How to Make Pizzelle Cookies

Amy Riolo: Hi, I am Amy Riolo. Today, we are making Italian cookies. I am going to start making Pizzelle. The ingredients which we will be needing to make the Pizzelle are 3 large eggs, of a cup of sugar, cup, that's one stick of butter which has been melted, 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract, 1 teaspoon of Anise extract, 1 of all purpose flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder and powdered sugar which is optional for dusting. So let's start making our Pizzelle. The first thing that we are going to do is combine our 3 eggs and put them into the mixer, or again, you can do this by hand with a whisk. Just we will whisk them lightly until they are foamy. Once the eggs are combined and foamy, we can start adding the rest of our ingredients. So the first thing that I am going to add is our melted butter. We add a little bit at a time because the butter is hard and the eggs are cold. So add a little bit mix and then turn the mixer, kind of, on and off that way. You can just keep going, it's mixing in well. Once we have our butter in, we can add our flavoring. I will add the vanilla and the almond. We are going to increase the speed a little bit just to work the almonds in. Then I am going to mix the baking powder into the flour and add that to the mixer as well. This is just a very basic batter. So now all of our flour is incorporated, we set off on low speed. Now I will increase the speed to medium and I just worked with the dough, just enough to get all of the ingredients incorporated. When you are baking cakes or cookies, you never want to over beat the dough because it can make th dough tough and then when you are making a frosting or a glaze, just the opposite is true, you can never beat enough. So always, kind of, think that you are under-beating the cakes and the cookies and then over-beat the frosting and you will be in very good shape when you are baking. So just make sure that everything is mixed together well here. Sometimes things stick to the side. You want to make sure that we are getting everything. You can see the consistency of this dough/batter, it's very springy, it's buttery, it leaves a little bit of butter on your fingers when you work with it. It's a really nice, simple dough. I will just work the sugar in by hand now.

So what we have done now is we had our Pizzelle maker and it's preheated. If you have never used one before, what you will want to do is they always have a little indicator light on the top. You will want to make sure that when you first plug it in, the light turns on and it's red. When the light is red, you know that this is heating up. Once it's completely heated up, the light will go off and it will look its normal color which is what this is right now, but you can feel that's it's hot to the touch. Then you just open it up and that's where we are going to be actually making our cookies. So you can get a tablespoon or a regular spoon, whatever works well for you, and take the dough. Then I, just to be on the safe side, a lot of times when I am working with cookies and things like that, I am not too careful, I just eyeball it. But these, because we have the mold that they are going on to, it's particularly nice if they scoop is of the same size. So I, kind of, pad it down like this and make sure that I am getting all of my cookies to have the same amount of dough on them. Then you have to work a little bit quickly and you take it and you scoop it right into the middle of the plate and then you do another one. Once you get used to it, it really goes quickly. In the beginning, takes a little bit of time but once you are used to it, it's fine. You can see in my plates, you have some Christmas designs on them with Santa Claus and Holly and Reindeer but you can use whatever you like, different ones have different designs. Then you close the lid and I really suggest using a timer because you want to cook these for about 60-90 seconds. The longer the iron has been on, the hotter it gets, the quicker your time goes. You can check at about 30 seconds intervals in between, to check if each one is done. So about 90 seconds and I am looking at my clock to know when that will be, but check after 60, just to make sure and if you smell them, definitely check at that time. That's it, that's how simple it is to make these cookies. So this recipe makes about 3 dozen and you can have them done very quickly. Kids love them and there are many different uses for them. So I am going to open up now and check our cookies and they look perfect. So what we can do now is just with our tongs, take them off and set them onto our plate. That concludes our Italian cookie series. I hope that you enjoyed baking them and I hope that you all will love eating them.