Currently cooking out of Baked Explorations by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

New cookbook! One full of sugar and eggs and flour and chocolate. Oh chocolate, how I’ve missed you.

I’m not quite done with The Food Matters Cookbook. I’ll have one more recipe coming up, but I just haven’t been able to get myself excited about cooking out of it. So instead of dreading picking a recipe, I’m going to set that cookbook aside and move on.

Back to baking!

A year ago, I was baking out of the first Baked cookbook. This time around, Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito decided to focus on those desserts you’d find at a church supper or potluck, things like Mississippi Mud Pie or Buckeyes. They took these recipes and gave them a Baked twist, refining and updating flavors.

I choose these malted waffles as my first recipe, pretty much because it sounded really good. And it’s been a few weeks since we’ve had waffles around here.

This is a pretty standard waffle recipe with one exception: a cup of malt powder is added to the waffle batter (you can usually find malt powder near the hot chocolate mixes in a grocery store). I can’t really describe what malt tastes like, but if you are a fan of malted milkshakes or Whoppers, you’ll recognize the malt flavor immediately.

I really liked these waffles. The malt flavor isn’t overwhelming, but it is definitely there. It gives the waffles a toasty flavor. These waffles were so good, I liked them without syrup.

However, I did have one problem with the recipe: the batter wasn’t thick enough (my first waffle burned because the batter was so thin). I ended up adding about a half of a cup of extra flour to thicken the batter, but unfortunately, that extra flour also dulled the malt flavor. So, next time I make these, I’ll start out with just two cups of buttermilk (the recipe calls for 2 1/2 cups) and add more as needed.

Also, this makes a huge batch of waffles (I think I ended up with about 18 waffles). That’s only a problem if you are trying to watch what you eat.