The Dao of Waffles

I met my Guy for lunch yesterday having no idea I was to spend the evening engrossed in wafflery, but a post-lunch jaunt to Williams-Sonoma made up my mind for me. There, on a shelf, was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen: an All-Clad Two-Square Begian Waffle Maker. 

"It's on sale. Should we buy it?" my Guy asked, eager to officially begin the waffle experiment. 

"Babe. It's $140. Let's just get the $20 cheap one from Target," I said. "We don't even know if this is going to work."

"But we'll get sick of the $20 waffle maker after we use it once, and then we'll buy another one anyway. Let's just get it," he said decisively. 

And that is how we came to own the best home waffle maker outside of Belgium.

I spent the afternoon carefully scrutinizing recipes on the internet. He shopped for ingredients. Just after dinner time, we were ready to roll. We used a recipe found on Chowhound, which I selected based on its delicious-looking ingredients and ridiculously complex process. The ingredients were as follows:

Batter 1:

1 1/4 ounces fresh cake yeast or 2 1/2 packages active dry yeast

1/4 cup warm water (about 100 degrees F)

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

1 large egg, beaten

1/3 cup milk, warmed to 100 degrees F

Batter 2:

9 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature

6tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (optional)

pinch of salt

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

1/2 cup pearl sugar or 3/4 cup crushed sugar cubes

That's right: the recipe required two separate batters, which could theoretically be mixed to create the incredible dough required to achieve Waffle Nirvana. Such complexity, such intricacy must surely mean the author knew what they were doing, right?

Just for good measure, we thought we'd add a few equally challenging ingredients of our own:

2 overtired children who wanted to make a caterpillar cake

1 caterpillar cake pan

1 boxed cake mix

ingredients for homemade buttercream frosting, including food coloring gel (primary colors)

candy for decorating the damned thing

Good thinking.

We mixed up our cake and stuck it in the oven, and reverently began the sacred work of Finding the Waffle. Diligently, we dissolved the yeast into warm water and combined it with the sugar and a small amount of flour. It foamed and gurgled like into a thick, angry brew. My Guy triumphantly declared, "We've just made Belgian beer!" I should have known then that something was wrong, but I was determined that this could be The Waffle. I pressed on.

I added the remaining flour to batter one, set it aside to rise, and moved on to batter two--a scrumptiously aromatic paste of butter, flour, vanilla and sugar. The recipe directed me to mix the two batters with my hands and shape it into ten small balls of dough. The children argued fervently in the background about who whether the cake was cool enough to frost, but I didn't care. I was ecstatic. This was our moment!  

Plunging my hands into the batter, I proceeded to try to knead it into dough. It stuck to my hands like rubber cement. I tried harder. It stuck harder. Within moments, the majority of the bowl's contents were firmly adhered to my palms. I was really trying hard now. My Guy offered to scrape off my hands with a spatula. By now I certainly should have known something was wrong.

We gave up on balling the dough, and more or less flung it at the waffle maker. For the sake of experimentation, Waffle Guy added more flour to part of the sludge in a vain effort to make it less glue-like. The kids fought about markers.

He took on the role of Waffle Cook, tenderly glopping our hideous batter-stuff into the waffle iron. It smelled like skunky beer. But they came out of the waffle maker shaped like waffles, and so we maintained our optimism. We tasted them.

Failure.

He added more sugar to the second batch and baked them while I made homemade buttercream frosting for the caterpillar cake. The kids argued about who got to add the food coloring. This time, the waffles were a little bit better.

"We need more sugar, I think," my Guy said. "The ones in Bruges were way sweeter than this. Plus, they're not getting all caramelized like the ones in Belgium." He dumped in more sugar.

This time, they weren't so bad. We were getting somewhere. He added much more sugar. The kids bickered about who got to frost which segments of the caterpillar. The high-octane extra-sugared dough began to smell a little like fire. "Waffle emergency!" yelped the Guy, who was trying to scrape crumbly goo from the grid of the waffle iron. 

I was devastated.The tastiest waffle yet was being removed from the iron in a hundred tiny pieces. Just when we began to find the flavor, we lost the structure.

I frosted cake with my girls. He cleaned up his kitchen, which contained two batters' worth of messy dishes. As I remember it, we were mostly silent. 

Later on that night, as we sipped a beer on his deck and watched a storm roll by, I found myself contemplating my enjoyment at such a simple pleasure. It occurred to me that when it came to our waffles, we'd buried them beneath layers of kneading and leavening and sugaring and flouring and glopping. Perhaps The Waffle can't be forced--perhaps it must just happen. I made a note to myself to pick a much simpler recipe next time, and sat back to watch the lightning. 

At least the cake turned out...