Belgian Iron Cookies

These have been in the family forever. They last forever - they mellow like fine wine. You must have a special iron to bake them over a gas burner. It's like two hinged plates and it usually has a pretty pattern that is pressed into the cookies as they bake one by one.

• Calories: 249 Calories

Ingredients

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 12 eggs
• 2 cups butter
• 5 pounds all-purpose flour
• 4 ½ cups brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons whiskey

Recipe Instructions

Step 1

Cream butter and brown sugar. Add eggs, vanilla, salt, and liquor (if desired). Blend in.

Step 2

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.

Step 3

Refrigerate dough overnight.

Step 4

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.

Step 5

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.