Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap: Pizzelles

I've never taken part in a cookie swap before. I'm thinking maybe I should put one together next year between me and my friends, because this one was so much fun. This month, with hundreds of other bloggers, I participated in:

Basically, a bunch of bloggers baked three dozen cookies and sent a dozen each to three different bloggers, none of whom knew who was sending to them. A Secret Santa of cookies, I suppose. Lindsay at Love and Olive Oil and Julie at The Little Kitchen put the swap together and are doing next year's as well, which I will gladly take part in.

It's hard for me to pick out a favorite cookie. But these cookies, pizzelles, are quintessential holiday cookies for me. My pseudo-grandma (she's the mother of my aunt through marriage who has been a grandmother to me) Mildred makes these every Christmas, and it was always super exciting when my uncle showed up with the old ice cream tub filled with these thin cookies. We don't get to see Mildred and that side of the family as often as I'd like anymore, and when I came across a pizzelle iron, I knew it would need to become my own cookie tradition.

As for the cookies I received, they were scrumptious. I got peanut butter cup cookie bars from Raenell at Raevyn's Nest; coconut chocolate chip cookies from Aaron at the Hungry Hutch; and cream cheese walnut cookies from Liz in Colorado (whose blog I have yet to find). All were amazing, and I'm trying my hardest not to eat them all at once!

I sent my cookies to three lovely ladies: Amanda over at MarocMama; Rebecca over at Peace, Love and Bagels; and Nadia at Cooking My Way to Healthy. I could tell when they received my cookies, because I got notifications they were suddenly following me on Twitter, and then we talked about cookies. Not too shabby! 

And you know what else is great? I instantly connected with these people. Amanda also has a family tradition of pizzelles, which I can best describe as waffle cone cookies, only SO much better. Mildred used to make them with anise, which is licorice flavoring. I hate licorice but always liked her cookies. Somehow, though, when I tried making them with anise once, they weren't as good. So I make mine vanilla or lemon. These were classic vanilla, and they're one of my favorites.

Mildred's Pizzelles

1 cup margerine (2 sticks) Use Fleishman's or any "no water added" brand (I actually used unsalted butter and they turned out fine)
6 eggs
1 1/2 cups white sugar
3 1/2 cups flour
2 Tbsp. baking powder
2 Tbsp. extract (Lemon or Anise work well) OR 2 Tbsp. vanilla extract

Instructions:
1. Melt margerine and let cool
2. Beat eggs thououghly until frothy
3. Add sugar gradually to eggs-beat well
4. SLOWLY add cooled margerine, beat well as you do so
5. Add extract or vanilla
6. Add flour---a little at a time and mix well after each addition
7. Chill dough---minimum of 2 hours, overnight or as much as several days to enrich flavors
8. Using a small cookie scoop bake cookies following Pizzelle maker directions--dough will be sticky. Cookies will be soft and flexible right off the baker.
9. Use cooling racks and let cool completely. Store in an airtight container. These are best crispy, in my opinion, so it's not the end of the world if you leave them out for a while.

Two days of baking, seven Christmas treats

Ah the holidays. How....uncomfortable you can be.

I drove back to Salina yesterday to beat the weather....that still hasn't hit Salina. It's come to Lawrence though, so I suppose leaving early was actually a good idea. Coming back, though, I'm still not so sure about. For one, I had a completely full car, including seven varieties of baked goods (yup! I said seven), all my Christmas presents for family, two blankets and a pillow, clothes, and the ever-whiny cat. Couple that with rainy/foggy weather, and it's can be an interesting 2-hour drive.

The older I get, though, the more I realize I only like part of the holidays. I love the baking, decorating and gift purchasing. I hate the actual day. Last night I went out to a bar in Salina, and throughout the course of the night there were at least 100 people from my high school there. Some were people I hadn't seen in forever and was happy about, but others were people I sort of recognized but couldn't place their names. I also found out my ex-boyfriend got engaged, which is doubly weird. We dated for four years, and for a while thought we would get married. It could have been me getting that ring last night, although I'm glad it wasn't. There are so many people getting engaged right now that I feel like I should be; after all, Drew and I have been together for as long as my ex and his girlfriend have. But I know I'm not ready for that. Not for a while.

I had nothing to do a couple days ago, and decided to go on a baking extravaganza. Last Christmas I brought cookies home that Drew's mom had made, but I wanted to bring home my own this year. I started with chocolate chunk cookies that I found in the Food Network magazine. They were one of the most labor-intensive cookies I've ever made because the dough isn't very sticky. I had to form each individual cookie, because it was more chunk (chocolate, white chocolate, M&M and cashew) than cookie. They were yummy though.

