Cookie Love, Part 1

So I’m not much of a cookie baker apparently.  I love to cook.  I love to bake, even.  But I usually bake cakes, bread, and cheesecakes. Not many cookies.  My cookies always spread too much or burn.  The fact that you always have to keep running back to the oven to rotate the pans or take them out is just too much for me I guess.  I just don’t really love doing it.  And I only recently figured this out.  I was ranting a few months ago to The Snail, “I just found out that I hate baking cookies.”

I always saw myself sweetly baking cookies with my kids, but The Monkey Boy doesn’t really show any interest in the whole process except for the consumption of the finished product.  Have I mentioned that I live in The South and it’s hot in my kitchen nine months out of the year?  Who the heck wants to run the oven when it’s 95 degrees outside?

And then I rediscovered pizzelles.  I’ve heard it pronounces piz-ELLE, but an Italian friend once corrected me and said it was pronounced peets-AY-la.  They’re slightly crisp, not too sweet, and can be made in a million different flavors.

Years ago, I was looking at a pizzelle maker to make the pizzelles that my stepmother makes every year for Christmas.   This was back before there was a Williams Sonoma and a Sur la Table in my town, and my local fancy cooking shop wanted around $60 for one.  Yikes.  So I gave up on owning one.  A few months ago the kids and I were trolling the local thriftshop when I found a brand new, still in its original box, Vitantonio pizzelle maker for (she says breathlessly) six dollars.  Woot!  I found it a home in my very crowded kitchen cabinets and promptly forgot about it.

A few nights ago, I was looking through a recipe notebook and found the instruction booklet that came with the machine.  I thought they might make great Christmas treats, so I pulled out the machine and gave it a go.  Oh. My.  So it’s kinda weird because the dough calls for six eggs.  Six eggs!  It makes this strange sticky batter.  But I used the recipe that came with the machine and they were a huge success.  And it’s great because The Monkey Boy, who is currently on a dairy-free diet, can eat them. I made hazelnut vanilla pizzelles because I cannot resist anything with hazelnuts in it.  The machine bakes two cookies at a time for only 30 seconds.  So now I’m not tempted to go start some laundry or change a diaper and forget about my burning cookies.  Now I just stay glued to the machine, and I can make great cookies that everyone flips out over.

And here’s the best part: I can make them in the summer when it’s a million degrees outside because I don’t even have to turn the oven on.  Sigh.