy, it's photogenic (most of the time), but it turns chocolate into something horribly overwhelming. I might use it as a very thin crumb-coat on future cakes, but I won't use it for much else.

Setting aside the chocolate, you don't even need to break one open to see how fluffy they are.

These waffles are delicious. If they weren't, I wouldn't have given them away with my signature on the card. They have the perfect soft-yet-dense texture of shortbread cookies. And they also had a much better shelf life than a lot of other waffles, which makes them nice for giving away.

Lemon Meringue Pie: Absolutely worth it

As the weather gets colder, the oven gets hotter!

Lemon Meringue Pie Lemon Cream Pie ¾ cup sugar 3 tablespoons flour 3 tablespoons cornstarch 1 teaspoon salt 1¾ cups water 2 eggs, separated Juice of 2 lemons Grated rind of 1 lemon ¼ cup sugar (for meringue) 1 baked pie shell Place the egg yolks into a medium mixing bowl, beat them slightly, and set aside. Sift sugar, flour, cornstarch, and salt into a saucepan or the top of a double boiler. Add boiling water and whisk until smooth. Then place over boiling water or a medium burner (depending on whether you're using a double boiler or not). Cook, stirring constantly, until it thickens completely. Don't take it off the heat as soon as it thickens just a little, but keep going until it stops getting thicker. Remove from heat. While whisking in the yolks hard, gradually drop in spoonfuls of pie filling until you have beaten in about one-third to half of it. Then return this to the heat and cook about one minute longer. Remove from heat again, then stir in lemon juice and rind. Allow to cool completely. When everything is cooled, heat oven to 400°. Pour and spread the filling into the pie shell. Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form. Then, with the mixer running, gradually add the sugar one spoonful at a time. Allow each spoonful of sugar to completely dissolve before adding the next. Then spread this onto the pie, being sure it touches the crust on all sides. You may find it easier to put the meringue into a food-storage bag with a corner cut off, and pipe it into place. If it looks bad, just spread it with a knife or a spatula afterward. Place in the oven and bake until the meringue is golden on top. If you make the meringue a bit ahead of time and find it's turned into a bowl of stiff and dry foam while sitting out, just put the mixer back in there and beat it again. Note: Meringues really only last a day before they start dripping and oozing out little brown beads. And they don't freeze well. So if you want to make this pie ahead of time, you really can't freeze it with the meringue on top. You have two options. The easiest: forget the meringue. You can put spray-can of whipped cream next to the pie if you like. The other choice: freeze or refrigerate the egg whites (depending on how far ahead you're making this). Then make the meringue and put it on top of the pie the day you serve it (or the day before at earliest). Unknown source (looks like a magazine clipping or a food label), probably 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

The freestanding pastry cases may have been a bust, but the lemon pie we put in them was really good. It comes from my great-grandmother's binder since I already had it open to learn how to make underwhelming tarts. She actually has two lemon pies. I chose the one that has more lemon in it. Conveniently, it also uses fewer eggs.

As we piled our ingredients into the sifter, I could tell that this pie absolutely could not stay runny after cooking. That's a lot of flour and starch. 

The recipe says to cook "until thick," and boy did this ever. Also, I know we're supposed to use a double boiler, but sometimes I like to live dangerously. Anyway I don't have a double boiler at hand and didn't feel like perching a mixing bowl over a pot.

 

We are next directed to simply "stir in slightly beaten egg yolks", but I didn't trust that instruction for a minute. (Lest we forget the egg curds in our hot macaroni salad.) 

When tempering eggs, you usually pour your hot mixture into the eggs while beating them very hard. But today, we had to carefully aim small blobs of steaming goop into the little bowl. It was annoying, but do you see any scrambled eggs?

After mixing in the lemon juice in, I tried a bit on the tip of a spoon. And... if you want your pie to make you pucker, this is the recipe for you. I might use this recipe the next time I want to put lemon filling in a cake. For one thing, it won't go gloopy and get squeezed out between the layers. Second, the concentrated lemon flavor is perfect for spreading thinly between cakes.

But this was too beige for me. This may be the natural color of lemon pie, but we have artificial dyes now. 

I nearly dyed the whole thing purple instead.

With the magic of petrochemical artifice, it's now the exact color of that cheap filling in gas station pies!

I really liked this. Some lemon pies are basically sugary cornstarch with a little bit of lemon that fell in by accident, but this is definitely a lemon pie. I loved how tart it was. We have another lemon pie in this book, and I'm a little bit afraid I already made the good one. 

