I’ve really been enjoying my new pizzelle maker lately and eating more ice cream than usual as a result of the fact that creamy ice cream is a good match for the crispy waffle cookies in ice cream sandwiches. Since the pizzelles taste like waffle cones, turning them into ice cream cones seems like an obvious option, too. Unfortunately, the pizzelles made with my baker are a little on the small side, and while I did successfully wrap some of them into cones, it wasn’t such an easy task. Instead, I’ve opted to make waffle cone bowls for my ice cream with these pizzelles, which is just as tasty and a lot easier.
The pizzelles are very malleable when they are hot and fresh off the baker. To shape them into a bowl, take out a small bowl of some kind and set it near the machine. A 6-oz pyrex dish is perfect, but any small dish of similar size will work. A wider dish will give you a shallower bowl. Bake the pizzelle as you normally would, take it off the machine and press it down into the bowl, covering the bottom and sides (as much as you can) with the waffle cookie. It only takes a few seconds for the cookie to set up into a nice, crisp bowl shape, in which you can serve ice cream or any other dessert treat.
Milk chocolate scones are chocolate scones, packed with milk chocolate chips and drizzled with melted milk chocolate. I have to admit that I generally prefer my scones to have fruit in them, if they’re not going to be plain to begin with, largely because I like to be able to be able to spread my scones with butter and jam. Chocolate scones don’t go quite as well with either spread (although you could really get away with either), but at least these have enough chocolate in the dough to make up for it.
The scones themselves actually only have a small amount of chocolate in them, just enough cocoa powder to give them a hint of chocolate taste and a nice chocolate color. I wanted to keep the scone texture and taste, not turn these into cookies. I used Guittard Milk chocolate chips – which are huge – in the dough, then melted some for the finishing drizzle after the scones had cooled. The scone dough by itself might not have a tremendous amount of chocolate flavor, but you definitely get a lot in every bite by the time they’re finished. The scones themselves are tender, moist and a little on the softer side, once they’ve cooled.
These are drop scones, where dollops of dough are placed on a baking sheet free-form, almost like a batch of cookies. They’re very low maintenance compared to rolled out, cut out scones, and have a little bit of a rustic look. You can use a different type of chocolate for these, if you prefer, but keep in mind that the scones are only slighly sweet and the milk chocolate adds a nice sweetness to them.
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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: serious bakers and cooks need to have a scale in the kitchen. The ability to weigh ingredients gives you a lot more precision than volume measures do, especially for dry ingredients like flour, where “1 cup” could be anywhere from 3.5 – 4.5 ounces depending on how hard you try to pack it into the cup (4-oz is a good standard for all purpose flour, incidentally). You can get by without one just fine, of course, but it’s nice to have. A good basic scale is the EatSmart Precision Pro Digital Kitchen Scale. It’s not too expensive, it’s easy to use and works very well.
The scale is small and lightweight, made of durable plastic that comes in a variety of different colors so that you can pick one that will fit into your kitchen. It runs on two AAA batteries that come included in the packaging and has a 3-minute auto shutoff to preserve battery life. It has a capacity of up to 11-lbs (4.98-kg), but will also measure a single gram for times when you need a very fine measurement. The feature that I like the best is the unit feature. Previous scales I’ve had require you to flip them over to change their measure from grams to ounces. On this scale, a touch of a button right on the front flips the measurement from grams to kilograms to ounces to pounds, which is very handy. Another nice thing about it is the size of the screen: it’s so large that you can almost read the numbers from across the room.
Matryoshkas, or Russian nesting dolls, are a collector’s item for many people. The dolls are all split in two at the “waist” and open to reveal another, smaller, doll inside. Some sets have an almost unbelievable number of dolls inside as they get tinier and tinier. This set of matryoshkas doesn’t get quite down to that size, but is a little more useful than your average doll set. These M Cups are actually measuring cups, shaped like the traditional dolls and neatly stacked together. There are three dolls in the set. The largest has a 1 cup measure for its upper hald and a 3/4 cup measure for its lower one. The medium has a 2/3 cup measure for its upper half and a 1/2 cup measure for its lower one, while the smallest doll measures 1/3 cup and 1/4 cup.
Designed by Fred Studios, which has also designed such products as the Peace of Cake pan and the Light Bites Birthday Candles, this set is made of heavy duty food grade plastic and is easy to wash after use. The best part is that, since the dolls stack up when they’re not in use, they don’t take up much space in the kitchen. They also look good on the counter and don’t necessarily need to be hidden away in a drawer.
