Happy holidays!
With this holiday season came some cookies, as usual:
also pictured: holiday cookbook haul
First, you’ll see my gingerbread holiday card! The recipe I used here is from Sally’s Baking Addiction. You’re getting the standard flavor; the only real modification I made was adding orange extract to the icing and using a little bit of honey when I ran out of molasses. To match the familial dietary restrictions of the season, I also made a variety substituting olive oil for butter and using Bob’s Red Mill gluten free flour - honestly, I thought these turned out even better. The pepperiness in olive oil actually works really well.
With respect to the icing, I think I need to practice a bit more to get an icing consistency I can really make solid lines with. But it still works :)
Second, I made biscotti! They are easier to make than I thought they’d be. These are from the King Arthur Flour Baking Companion, but with the aforementioned gluten free flour and this vegan butter, which is pricy but kicks ass. These demand to be dunked in coffee to be truly appreciated. If coffee isn’t your thing, I’m told hot brown water works too.
Finally… there are those odd flat discs in the front… I wanted to try to make stroopwafels, and got attached to the idea. Armed with no knowledge of how to make them, I found a suitable-seeming gluten-free recipe that seemed easy enough to make dairy free, using aforementioned vegan butter, and has a molasses filling (always a plus). I mixed the batter before coming face to face with the reality that I don’t have a pizelle iron, and so true stroopwafels were not going to happen this time. That said, I tried various ways to cook them:
I heated up two pans and sandwiched a ball between them - this cooked/burned the outside of the wafels too quickly.
I smooshed a ball onto a warm pan with a spatula. This didn’t work because the uncooked side just stuck to the spatula.
I used a tortilla press to flatten a ball, and cooked it like a tortilla on both sides for about 20 seconds per side. This was way more labor intensive, but thankfully it actually produced something edible and sliceable. It cooked way more evenly if I moved the “wafel” around the pan as it was cooking constantly.
With this I was able to get some uh, strooppannenkoeks, that I was able to cut in half length-wise and sort-of fill them, though they did end up a bit messy. (I think I could make them not quite as thin next time, and they’d be easier to cut and fill.)
These things are interesting and are definitely not stroopwafels. But I think there’s something there, worth revisiting. A maple filling is required next time, though.