 In full disclosure, after two days the meringues were starting to put out little brown droplets and get a little drippy. So if you want to make lemon pie more than a day ahead, you should forget the meringue and just squirt canned whipped cream on top at serving time. 

Meringue Tarts: or, Disposable ashtrays?

Have you had too much lemon pie lately?

Lemon or Butterscotch Meringue Tarts Have lemon meringue or butterscotch pie filling ready to go. Use the recipe of your choice and cut it in half. (Your recipe may simply be "purchase one can/box of pie filling.") If you make it yourself, be sure it is completely cooled off. (Try my great-grandmother's butterscotch pie filling! Just cook it in a saucepan until thick enough to almost hold a shape when spooned.) Make one double-crust pie's worth of dough. After rolling it out, have a three- and four-inch cookie cutter ready. For each tart, cut out three 4-inch circles out of the rolled-out dough. Then use the three-inch cutter to cut out the centers of two of them. Brush or finger-paint the top of the intact circle with water. Then stack the pastry rings on top of it. Brush each layer with water before putting the next one on top. Be sure the rings are nicely aligned as you stack them, otherwise they will slump sideways in the oven. When rerolling the dough scraps, stack them on each other instead of wadding them up into a ball. This helps keep the dough from becoming tough. When ready to bake, heat oven to 425°. Line a baking sheet with foil. Bake the cases until delicately browned, about 10-15 minutes. Then allow to cool. While they are cooling, reduce the oven to 350°. Then fill them with the (cooled!) pie filling. If desired, top with a meringue and bake until golden on top. (Or just spoon in the pie filling, forget the meringue, and call it a day.) You can also fill these with ice cream topped with fresh berries, or custard, or anything else you like. Undated Chicago Tribune newspaper clipping, probably 1930s-1940s Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

This is one of my great-grandmother's newspaper clippings. Check out the caption under the photo: "A tart is a pleasant change from a piece of lemon meringue pie, but contains the same ingredients." I love the idea of a world where we have so much lemon pie that we need "a pleasant change" from it. 

Before I could make these, I had to come up with three-inch and four-inch cookie cutters. I briefly thought about buying them, but then I saw the prices. And while I have a habit of ill-advised kitchen splurges, I didn't want to sink money into today's tarts. Besides, if I never made them again, the four-inch cutter would sit in the drawer and remind me that I wasted $10.

The three-inch cutter was easy enough: cut the top and bottom off a can of peaches, and announce that we're having "peach salad" with dinner tonight. (read: canned peaches suspended in red Jello.) But I didn't have any four-inch diameter cans lying around the house.

I took a ruler to every cup and bowl, but none of them were the right size. Then I realized that if I cut one of the old cottage cheese tubs (of course we save sour cream and cottage cheese tubs) short enough, it would be four inches across. I only note this so I can say how much I love my kitchen scissors. I thought I'd have to put a lot of force into this, but these scissors made it as easy as cutting up construction paper.

If it's three inches across at the top and five inches across at the bottom, then it must be four inches across at some point.

Of course, I could have saved a lot of time by bringing a pocket ruler the next time I went grocery shopping. But by borrowing a pack of 4"x6" cards from the office supplies aisle, I found that extra-large fruit cans are four inches across. I then told myself "Everyone at the house really wanted a lot of peach 'salad' anyway." So now, for the first time in my life, I own a matching set of nested cookie cutters!

The little tomato paste can has been in regular use for a while now.

After making our perfect pie dough (that's the heading on the page, and you don't argue with someone who has perfect Palmer handwriting), I decided to let it rest. I know the article doesn't mention that, but Delia Smith does. And look what a difference a half-hour's relaxation made! It rolled out with no cracks, no crumbly bits, no problems at all.

For comparison, here is what happened when we made dough from the same recipe and didn't give it a moment's rest before flattening it:

Our success soon got a lot more tedious. You don't get many four-inch circles out of a single sheet of pie dough. We would have to reroll this a lot.

When we cut out the center holes, the remaining rings were thinner than I expected.

As we learned in our old newspaper articles, you can reroll pie scraps as many times as you want if you fold and stack them. (I'm sure there's a limit, but...) This scrap pile might look like I wadded them, but I did try to lay them in horizontal layers. And of course, I didn't squeeze or press them into shape. After all, we were expressly told that "kneading or squeezing the pastry forms it into a sticky mass."

It was kind of amusing to see those three-inch circles stretch as I persuaded the dough back into a flat sheet. And credit to the newspaper article I learned this from, the dough didn't break apart at all.

