Italian Pizzelles

Several years ago, I splurged on a pizzelle iron. For those who've never heard of them, pizzelles are delicious Italian wafer cookies that traditionally are flavored with anise. I think the first time I had them was in Maryland when we were at one of my old BC roommate's grandparents' house.

Pizzelles came up in conversation at work last week which put me in the mood to put my fancy pizzelle iron to work.

The shiny exterior:


...and the beautiful interior:


Recipe for Traditional Italian Pizzelles

• 3 eggs, room temperature
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 butter or margarine, melted and cooled
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1 tsp. anise
• 1 3/4 cups flour
• 2 tsp baking powder

1. In a large mixing bowl, beat the eggs and sugar.
2. Add the cooled butter or margarine, vanilla and anise.
3. Sift the flour and baking powder together and add to the egg mixture.
4. The batter should be stiff enough to dropped by spoon (I used my cookie scoop).

Placing the scoops can be tricky:

As you can see, if you put too much in the scoop or place it to close to an edge, there's some overflow.

I had a whole stack of pizzelles at the end:

I then switched to chocolate pizzelles (since Andrew doesn't like the anise flavor). The recipe is the same except you remove the anise flavoring, add three tablespoons of sugar and three tablespoons of cocoa powder. I threw in a few mini chocolate chips for good measure:

Which lead to another large stack of pizzelles:

The fun thing with pizzelles is that you can shape them into bowls or cones while they're still warm - so I formed two pizzelles into bowls, which would be perfect with a scoop of ice cream for dessert tonight: