Prompt/Challenge Title: Portrait of the Fat Lady
Project Name & Page Link: Pizzelle Success [recipe]
Team: 
Honeyduke’s
Brief Description: Maybe stretching this a bit since what was really repaired here was my confidence. My family’s signature Christmas cookie is pizzelles, to the point that I associate the season with the smell of anise more so than pine. I’ve never bought a pizzelle iron, they’ve just been inherited from random relations and friends of friends who had died or were downsizing right when the last one gave up the ghost. A few years ago the neighbor on the other side of the party wall flooded her apartment and destroyed my kitchen and my pizzelle iron was a casualty of the mold remediation. My father bought me a replacement (cuisinart) but since I was without a kitchen for two Christmases and dealing with hospice for my mother last year I hadn’t really broken it in and was looking forward to going to town on pizzelles in 2025. I could not for the life of me get them right. They just wouldn’t crisp up and I couldn’t get a consistent color on them. 40 seconds would burn one pair and 80 seconds would leave the next barely cooked, and no matter what they would bend more than snap. After three batches (one of which got thrown away) I finally thought it might be the machine and not me. I stalked some reddit threads and Pittsburgh Cookie Table facebook groups to find the best manufacturer for thin, crispy pizzelles and ordered one the day after Christmas. It arrived this week and I made a half-batch to test it out. They. Were. Perfect. Thin and crispy and giving me flashbacks to the ones made on my great-grandmother’s harvest gold machine we used back when I was a kid in the 90s. If you want to make pizzelles that practically melt in your mouth this is the one to get.
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