Also I'm pretty sure I should have rested the dough every now and then between rerollings. Because of my impatience, I had to use a LOT of force on the rolling pin by the time we got to assembling the last tart or two. But had I let the dough rest for half an hour every other time, this would have taken all night. I decided that no one would have turned tartlets into an all-day affair unless they worked in a bakery. 

Even without letting the dough rest before restretching it, these took long enough. I only got one tart's worth of four-inch circles out of the dough every time I rerolled it. If I hadn't made the pie filling the night before, I wouldn't have baked these tonight. 

Moving away from the rolling pin, it turns out there's a bit of a knack to assembling these. The newspaper article made it seem as easy as stacking crackers, but it was more like trying to neatly arrange rubber bands.

Our tart shells puffed up a lot in the oven. You can really see the multilayered effect of stacking the scraps instead of kneading and smushing them into one big dough ball. They did look a little underbaked, but I figured they're supposed to go into the oven twice.

As we learned, these slump sideways unless you stack your dough rings perfectly on top of each other. I reached in the oven and tried to nudge the worst ones back into shape. It didn't work.

But if you do this right, this is what you get.

Looks like something from a beginners pottery class, doesn't it?

 It was finally time to get some pie into these. The Chicago Tribune's cooking staff piped the meringue on top, so I did the same. Squirting the meringue into place also seemed a lot easier than trying to spread it across semi-gelatinous pie filling. And while I did manage to extrude the meringue semi-evenly across the pie, I did have to go back with a spoon and fix it.

Ahhh, that's better.

One of these is empty because I was going to follow the article and try it with ice cream.

The first tarts we had made exuded a lot of melted butter as they baked again. I'm not sure if puff-paste just does that, or if I was a bit too good at cutting the butter in "coarsely."

If you really like pie crust, this is definitely for you. You end up chewing on a big wad of dough. Like, they got cooked all the way through but they really didn't seem like it. They almost reminded me of medieval trenchers (ie, plates made out of hard-baked flour paste) because they were technically edible, but seemed like you should eat the food on top and then throw them out.

But really, if you're going to serve a big wad of pie crust, it needs to taste like something. This was only bland baked dough. Nevertheless, the idea has potential. I might revisit it with cookie dough, or perhaps make herbed biscuit dough and put something like tuna salad in them. Or, cut out circles of pie crust and then use strips of puff-paste to make the rims.

I guess today's recipe makes a pie easy to serve if people can't take a plate and sit down, but otherwise this is too much work for too much disappointment. And I am rarely disappointed with pie.  

More gallingly, it didn't work with the lemon meringue pie recipe even though they literally tell me to make meringue tarts in the headline. We used half a pie's worth of filling, a whole pie's worth of meringue, and two pies' worth of dough.

On a positive note, these things were sturdy. You usually can't stack pies on each other.

I also can't say I liked the size of these tarts. They're too big to serve one, but not quite big enough to serve two. Obviously, you can easily fix that by changing what size circles you cut out. But you still have a lot of pie crust on the sides of this. If you want a freestanding pie, this is definitely a good way to go about it (where was this newspaper clipping when we did a piecaken?). I might use this method if I want to make edible serving bowls, but I'll do my future small tarts by pressing pie dough into a muffin pan. 

 

Although as I was cleaning up the kitchen I had a thought. Given what I've heard about these relatives (and how much empty cigarette packaging we found in the apartment!), and given the size of these tart shells and how sturdy they were, was my great-grandmother making disposable ashtrays?

Tart, or ashtray?

Second-Stab Saturday: Sorry I didn't like these pizzelles as much as someone else apparently did

I couldn't let go of the pizzelle recipe that covered an entire box. As a reminder:

Est! Est!! Est!!! Pizzelles 6 eggs 1 tsp vanilla 1 tbsp anise extract, or ¼ tsp anise oil 1 tsp orange or lemon extract 1 cup sugar 1 cup butter or oil Pinch of salt 2¼-2½ cups flour 2 tsp baking powder If using butter, melt it and set it aside to cool. Combine flour and baking powder in a sifter, set aside. Beat eggs and flavorings with an electric mixer until very light. Gradually add the sugar, beating the whole time. Beat until very thick. Gradually pour in the butter or oil, beating on high speed the whole time. Then set aside the mixer. Sift in the flour and stir it in by hand. Cook on a hot pizzelle iron until crisp and golden. If desired, take out about a third of the batter. Mix in ¼ cup cocoa powder. Cut this into the rest of the batter for a marbled effect. (Note: Apparently lots of people can make chocolate pizzelles, but the cocoa powder makes them stick horribly to the iron every time I try. So beware!) Source: handwritten recipe on a pizzelle iron box

Whoever wrote this recipe gave it the entire side of a pizzelle iron box, like they were declaring that this was the one and only. You don't do that with a dud. I decided to bring the recipe back to its native iron.

