My favorite holiday has always been New Year’s Eve- or as they call it in Eorzea: Heavensturn. It is the one time of the year where everyone is looking towards the future, and when you can always begin again with whatever you want to try to become as a person. I have religiously watched Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve from start to finish since I was a child, and this year was definitely no exception.
I am also big into New Year’s Resolutions. 2021 was, honestly, a terrible year for me between my relationship ending and me moving across the country to a place where I don’t know anyone around me. So, for this year, I made four resolutions:
| 1) I will do a new experience or visit a new place, or both, at least once a month. 2) I will continue to work on myself and try to become a better person for me. I want to be a less flawed person come 2023. 3) I will continue working on cooking a new dish for Cooking Eorzea every week, no matter how difficult or frustrating it gets. 4) I will try to be happier. Things fell apart last year in so many ways and it just…things need to get better for me. |
This is a lot to try to accomplish. But everything starts with a single step. Happiness- and Love, Eorzean Style– starts with a single step after all.
And these things will only come to me if I try to make them happen. And hopefully with this Heavensturn, I can make all of this happen.
If you’ve missed a prior installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check it out here.
Recipe of the Week
This week’s Cooking Eorzea recipe is the sixth recipe of The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook for Lemon Waffle. From the Norvrandt Region with a difficulty rating of ‘Medium’, this dish made my entire kitchen smell like lemons as I was making the curd. After I had finished making the full dish the next day, my hands smelled of lemon and they STILL smelled of lemon after I washed them twice. It is probably from all the lemon zest and from the dry ingredient blending by hand.
Anyway, this is what the dish is supposed to look like when it is done!
Ingredient of the Week
The ingredient of the week for this recipe is beet sugar. “What is beet sugar?”, you may ask. That’s an excellent question, because I had no idea what it was either until I started looking for it.
It turns out that none of the grocery stores or health food stores nearby me carry it. I ended up having to order it from Amazon…and the only way that I could get it in time for this recipe was to order two bags of beet sugar with thirty packets of beet sugar in each one. This means that I am ripping open beet sugar packets while cooking in order to get enough for the recipe.
Finding the ingredients for each week’s Cooking Eorzea recipe is quite the experience, I swear.
My Cooking Attempt
Here are all the ingredients that I used for this week’s Cooking Eorzea Lemon Waffle recipe:
First, I had to make the lemon curd and so I placed everything that I didn’t need for it back into the refrigerator. I then scraped a lemon to get enough lemon zest for said lemon curd.
After I finished with the lemon and set it aside, I got out a vanilla bean. I sliced down the middle of it, being careful to only puncture one side of the vanilla bean. I had never actually worked with a real vanilla bean before, and so I was surprised at how tough the outer bean shell was to cut through. After I cut through the bean, I scraped out the inside caviar (not my term) with the edge of the knife.
What scraped out vanilla bean looks like. Okay, so it does kinda look like caviar:
Next, I had to get three egg yolks. This involved me cracking three eggs and trying to not break the yolks as I separate the whites out from the yolk.
At first, I was quite proud of myself for how well I made it work as I managed to get all three egg yolks to drop without ruining any. Until I tried to separate them, and I ended up breaking two out of the three.
I had to crack more eggs and then try to pull the yolks out by hand. Eventually, I was able to get the necessary three yolks pulled out without ruining more yolks.
I added the granulated sugar, the egg yolks, and the lemon zest into a medium saucepan. It was a lot of sugar that I added, surprisingly.
I then whisked it all together until the granulated sugar, the egg yolks, and the lemon zest had blended together.
I added in the lemon juice and a pinch of salt before I set it over low heat on my stovetop.
I started to whisk the mixture together as the mixture heated up, and I could tell that it was starting to get thick as time rolled onwards.
The recipe gave me a nifty way to tell if the curd was ready or not! I am supposed to scoop some out with a spoon, turn the spoon over, and run my finger along the back of the spoon. If the streak I create remains intact, then the curd is ready for the next step.
As my curd passed the ‘spoon test’, I added in the butter and half of the vanilla bean. That is a pie scoop that I am using to add the vanilla into the pot!
I then blended it all together until the butter fully melted and everything was well mixed together.
I then whipped out my strainer so I could pour the curd mixture through and into an airtight container. You can see the lemon zest remaining behind in the strainer afterwards!
I snapped the lid on before letting the curd cool down on the countertop. Once it had cooled, I placed it into the fridge so it could set overnight.
The next day, I had to scrape another vanilla bean and I zested the remaining three lemons. It turns out that scraping out vanilla caviar is even easier the second time around!
I then had to measure out the beet sugar. It took me fifteen packets of beet sugar to get enough to make this recipe. It was borderline ridiculous to be ripping open packets and dumping them out into a measuring spoon in order to make this dish for Cooking Eorzea.
After I got enough beet sugar, I placed a small stick of butter in the microwave, covered it with a plate, and turned it on. The butter ‘popped’ loudly in the microwave, and so I was glad that I had covered the butter up. Afterwards, I pulled the melted butter out and set it aside to cool down.
I threw the flour, baking powder, salt, beet sugar, and lemon zest together in a large bowl while the waffle maker preheated. I then combined them all together with my hands.
I combined the dry ingredients together until they were well mixed. Afterwards, I had to wash my hands since they were absolutely covered in flour and other ingredients.
After setting the dry mixture aside, I cracked two more eggs and added them to a smaller bowl with half a bean’s worth of vanilla caviar, the cooled melted butter, the oat milk, and the lemon juice.
I then whisked all the ingredients together until they were well-blended together.
Once it was well blended together, it was then that I realized that my hands smelled completely like lemon still…despite having washed them. Regardless, I poured the wet ingredients into the dry mixture.
I then whisked it all together until the waffle batter was thick and well-blended.
The waffle maker had finished preheating at this point, and so I scooped some of the finished batter out and poured it into the waffle maker. I had to use a spatula and the back of my spoon to help spread it out well. Once that was done, I closed the lid so the waffle could cook.
The first waffle turned out well, but I poured too much batter into the waffle maker with my second waffle…and it started to leak out EVERYWHERE. I ended up having to scrape the escaping batter off of the sides of the waffle maker while the second waffle was cooking. Or is it called baking? Maybe waffling?
Once I had finished making three waffles, I set them aside on a dish.
I got the lemon curd out of the fridge from last night, and I was pleased to see that it had really solidified up overnight. I also got out a can of whipped cream. While whipped cream was not listed in the ingredient list, it was clearly included in the official recipe photo and so I thought it was ‘fair game’ to use.
I stirred the lemon curd up with a spoon and ladled it over the waffles. It poured on very thickly and smoothly, and I was happy that it had actually set correctly in the refrigerator.
I then applied a small amount of whipped cream…
And here is the final dish for Week 4 of Cooking Eorzea!
Even though the whipped cream melted down very quickly after I took this photograph, I sat down and ate it. The lemon waffle was really, really good! I could clearly taste the lemon in each bite, and I appreciated that the citrus flavor didn’t overwhelm me. The waffles were also very hearty to eat, and I couldn’t finish the entire stack. I ate like three-fourths of them however, and I enjoyed every bit of it!
Afterward
I was impressed with how easy it was to use this waffle maker. I had only previously used Belgian waffle makers at a Holiday Inn Express, and so I was a bit nervous about using this kind of waffle maker. Having also used both vanilla extract and actual vanilla beans in various recipes at this point, I was surprised at how pleasant both are to work with and how strong of a smell they both have. I wouldn’t mind trying to make other waffle dishes in the future, though I can’t imagine that there are too many more of them in this cookbook that I will make as part of Cooking Eorzea.
As always, I want to thank Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook. I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes are actually supposed to look. Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You can check him and his works out over on Twitter.
Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. I logged on very briefly to do this year’s Heavensturn event. I have a lot of emotional issues playing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online…but I am trying to at least do the seasonal events when they pop up every few months.
Next Week
Next week’s Cooking Eorzea recipe will be Nutrient-Rich Porridge! While the recipe looks like it will be a simpler recipe to make, I am going to give it my all to make! And of course, I will be sure to share it all with you.
Happy Heavensturn everyone!
Have you ever used a classic waffle maker before? Or have you even heard of beet sugar?
Let us know in the comments below!
