In recent weeks, we've been busy to the point that we've missed two Waffle Days. Between kids' sports and lessons, an impending move, a trip to the cabin and a tenth birthday, it's been nuts.
On Saturday morning, the middlest kid announced that she'd had enough. Come hell or high water, we'd be making waffles for her. Simple enough, right?
Nope.
See, the credit for our mad waffle skills must be given primarily to a magic ingredient: Hagel Zucker. After unsuccessfully scouring Belgian stores for the elusive Belgian pearl sugar, we decided to hunt for it in Germany, at a grocery store near a friend's house.
Heartbreakingly, we never did find our pearl sugar, but we decided to take a chance on Hagel Zucker. Literally translated, it means "hail sugar", and that's a pretty apt description. These little clumpy balls of sweet, crunchy sugary goodness were indeed shaped like hail stones, and they were our last hope.
They did not fail us.
On that trip, we brought home several boxes of Hagel Zucker, and we were delighted to discover that the crystals worked perfectly. They gooified the outside of our waffles and added tiny crun-chewity flavor explosions to the inside of our perfect little confections. Hagel Zucker was a life-altering discovery, and we've been breakfasting in heaven ever since.
In October, our German friends came to the United States to get married, and we requested that they bring us some new Hagel Zucker to supplement our stash. They arrived with a suitcase full, God bless 'em. But Hagel Zucker goes fast: each batch of waffles requires a whole box, and the time has come when our once massive stash of the crystal wonder-balls has dwindled to a meager fourteen boxes.
Saturday morning, we made a gut-wrenching decision. We decided to ration, which might have been sensible enough. But we didn't just ration. We took the easy way out, and made waffles from a box mix. What were we thinking?
We learned an extremely valuable lesson. First, the Spirit of True Belgeezian Waffles is a spirit with high standards, and it resented the fact that our boxed mix batter was in no way actually Belgian. It demonstrated this to us by causing our batter to stick cruelly to the inside of The World's Best Waffle Maker, tragically resulting in a massive plate of crumbs. We threw away half the batch.
The waffles, as expected, were solidly mediocre, and tasted best when drowned in massive quantities of heavily flavored syrup and powdered sugar. Sigh...
The overall theme of the Waffle Quest has been alive with a much greater truth, however: Whenever you truly seek to understand anything in life, you'll ultimately learn more than you bargained for.
Here's what the waffles taught us this time: When you have the capability to succeed on a grand scale, it's a darn shame to half-heartedly embark on a journey. Victory tastes sweeter when you give it your all, even when your reserves are low.
Dang it, Waffles. How do you know so much?
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