Chocolate Waffle Iron Cookies: or, Reader recipes!

Sometimes at A Book of Cookrye, someone will send in a recipe that speaks to them of us. This one comes to us from Lace Maker in the comments under our post about banana cookies.  I love the thoughtful note of why this recipe seemed right for A Book of Cookrye:

I didn't find any interesting banana recipes in my cookbooks, but I did find waffle iron cookies which made me think about cooking banana bread/cake batter in a waffle iron. After all, summer is coming, and I know that you like adventures in cooking things in a waffle iron. 

"Choc Waffle Iron Cookies" Marti Patter (from Police Potpourri, Cedar Rapids Iowa State Policeman's Association Auxiliary" 1977) Cream 1.5 c. sugar with 1 c. butter. Beat in 4 eggs. Add 2 c. flour, 1/2 c. cocoa, 2 tsp. vanilla. Beat well. Drop by spoonful onto waffle iron and bake till done. Frost. The recipe notes they are better on the second day.

Chocolate Waffle Iron Cookies 1½ c sugar 1 c butter 4 eggs 2 c flour ½ c cocoa 2 tsp vanilla Cream sugar and cocoa with butter, beating until light. Beat in eggs and vanilla, using your electric mixer to keep beating until it's whipped. Add flour, stirring just until mixed. Drop by spoonful onto a very well-greased waffle iron and bake until done. They will be too fragile to lift out off of the waffle iron. Instead, place a plate under the waffle iron and tip it until they fall out. You may need to give them a starting nudge with a fork to release them after you have the waffle iron tipped upright. Frost (I made a thin glaze and just poured it over). They are better on the second day. Source: Marti Patter, Police Potpourri, Cedar Rapids (Iowa) State Policeman's Association Auxiliary, 1977

Vanilla Glaze 2 tbsp butter 4 tsp hot water 2 tsp vanilla or so 1 c powdered sugar Melt butter, add hot water. Stir in vanilla, then add powdered sugar. Whisk until smooth. If you have one of those glass measuring cups with a pour spout, you can easily mix this in the cup and then pour it out on all the cookies.

We do not have a lot of people in the house, so I hope no one minds if we cut this recipe down to one quarter.

This reminds me of one of my best accidental creations that I have only made once. When a dear cousin got her first apartment and had a housewarming, I got her a cast iron skillet (in case she ever accidentally dated a bastard) and filled it with cake-waffle-cookies for the housewarming party ("The cookies are for the party, the serving dish is your housewarming present!"). I made a batch of 1234 cake batter and dropped spoonfuls of it onto my waffle iron. After they cooled enough to not fall apart, I made the grave mistake of dipping them in glaze (just powdered sugar and water) and thus making a horrendous mess of half the kitchen while they drip-dried. The resulting cake-waffle-cookies (shortened to kwaffle cookies)  were unexpectedly addictive and people kept badgering me to make them again but not offering to clean up the inevitable kitchen disaster that comes from dipping all those waffle cookies in sticky glaze.

Back to today's recipe, I'm not sure if anything makes this recipe particularly waffle iron specific. Maybe Marti Platter tried to bake cookies on a sheet and they melted together into one big dough puddle, so she used the waffle iron to force them to stay as individual cookies. Maybe this was something that they did at home because waffle irons are entertaining for the whole family. Maybe one day there was a dire need for chocolate and no one had the patience to preheat an oven.

Some recipes seem to take forever to get mixed and put together, but this one went so fast that I almost wasn't ready to be finished. We're only a minute or two into this and we've already got most of the ingredients ready to go.

I like using a spoon instead of a mixer most of the time for the same reason some people love hand-sewing instead of using a sewing machine and some people go out of their way to get a stick-shift car. (That and I still have to remind myself that nowadays I can just drop the beaters from an electric mixer in the dishwasher instead of washing them by hand.) However, I double-checked the ingredients list and found no leavener in this whatsoever. So therefore, the only leavening comes from you, the home cook, and how hard you stir and whip. Therefore, we set aside the spoon and got out the power tools.

It's hard to tell since the chocolate gives this a tantalizingly dark color, but we've gotten the ingredients more aerated than we usually bother to. The recipe doesn't mention separating the eggs and beating the white to stiff peaks, which is why I didn't. Perhaps in earlier decades one would have assumed that you're supposed to whip the egg whites, but this is the late 1970s. At this point, even the most tersely-written recipe would have written "four eggs, separated." This one just says "beat in four eggs."

