Sunday Morning Waffle Disaster

My 10-year-old really enjoys cooking these days. She found a recipe for waffles that she has been bugging us to make for months. The ingredients sounded good to us. But it sounded all a bit involved. Don’t you just love the kid cookbooks where it says “ask an adult for help”. This Sunday was the day she convinced us to help her.

The recipe, or waffle project, came from  Kit’s Cooking Studio, an AmericanGirl cookbook… Kit is the AmericanGirl Doll character whose story is set in the Depression era.  Accordingly, the recipes revolve around that topic. So it’s really fun to learn a bit of history while cooking.

The waffle recipe called for the following ingredients:

1 2/3 cups of flour

1/3 cup of corn meal

4 teaspoons of baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup of rolled oats

2 cups of milk

1 tablespoon vanilla

3 eggs

1/3 cup oil

butter

some kind of topping like syrup/ honey/ fruit

How to make it?

Step 1. Put the flour, corn meal, baking powder, and salt into a sifter. What is a sifter, mom? Hmm, we don’t have one. I guess back in the depression era people had to sift everything because there may have been little bugs in your flour. So we didn’t sift our flour and mixed all the dry ingredients in a bowl.

Step 2. Put the milk, honey, and vanilla in another bowl.

Step 3. Here it comes…” Have an adult help you separate the egg whites and the egg yolks as shown.” Followed by a little picture where the adult is carefully separating the eggs. My daughter who is not exactly Miss Patient wanted to forgo the “help by adult part”  so we went through a couple of eggs before it worked …

Step 4. Mix the egg yolks into the wet ingredients (bowl with the milk in it).

Step 5. This step was followed by the next disaster. The recipe goes on telling you to stir the wet mixture into the dry flour mixture of ingredients. Huge mistake! We instantly got big lumps. Years of cooking and baking have taught me that it’s always better to put the dry ingredients and stir them into the wet ingredients. Why did we not follow our instincts and do it that way? Dad had to come to the rescue and get the hand mixer out to take care of the lump situation.

Step 6. “With adult help” beat the egg whites until they are shiny and slightly stiff. Yippee! Success! This was the easy part. Not a problem since our eggs were perfectly separated after many attempts. LOL

Step 7. Next you are supposed to fold the egg whites gently into the batter. Some lumps of egg white are okay!

Step 8. Last,  have your adult slave put the Waffle mix into the preheated waffle iron.

Well, that’s when the whole project went totally South. The batter stuck to the waffle iron so badly that we could not get it out.  See photos. What went wrong? My husband got so annoyed that he wanted to toss the waffle maker into the trashcan. Then came the tears of disappointment. We all started joking that it was a book about the Great Depression after all.

I think it’s great my daughter wants to learn how to cook, and I love the idea of teaching history while we do it,  but can we please have easier recipes that don’t wipe out the whole kitchen after I spent all of Saturday cleaning my house from top to bottom?

We ended up making pancakes with the batter. And let me tell you they were REALLY yummy!

Ulla Seckler  is a dollmaker who was born and raised in Germany. She lives in beautiful Colorado with her husband and two kids. You can find her Notes by a German Dollmaker on her blog where she shares some great German recipes, pictures of her sweet dolls, and life lessons learned.  Don’t forget to stop by her Etsyshop and take a peek at her wonderful doll creations.