And in the Morning, I'm Makin' Waffles!

I experienced a heartbreaking culinary disaster yesterday.

I really wanted waffles, because it was Saturday, which is clearly a weekend breakfast kind of day. I have a fancy-pants Belgian Waffle maker from Williams-Sonoma and it came with a booklet that has some waffle recipes, so I figured I would try one of those instead of doing what I usually do, which is make it up as I go. (Although in my defense, that tends to work out pretty well.)

So this recipe was one of those annoying ones where you have to whip your egg whites until they’re stiff. And being the lazy personal that I am, I decide I don’t want to dirty my hand mixer so I opt to whip them by hand. BIG MISTAKE. Yeah, I got them to whip up, but they weren’t exactly stiff or firm. They were more of what we in the business (ha) might call soft peaks. But my arm was tired, so I stopped. My other problem was that I tried to combine water with melted butter, and when I realized the idiocy of this I attempted to rectify my mistake by adding milk. But that didn’t really work either. Anyway, I decided to just go for it and mixed it all together.

When I poured the batter into the hot waffle iron, it rose immediately, like it was supposed to, but then after a couple of minutes of cooking it collapsed. I guess my waffle iron was too heavy for the not-quite-stiff-enough egg whites. I figured I should probably just let it keep going. I wasn’t about to start cooking a whole second breakfast at this point, after all. After a few more minutes, I started to smell burning, so I peeked (oops). It was getting a little burned, but it also looked a little uncooked – so I took a little piece and lo and behold, the insides were totally wet! I let it finish its cooking cycle and smothered it in brown sugar and fresh banana slices to try to mask the mushiness of its innards, and it kind of worked.

It didn’t taste terrible, it actually was pretty good, it just didn’t exactly work out the way it was supposed to. Alas, now I know for next time. I am just better at experiments than I am at recipes, at least in the morning when I am tired.