As aforementioned, there's no baking powder or any other leavening in this. Which means that we, the ones with the electric mixer, are the leavener in today's recipe. And so, when this recipe says "beat in four eggs," we decided to look to Fanny Cradock. As Her Not-So-Serene Highness would say, we thought of someone we really don't like but we're too well-bred to say anything, and we took it out on our cooking instead. We got this so whipped that it was several shades lighter.

After scraping that ring of unbeaten mixture into our light and airy cookie dough and beating it a bit more, we got the flour into it and pronounced it iron-ready.

Now, there's a really awesome, vintage, excessively-large waffle iron in this house. You might think it'd be perfect for doing all these cookies at once. However, our every attempt to use it has ended like this:

I used so much cooking spray that the waffle practically got fried in it.

However, this turned up in the cabinets. Note that the waffle grids are screwed on, meaning we can presumably take them out and wash them. This is a tragic shortcoming of that massive vintage one- you can't just shove the dirty parts of it under the faucet or soak them overnight without disassembling the whole appliance.

Without those screws we'd be screwed.

All right, it's time for the magic moment! The oven gets a rest today because we are doing these things with countertop appliances.

Those of you trying this at home should know that if your waffle iron has a ready light, you can't trust it for this recipe. Whatever sensors it uses were apparently designed with the assumption that you will be covering the entire waffle iron with batter. Since you've only put a few scattered spoonfuls of dough on the iron, the ready light will probably turn on while you still have a waffle iron full of hot goo. We gave these four minutes and got successful cookies out of it.

However, we had difficulty removing them at first. You know how you usually just carefully get a fork under your waffles and gently lift them out? These proved too crumbly and fragile. If you got a fork under them and tried to lift, the fork just tore right through them no matter how delicately you tried to move it. But I've been sporadically putting cookies onto a waffle iron for a long time now, and knew exactly how to get them off the iron intact:

 

 But after they were cooled, we had a plate that looked like this.

You might think that's a tiny recipe yield, but keep in mind that we did not halve this recipe but quarter it. Also, a lot of the cookies mysteriously disappeared while successive batches were baking.

The original recipe says to frost these. I did not know how the heck you are supposed to spread icing on a waffle. To keep things easy, I threw together some glaze for this (which was just our dear favorite cinnamon icing without the cinnamon and with about thrice the vanilla) and just poured it on.

I then realized that we had a lot more glaze on these than I thought because we filled up all those holes. At first I thought this would prove a nasty sugar overload, but someone else passing through tried one and said "No. It's perfect." These cookies are amazing. They're like brownies that came off of a waffle iron. They have that delicate yet fudgy texture plus a marvelous crisp outer crust. 

Purely to make sure we thoroughly tested the recipe, we made sure to set aside a few overnight to see if (as is written) they are better the second day. I think it says plenty that we had to deliberately set some aside. The cookies did get a bit firmer and less crumbly, but there was no drastic transformation. Even though the recipe says they're better the next day, you can safely eat them right after they're made.

Hump-Day Quickie: Even the hardest stale bread can become French Toast!

These days, it's easy to forget that French toast is one of those recipes that started off as a way to make past-their-prime foods into something nice. Long before we started just randomly battering sandwich bread because it's delicious that way, French toast was a way to get the most tooth-breakingly hard stale bread to become edible again- that's why so many recipes will tell you to put soak the bread overnight. 

However, what does one do when you just found the petrified heels of a long-eaten bread loaf in the back of the refrigerator but most French toast recipes assume you have the rest of the loaf? Or when you just want to fix something nice for yourself but don't want to make enough to feed four people?

Easy French Toast Sliced bread (if it has gone stale and very hard, it's still just fine for this) Pancake mix (the kind where you only need to add water) Make a batter of the pancake mix, using enough water to make it a little bit too runny for pancakes. Prepare just enough to soak the bread in. Pour it all over the bread, making sure each slice is well coated. If the bread is hard, soak it in the refrigerator overnight to soften. Cook on a griddle or frying pan over medium heat until both sides are golden. Serve with your favorite syrup. Because there's no eggs or tiny teaspoons of ingredients to subdivide, you can easily make French toast out of just one or two bread slices if you like.

These bread-stones came from one of those multi-grain, multi-seed loaves that use half the space on the wrapper saying how they're so nutritious that you'll lose 15 pounds and have better eyesight from the superfood onslaught. But by the time I found them, they were hard and brittle. But every time you eat food instead of waste it, you keep money from going into the trash. However, what sort of soaking batter could we make in a small enough quantity to avoid wasting a whole lot of excess? Pancake mix!

Those twist-ties were surprisingly well entangled.

