Have you ever cooked or baked something purely for the sense of nostalgia it would bring you?
I did just that last week, even though I knew could only approximate the taste I was hoping to recapture: Crystal Beach Sugar Waffles.
Crystal Beach was an amusement park in Fort Erie, Canada, probably less than thirty minutes from where my grandparents lived in Port Colborne, Ontario and just across Lake Erie, where we lived on the American side. It was a place we went just about every summer, maybe even a few times. My mom even worked there when she was a teenager. When I was a kid, Crystal Beach was a pretty happening place, and if my sisters and I thought our parents might detour there on the way home from Gran’s house, well, we got pretty excited. We’d inevitably ride the rides and play games, but, even then, my heart was really in it for the food. Before we’d leave, my parents would buy goodies, and the memories of happiness that it brings to me even now just reminiscing, can’t even compare to the anticipation, dare I say, glee that Crystal Beach Sugar Waffles struck in me.
This, of course, begs the question of what a Sugar Waffle actually is. It technically is a fried pastry, cooked on an iron shaped like a flower about 4 inches in diameter and maybe 3 inches deep, covered in powdered sugar. It is redolent of a Rosette cookie, but is like a Rosette on steroids: bigger and better in every way.
This leads me to trying to recapture the past, even if only fleetingly and approximately: at about ten thirty in the evening, I was waxing nostalgic, and decided I would make Rosettes, which is a fairly long and kind of messy project. The effort, however foolish, was worth it, and I came as close as I could to being a delighted seven year old again.
