Belgian Iron Cookies
Ingredients
5 pounds all-purpose flour
4 1/2 cups brown sugar
12 eggs
2 cups butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons whiskey
Directions for making Belgian Iron Cookies,
Cream butter and brown sugar. Add eggs, vanilla, salt, and liquor (if
desired). Blend in.
Now it gets to be fun. You have to work in all five pounds of flour
little by little by hand. It will work in but it takes a while. You’ll wind
up with a BIG mixing bowl of dough.
Refrigerate dough overnight.
Have plenty of people to help with the cooking. Lightly grease and
heat the empty cookie iron over a gas burner. Start with a
tablespoon and a half of dough rolled into a little “cigar” shape and
vary amount to fit the size of your cookie iron. It takes from one to
one and a half minutes to cook each cookie – it’s a trial and error
process at first till you get a handle on the temperature of the gas
burner and the heat retaining capabilities of your iron. A properly
cooked cookie will be golden and after cooled, crisp.
This a family holiday tradition for us and we spend a whole day
cooking cookies with lots of testing to make sure they’re as good as
last year’s. The cast iron cookie irons work best, but I have seen
people make them with the aluminum pizelle “irons”. Ask for a
krumkokie (croom cockie) iron at a gourmet cooking shop. We put
them in tins and store till next Christmas, eating last year’s cookies.