I like the just-add-water pancake mixes a lot because you can make just one or two for yourself. Heck, if you wanted to make just one 2-inch pancake, you can easily reconstitute a tiny smidge of powder without trying to get out a pancake recipe and figure out what one sixteenth of an egg would look like. Or, for today's purposes, you can make just enough of it to immerse two slices of bread.

In the morning, the bread had miraculously reconstituted and seemed as fresh as when it was purchased (albeit a little soggy). It had absorbed so much water that our batter was now paste. 

And now, we get to the other reason I wanted to make French toast out of this bread that most people would have thrown away: a cast iron griddle turned up in one of the cabinets! Finding such lovely things makes me want to use them as soon as I can find a recipe that makes a good excuse.

One of the bread pieces tore apart after soaking all night.  That's an encouraging sign that the bread, which earlier was as hard as the plate we set it on, was now soft enough to accidentally tear.

 

Looks like chicken-fried steak, doesn't it?

 

And so, we are excited to let you know that if you have just-add-water pancake mix and inedibly stale bread, you can turn it into a lovely first thing to eat in the morning. You might be wondering why we didn't just chuck the bread and make pancakes, but that would mean not getting any French toast.

Second-Stab Saturday: Pumpkin-Spice Coffee Cookies

We earlier made chocolate cookies with pumpkin-spice chips. In case you don't remember, the chocolate and the pumpkin spice did not go together as well as I had expected. We speculated that, in the delicious tradition of pumpkin spice lattes, we should perhaps make the cookies again with coffee instead of chocolate.

Pumpkin Spice-Coffee Cookies 2 tbsp ground coffee ¼ tsp salt 1½ tsp baking powder 5 oz pumpkin spice chips ½ c + 2 tbsp butter or margarine 1 c sugar 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla 1 c flour Heat oven to 350°. Grease a sheet pan. Put the coffee in a coffee grinder and reduce it to as fine a powder as the machine will make.* Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the coffee, baking powder, and salt, beating well. Add the egg and vanilla, beat until quite light. Stir in the flour just until mixed. Then stir in the chips. Drop by the rounded teaspoon (or, if you have one, by the rounded half-tablespoon). Bake 8-9 minutes. Let cool before removing from pan. Note: Even if you don't usually use foil for your cookie sheets, it will make it easy to just slide the pan out from under the cookies right out of the oven rather than waiting for them to cool before baking more cookies on it. *If you don't have a coffee grinder, you can use instant coffee instead. Put it in a very small bowl and press the granules into the sides with your thumb until it is a powder. Source: adapted from Hershey's

Today's recipe starts with technical difficulties. The butter had for some reason glued itself to the refrigerator shelf. I've often seen cardboard residue in people's refrigerators, but it always looked like it had been there a long time. This is the first time I have ever left such deposits for myself.

 

We weren't sure if we wanted to make coffee cookies or non-coffee ones. Therefore, we all agreed that we could divide the dough in half and do both. We decided to go ahead and mix the harder-to-halve ingredients before performing the bifurcation. Everything measured by the tiny spoonful gets put in now. 

And now, for a brief moment of kitchen science! The original recipe tells us to use baking soda. But it also has chocolate in it which is (barely) acidic. We have removed the chocolate from the cookies, so now the baking soda has no acid to fizz with. Therefore, we are using baking powder instead because it already has enough powdered acid to fizz with itself.

 

And now we get to the hardest ingredient to cut in half: the egg. If you really want to, you could crack the egg into a measuring cup, beat it uniform, and then measure out exactly half. But that means you are wasting half an egg. And while one can just pour the unused half-egg into a hot frying pan for a quick snack, we'd rather have twice the cookies.

At this point, we thought of Her Disapproving Highness, Fanny Cradock. She would have told us to think of someone we really don't like (but we're too well-bred to say anything) then take it out on the bowl. We could use a handmixer if we wanted. But while in isolation, this is my well-whipped idea of a good time.

And so, with the first ingredients excessively well-beaten together, we reached The Great Bifurcation! I should have actually measured out the halves, or maybe put the bowl on a kitchen scale and ensured that we had a perfectly even divide. Instead I just eyeballed it. I will also note that this sort of multi-bowl experimentation is only possible because we now share a kitchen with a dishwasher.

 

And now we get to our first star ingredient: the coffee! Most of the coffee-flavored recipes will have you use instant coffee (or to make a cup of it and pour it in). Using actual coffee, we are warned, will fill your creation with gritty coffee grounds and ruin it. But the instant coffee in this house is rancid and only kept for emergency caffeination purposes. I'd thought I'd stir in some of the normal coffee, but when I scooped it out it looked like a spoonful of woodchips.