The next day was my big baking day. First it was pizzelles again to take to my grandma. I had Drew put them on the iron, and I've found he has quite a talent for it. I think I know what his job will be from now on. :)

Then it was my mom's old no-bake butterscotch cookies (essentially these minus the peanuts). We used to make them when I was little. They're super easy and only four ingredients, but get really hard to stir. You melt butterscotch chips in a pan, then add peanut butter and later marshmallows. The marshmallows make it really tough to stir, and then you add chow mein noodles. They're soooo rich but so yummy.

Then came one of my favorite recipes: peanut butter brownies. This is easily one of my favorite recipes, one I found on another baking blog. They go pretty quick too once you set people on them. They're basically brownies with chocolate and peanut butter chips in them. You bake them in muffin tins, then let them fall and fill the void with peanut butter. Top them off with chocolate and peanut butter chips and you're set! I went for the more festive vibe and did Christmas M&Ms.

I made three things I never had before as well. As you can tell, I baked for like a solid five hours. First were pineapple cookies with pineapple glaze from my Golden Book of Cookies. They are super moist from the crushed pineapple in them. Then I made biscotti a la Bobby Flay. It has blue and yellow cornmeal and pistachios. It's supposed to have Sambuca, a licorice-flavored liqueur, but I didn't have any of that and wasn't about to buy it (yuck!) so did Triple Sec instead. Last, I made chocolate-dipped pretzels. Mmmm.

Now I just need to figure out who's going to eat all this food. I'm not sure I'll be here as long as was planned.

Post-sickness baking

So the last few posts have talked about how I've been sick. Well, it's been a month now. On Monday it started getting tough to breathe, so I decided to go to the doctor. I had to wear one of those masks (like when you get SARS) in the health center. I felt pretty stupid. Anyway, they told me I had an upper respiratory infection. After 2 1/2 days in bed, antibiotics, an inhaler, Mucinex, snuggling with the kitty and a whole lot of Kleenexes, I felt better on Friday. Not exactly the best time to be sick, but what can I do. And, it's senior year, so I'm considerably less concerned about grades. Probably the wrong attitude. Oh well.

So Friday I started to bake. A lot. I had a few days to make up, after all, so I started making some favorites. Lemon bars (for Drew and Co.), pumpkin bread (for Stephen and Co.) and pizzelles. I had press club later, and then people came over for games, so I had enough people over that I could bake that much. We played Catchphrase for three hours. You could tell we were playing with journalism kids. For "Who's who": "Blank blank at KU!" and another, describing one that was a gerund. It was super fun though.

The lemon bars are the old faithful recipe from Martha Stewart that is just perfect, but how it works hardly makes sense. The crust is really strange, as in, you grate butter into your dry ingredients, push it into a pan, freeze it and then bake it. They sure end up yummy, though. The crust is half the bar, but it doesn't taste that way. This is easily one of my favorite things to make.

Then there's the pumpkin bread, a two-loaf recipe. I found the recipe on foodnetwork.com, and it ends up tasting great, but there's one huge problem. The recipe says bake it for 30 to 40 minutes, and it definitely takes 50 minutes to an hour. Can't these people count? The pumpkin loaves made an exit when Stephen returned after Catchphrase with three hungry lacrosse friends. Neither Drew nor I like pumpkin bread, but everyone else seems to, so Stephen took the loaves.

The last recipe is of pizzelles (see the Wikipedia article). They're Italian cookies that almost taste like a waffle cone and are super thin with designs on them. You have to have a special iron (like a waffle iron) to make them, which I have. These have kind of a family history with me. My not-really-grandma Mildred, who is my aunt-through-marriage's mother, makes them every Christmas and sends them to my grandma in an old ice cream container. I steal a few each time, and finally I just asked my aunt for the recipe. It's incredibly simple and only has six ingredients: margarine, eggs (a whole bunch of them!), sugar, flour, baking powder and flavoring. I usually make vanilla, but Mildred makes anise-flavored. The annoying part about these cookies is they make forever to make. The iron only has a spot for two cookies at a time, and it's a pretty huge recipe.

The cookies were a hit though, and I'm thinking of making lemon-flavored ones for the first time tonight. It's strange; I had two papers due Friday and now have almost nothing till finals. It's winding down and I'm finding I have free time. It's definitely a foreign feeling. So last night I watched a musical last night I'd never seen: Meet Me in St. Louis. I absolutely LOVE musicals. My mom is an organist/choir director/carillonneur, and my dad played in KU's marching band, so music is pretty much how I grew up. Music Man, Sound of Music, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, etc. Meet Me in St. Louis was a Judy Garland one, and I'd forgotten how unbelievable her voice was. A good movie all around. My other new discovery: the Boomerang channel and Cartoon Network. They play the Flintstones, the Jetsons, and Cartoon Network is bringing back Looney Tunes. I'm DVR-ing it.

Anyway, we'll see how much I decide to bake this week. I think it will be a fair amount, because I have a lot of free time at night this week. Another consideration of something to make: oatmeal cream cheese butterscotch bars.