Perfect Christmas Cookies: Chocolate Peppermint and Gingerbread Pizzelles • Homemaker's Habitat (2024)

I’ve updated my Italian Grandma’s famous cookie recipe for Christmas. Chocolate Peppermint and Gingerbread Pizzelles are perfect holiday cookies!

Chocolate Peppermint and Gingerbread Pizzelles

Anyone who knows me personally knows about my Grandma Rose. Grandma Rose will be 99 on December 19th. She has lived with my parents since I was about 12 (still does, knock on wood) and has played a massive role in my life and the lives of my husband and children. She is a treasure. She also has a talent for conjuring her famous signature cookies, Vanilla Pizzelles, seemingly out of thin air at a moment’s notice. Her pizzelles are basically the confectionary equivalent my Grandma herself: delicate, lighthearted and just the right amount of sweet. So, when I decided to give her cookie recipe a Christmas makeover, I did not approach the task lightly. My Chocolate Peppermint and Gingerbread Pizzelles had to be perfect.

A Master Course in Making Pizzelles

The fact is, before this year, I rarely made Pizzelles on my own. I mean, throughout middle school and high school I spent many an afternoon parked next to Grandma at the kitchen table while she made pizzelles in front of Oprah, just so I could steal cookies and devour them still hot off the press. But actually making them seemed sort of superfluous. That was Grandma’s thing.

But last year, we asked her to show the kids how to make them. If you’ve unfamiliar with Pizzelles, they’re different than most cookie recipes. For one thing, you melt the butter before creaming it into the sugar which is kind of odd. But the oddest part is how you bake them. To make pizzelles, you need a special device called a Pizzelle Press. It looks vaguely like a waffle iron and makes cookies two at a time. It can be time consuming but its a fun process and one that my kids really enjoyed. They spent a wonderful afternoon with Grandma, stirring and mixing and pressing and tasting and it was so special.

Now that they know how to do it (and that they can stand next to the cookie press and eat a boatload of hot cookies), they wanted to make them again this year. And thats when I decided to get creative.

Perfect Christmas Flavors

Grandma makes vanilla pizzelles. Period. She does not deviate. But I’m a tinkerer by nature so I started tinkering. I used Grandma’s recipe as my base, but then added in some of my favorite Christmas flavors: one batch of Chocolate Peppermint made by adding cocoa and crushed peppermint candies to the batter. The second batch, I added in cinnamon, cloves, allspice and molasses for a light, crisp, perfect take on gingerbread.

I gotta say: I nailed it.

I was so happy with how these turned out. Frankly I was a little afraid that the Chocolate Peppermint ones would be either TOO chocolatey or TOO pepperminty or that the crushed candies would stick to the Pizzelle Press. But they came out beautifully with JUST the right amount of chocolate and peppermint flavor. The kids and my dad are in love. (Btw, if you’re in the market for a great Pizzelle Press, I absolutely love my stainless steel one which you can find here).

Then there’s the gingerbread. OMG….I am obsessed with the gingerbread. Honestly, when I first told my mom what I’d done (remember, messing with pizzelle is close to blasphemy in our family), she immediately launched into a speech about how you just can’t beat vanilla. Lucky for me, my mother is a certifiable cinnamon addict. I cut her off by waving the cookie jar of Gingerbread Pizzelles under her nose. That was all at took to convert her.

Although my mom is right, you can never really replace Grandma’s Vanilla Pizzelles, I suspect that my Chocolate Peppermint and Gingerbread Pizzelles will be a special part of our family traditions for a long time (just like Grandma herself).

Featured Items:

Cucina Pro Polished Pizzelle Maker

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