Fortunately, this house has a coffee grinder. It last saw use when I was grinding granulated sugar into caster sugar for the most recent Pieathlon. As far as I know, this is the first time anyone's actually put coffee in it.

Coffee gets unexpectedly sticky when you grind it. I had to keep breaking up clumps that stuck to the sides and avoided the blades. But eventually, we had reduced the coffee from mulch to brown powder. I don't know if it's ground finely enough to prevent grittiness, but the grinder had done the best it could. At this point, it wasn't grinding anymore, just kicking the powder up and throwing it around.

 

I was a bit worried at the sight of this mound of coffee powder that looked almost as big as the cookie dough we were stirring it into. Had we overdone it? Would these cookies be horribly bitter? I could have just carefully spooned some out before stirring, but then I risked having unacceptably insufficient coffee flavor.

 

Before I could spend half the night considering acceptable quantities of coffee for cookies, I went ahead and stirred everything together. It turns out that one scoop of coffee is perfect for this amount of cookie dough. It tasted like one of those magical iced creations from a coffee shop that comes out of a blender and has a blob of whipped cream and a shake of cinnamon on top.

 

The last time I did this kind of assembly-line cooking, it was Thanksgiving and I was making three pies, two cakes, and multiple cookie recipes (it was my idea of a good time). Anyway, it is now time to put flour into these delicious cookies.

 

And now, we get to the other title ingredient: pumpkin spice chips! You may notice that I made a fatal error with the coffee-free bowl. I forgot to actually mix in the flour before adding the chips. This caused me a brief panic because I've always been warned that dreadful failure will always ensue if you don't actually mix your flour in before adding the chips. But I figured that we already had committed the ingredients. We couldn't put the butter or the egg back in the refrigerator, nor could we separate out the sugar and return it to the bag. So we just stirred everything together and hoped that we would have success anyway.

 

We baked the vanilla cookies first. Without chocolate, these cookies look anemic.

 

You know how when we made this recipe according to the actual directions, the dough was so runny that it barely held itself into cookie shapes? Well it was even runnier without the cocoa powder in there. If it wasn't the middle of the night, you could have seen daylight through them.

 

Well, let's put that pan of baked splatters aside and get to the real reason we're here today. We hoped that the coffee would make them a bit less runny than the vanilla ones, even if we could feel no difference while scooping it out.

 

Tragically, our featured cookies became what I had feared I'd get the whole time: one big melted-together megacookie. I could have saved a lot of time by just pressing the dough out into a square pan.

Figuring that the cookies may be thin but they are nevertheless edible, we cut them apart. It looks kind of like the underside of a turtle, doesn't it?

 

The resulting cookies tasted fantastic. Coffee and pumpkin spice go together like chocolate and peanut butter. We could not stop eating these. We had made the vanilla cookies in case the coffee cookies brought disappointment, but they were just so good that ate them all long before polishing off the vanilla ones (though all the cookies got eaten in haste).

However, removing the cocoa powder from the recipe made these cookies too runny and too buttery. You might think that would make them extra decadent, but in reality it made them greasy. We might try these again, cutting back on the butter a little bit and adding a little more flour so they bake into cookies instead of puddles. 

You might be thinking "There are a lot of cookie recipes that would come out exactly like you want! Why not just make one of those and add the coffee and chips to it?" I have three reasons for that. First, I have a lot more quarantine free time than I intended. Second, I try to tell myself I am good at baking (even if my results remain irregular). As someone who self-allegedly is good at baking, surely I can figure out how this recipe works and then alter it to do as I wish. Third, others in the house are enabling my cookie battiness. I suggested cracking open a cookbook and getting out another recipe. Someone else said. "No, no! This is a challenge."

And so, more (hopefully) lovely cookies will be forthcoming! With that said, these weren't bad aside from being far too thin. If you cut back on the butter by a spoon or two and press them into a pan to make bars, you would be delighted.

Brownies from Nuns

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we are making brownies that are apparently endorsed by nuns.

