Rosettes to Cure the Mid-Winter Blahs

When I was a kid, sometime during the long, dreary stretch of weeks between New Year's Day and spring, my mother would make rosettes. It's hard to describe how very much I loved these fragile little cookies. Perhaps because they're so very delicate, yet simple, without being cloyingly sweet. Or maybe it's the intricate, snowflake shapes. Perhaps it's the careful, multi-step process required to produce them that fascinated me so much as a child. Regardless of why, just the thought of crisp, warm rosettes dusted with powdered sugar on a dark mid-winter evening is still enough to summon a nostalgic smile, all these years later.

Rosettes are a crisp, lacy cookie, made of a simple batter. You coat a special rosette iron with the batter and then place it in hot oil. The batter usually releases from the iron as it cooks. Once the cookie is golden-brown, you carefully transfer it to cool on layers of paper-towel to absorb the extra oil. Before the rosettes completely cool, you can finish them by drizzling the cookies with glaze, dipping in frosting, rolling in sugar or cinnamon sugar, or sifting confectioner's sugar over them. A large part of the fun as a child was the complicated process, and that special kitchen implements were required. Mom had a rosette iron with several different molds that could be interchanged to create different shapes.

Rosette batter is simple to make and you likely already have the necessary ingredients: eggs, sugar, milk, flour, salt, and perhaps a touch of cinnamon, nutmeg, almond or vanilla extract, or whatever specific flavor you most enjoy. There are quite decent recipes all over the internet, and probably in a good many of the cookbooks you already have.

You're perhaps less likely to have a rosette iron rattling around your kitchen, unless you're already familiar with these cookies. Special tools really are better than half the fun of this cookie (for me, anyway.) You can get the basic model rosette iron at pretty much any local department store. If you're more of an Internet shopper, then eBay, Amazon, or other online venues will certainly be able to supply you as well. If you're a kitchen-gadget fiend, and simply must have rosette-iron molds for every conceivable occasion, you'll find a bewildering range of designs at various kitchen-specialty shops.

Bits of fried dough rolled in sugar, honey, or other sweet glazes, have a long tradition. Lisala already wrote about fried pastry traditions a bit, upstream on this blog. The ancients fried and ate pastries and doughs, and evidence suggests they enjoyed these morsels every bit as much as we do, today.

Rosettes are usually attributed to a Scandinavian origin, and have been made in the U.S. pretty much since European immigrants started arriving. However, lots of other countries apparently independently discovered how well it works to to heat an ornate iron mold, dip it in batter, and fry up the resulting fancy tidbits, because variations of this cookie are found pretty much the world over, and folks have been making them for centuries.