As I mentioned last time, I happen to have the same iron that this recipe came with. This isn't as much a coincidence as you may think. This seems to be one of the most common stovetop pizzelle iron designs, and I can see why. First, it looks really pretty. Second, it lets go of waffles ever-so-easily. With other irons, I often need to get out a fork and gently ease the pizzelles out of the grooves. But they fall right out of this one.

I wanted to give this recipe a fair shake, mostly because apparently someone really liked it. So on a lovely chilly night, I fired up the record player, cleared off the counters, and made pizzelles.

As much as I hate to admit it, it seems like the best pizzelle irons come from Ohio.* Our Pennsylvania iron turned this recipe into bendy wafers, but they were a lot thinner and crisper when cooked on a Cleveland native. But they were still oddly flexible and their texture just wasn't the best. I won't make these again, but I didn't throw the rest out.

They did photograph very well, though.

*Ohio has a large Italian community-- particularly in the greater Cleveland area, which may be why pizzelles are more common among Italian-Americans than still-in-Italy Italians. It is speculated that Cleveland's metalworking industry made it a lot easier to produce specialized waffle irons.
As for why I would have problems with Ohio and the cookware made in that state, it's for (admittedly shallow) personal reasons. 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.↪

Biscuits: or, Kimbell Flour Redeemed

The Kimbell Flour people redeemed themselves just in time for Thanksgiving.

Biscuits 2 cups flour 3 tsp baking powder 1 tsp salt ¼ cup shortening (I used half butter) ½ to ⅞ cup milk Heat oven to 475°. That is not a mistype. Four hundred seventy-five degrees, also known as gas mark 9, or 225°C. Sift dry ingredients together into a large bowl. Coarsely cut in shortening. Stir in enough milk to make a dough that is soft, but still firm enough to work with your hands. Turn out on floured board and knead lightly for about 30 seconds, or until smooth. Roll out to ½ inch thickness. Cut with biscuit cutter. Place in shallow, ungreased baking pan. (If you're worried about them sticking, line the pan with aluminum foil. Because of the high baking temperature, use foil instead of paper.) Bake until golden on top, about 10-12 minutes. Source: Kimbell Flour canister, probably 1940s-1950s

For those who are just dropping in, I've been making the recipes on this antique flour canister that lives among Mom's knickknacks. 

There are a lot of flour sacks with recipes on the side, but the Kimbell Flour Company's owners used all that carbohydrate-based money to fund one of the most prestigious art museums in the area. I wanted to try some of the recipes that led to people in North Texas to see Renaissance art for free. (The museum only charges for touring exhibits.)

Unfortunately, the recipes we've tried so far have been surprisingly bad. Their marble cake recipe fundamentally didn't work, and their banana bread was passable but bland. I couldn't believe a flour company would have such lousy canister recipes. And so, I tried another one just to see if they could get anything right.

I had high hopes for this recipe because it made the cover photo.

I was going to make the yeast-raised dinner rolls printed on the same canister, but I didn't think of it until the last minute. No one wants the bread to be ready five hours after the dinner dishes are washed and put away.  

The Kimbell people's biscuit recipe looked a lot like the one I've been making all this time. It calls for shortening, but I substituted half butter. A lot of older recipes use "shortening" to mean "any solid fat." 

At first I didn't believe the oven temperature. We haven't gotten the oven this hot since the pita bread. Just for sanity's sake, I cross-checked the some other biscuit recipes.  The Kimbell people set the oven dial a little higher than most others, but not by very much. If it wasn't Thanksgiving, I wouldn't have considered running the oven to nearly 500 degrees unless it was cold enough to ice out the roads. But I figured we're allowed a little bit of extravagance for the holidays.

Now, after countless biscuits that never rose, I have learned not to roll them out too thin. You don't want them to crisp up before the baking powder has a chance. But these might have benefited from a little more time with a rolling pin. They expanded into little towers of carbs. Then some of them tipped over.

I wasn't expecting these to be so good. They made up for the waste of eggs that was Kimbell's marble cake. I've made a lot of biscuits that were decent ish, but these were fantastic. The butter on top was almost superfluous, they were so good. It's hard to justify running the oven that hot unless we really mean it, but I am definitely looking for the next excuse to get away with baking these again.