Fudge Frosted Brownies ½ c butter 1 c sugar 2 eggs 2 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted* 1 tsp vanilla ½ c flour ½ c chopped walnuts if desired        Fudge frosting: 1 c sifted powdered sugar 1 tbsp cocoa 2 tbsp cream 1 tbsp butter Heat oven to 325°. Grease an 8" square pan. Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs one at a time, stirring well after each. Blend in the chocolate and the vanilla. When all is mixed, add the flour and nuts. Bake 35 minutes. When they're done, press the brownies with the bottom of a glass to level the top. Frost when cooled.        To make the frosting: Mix the ingredients in a saucepan. Cook until the pot boils around the sides. Remove from heat and beat until it is a spreading consistency. *If you don't have unsweetened chocolate, use 6 tbsp of cocoa powder. Increase the butter by 2 tablespoons. Stir in the cocoa powder with the sugar. Dominican Sisters (Oxford, Michigan), Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book, First Catholic Slovak Ladies' Union, 1952

It's weird making a brownie recipe from nuns. I'd have thought that 1950s nuns would do this to anyone who asked for something so decadent:

I worked with someone who grew up in New York in the 50s. She had a sign on her desk that said YOU CAN'T SCARE ME, I WAS TAUGHT BY NUNS.

Anyway, let's get this recipe launched with a sinful amount of butter and sugar!

 

Do you believe signs of divine endorsement? Because after I measured out the cocoa powder we'd be using for this recipe as a substitute for the melted chocolate (and we're using a lot of it)...

...This is how much cocoa remained in the can. It's like the good Lord wanted us to make brownies from this recipe.

It appears that when a convent of nuns decide to partake of earthly delights, they don't half-ass it. Look at how much chocolate we have in this divinely dark mixture!

This lovely confluence of butter, sugar, and chocolate did not want to combine with the eggs. At first, we got these slimy curds of stubbornly-unmixed chocolate-butter.

 

To get it all to actually mix, we needed a change of mentality. We stopped treating the bowl before us like brownies in progress, and instead gave it all the gentleness of Sister Mary Stigmata after hearing someone take the Lord's name in vain. As a reminder:

"Is this a good time to ask for your brownie recipe?"

Given how many wooden spoons have already snapped in my hands during this pandemic, perhaps I shouldn't have gone full nun on the future brownies. But the Lord was with us, and both batter and spoon emerged from this intact.

It looks like the Dominican Sisters of Oxford, Michigan decided that after such an extravagance of chocolate, it would be a sin to waste flour that could have gone towards making our daily bread. We're barely putting any in this. Look how it sits in a small, near-flat heap on top of all that chocolate.

Anyone who has flipped through my previous posts will know that I have made a lot of brownie recipes. Sometimes, the batter is so runny you could pour it like syrup. Other times, it's so thick you could shape it with a spoon. Today's brownies almost looked like I could drop spoonfuls of batter onto a baking sheet like cookies and they wouldn't run together in the oven.

I have to say, this batter tasted amazing. I was almost thinking that the Dominican Sisters of Oxford, Michigan knew how to have a good time. But if you use the pan size prescribed, you're going to get some penitent rations.

We haven't got the whole pan covered because we wanted to try this recipe in its original state (after all, is it possible to improve a recipe that came from God's kitchen?) but still had half a can of cherry pie in the refrigerator from our cherry and ham tragedy.

If you're going to add canned cherry pie to your brownies (which is something I like a lot), I suggest you make sure not to mix it very well. This is not the time to be a nun with a spoon instead of a yardstick. Instead, you want unmixed swirls of that glistening syrup throughout the brownies, like the caramel syrup sometimes swirled into a carton of ice cream. 

I have to say, I think God wanted me to just eat the brownie batter and forget this business of baking it. I took the pan out of the oven far earlier than the recipe said, and things were still looking a bit... overdone.

In case you're wondering what those white lumps are on the cherry side, I found a near-depleted bag of white chocolate chips and decided to dump those in also. They don't matter much because you couldn't tell they were there unless you saw them first, so we can safely forget them. I had high hopes for chocolate-cherry-white-chip brownies, but chocolate-cherry without the white chips is still a delicious pair. Anyway, these weren't burned, but they had that peculiar texture you find in baked goods that have spent several hours slowly drying out in a warming oven. 

 

After such a deliriously chocolate-dark batter, I was disappointed that these were as dried-out and bland as the brownies that might be served next to unusually depressing cafeteria food. They have that institutional sadness to them. The cherry ones weren't as dry as the plain ones because of the extra cherry syrup mixed in, but that didn't save them. Maybe the nuns took the same approach to baking brownies as they did when baking communion wafers (which used to be an in-house operation at many convents before they got shoved out of the business).

You may have noticed that we did not make the icing that's supposed to go with these. That's because we didn't have cream, and I'm not about to buy a carton of it just to use two spoons and have the rest of it sit forgotten in the refrigerator until it expires. I felt a little bad about failure to ice these until they turned out almost dusty.

I think this recipe was perfectly fine until we got to the baking instructions. Further investigation will be required and undertaken before I write it off.