The Best Days of Our Lives

Regardless of whether you are 3 or 63, summer is almost always a wonderful time of the year. Long vacations, visits to the beach, picnics, sitting out on the porch, barbecues, tons of ice cream and milkshakes…

Unfortunately we can’t enjoy all of those things year round, but ice cream is the kind of treat you can devour as often as you want. This is the first summer that I have been a blogger, so I was surprised by how many bloggers actually made homemade ice cream….and of course, I was very tempted to do it myself.

It took me awhile, and the influence of a dear newcomer in my life who loves ice cream even more than I do, but even though summer is quickly coming to an end, I have finally made this incredible tasty treat.

The best thing about this recipe, is it does not require an ice cream maker. YOU are the ice cream maker so anyone like myself, who has not yet invested in one of these can make it.

Vanilla Ice Cream
Source: David Lebovitz

1 cup milk
A pinch of salt
3/4 cups sugar
1 vanilla bean
5 egg yolks
2 cup heavy cream
A few drops of vanilla extract

Heat the milk, salt, and sugar in a saucepan. Split the vanilla bean lengthwise and scrape the seeds into the milk with the tip of a paring knife. Add the bean pod to the milk.

Stir together the egg yolks in a bowl and gradually add some of the warmed milk, stirring constantly as you pour. Pour the warmed yolks back into the saucepan.

Cook over low heat, stirring constantly and scraping the bottom with a heat-resistant spatula until the custard thickens enough to coat the spatula. Strain the custard into the heavy cream. Rinse the vanilla bean and put it back into the custard and cream to continue steeping. Pour into a deep baking dish, or bowl made of plastic, stainless steel or something durable and chill over an ice bath.

After forty-five minutes, open the freezer and check it. As it starts to freeze near the edges, remove it from the freezer and stir it vigorously with a beater, spatula or whisk. Really beat it up and break up any frozen sections. Return to freezer. Continue to check the mixture every 30 minutes, stirring vigorously as it’s freezing.

Keep checking on your ice cream and stirring while it freezes (by hand or with the electric mixer) until the ice cream is frozen. It will likely take 2-3 hours to be ready.

When it reaches the desired consistency, serve as always. Enjoy.

Anyone with a machine can make this themselves, just follow this recipe and when you get to the freezing process, finish up with the machine.

Hope you have enjoyed your summer as much as I have, and have treated yourself to plenty of ice cream.  Don’t forget, even if it’s snowing outside you can still enjoy this treat and think of past summers 🙂

Let’s Do the Twist

There are certain snacks that always seem to make people happy. Most of them are as happy-inducing because they have much sugar on top (hey, if a spoonful of sugar can make medicine better, why shouldn’t a cupful make everything else better? *g*)

This, however, is actually one of those snacks that is actually reasonably healthy…assuming you don’t over-do the salt and you’re not one of those weird anti-carb people…..but if you were anti carb you probably wouldn’t be reading this 🙂

These pretzles are not even remotely as good as those you can get in the city. But I don’t think it’s possible to make anything that good at home. But as soothing as it is to make any type of bread, and as fun as snacks like this tend to be, it’s another one of those I just couldn’t resist.

Soft Pretzels
Source: The Fresh Loaf

1 teaspoon instant yeast
1 tablespoon malt powder or brown sugar
2-3 cups bread flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup warm milk

Combine all of the ingredients in a bowl and mix together until it forms a ball. Start with 2 cups of the flour and mix it together until it forms something like a thick batter, then add more flour a handful at a time until it’ll form a nice ball that you can knead by hand.

Knead the dough for 5 to 10 minutes until it begins to get smooth and satiny. Return the ball of dough to a clean, greased bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and set it aside to rise until it has doubled in size, approximately an hour.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Degas the dough gently then cut into 6 pieces. Roll each one into a short log, cover with a towel, and let the dough relax for 5 to 10 minutes. After it has relaxed you should be able to roll it out and stretch again fairly easily.

Let them relax again and then roll and stretch a third time until they are long and thin (about 15 inches long and about as big around as your index finger). They’ll nearly double in width while baking, so you should roll them out very thin.

To shape the pretzels, place a rope of dough on the work surface in front of you. Take each end in a hand, loop the dough away from you, and bring the ends back toward you, crossing them about an inch above the rope. Apply a little bit of pressure to make the loops stick together, but not too much because you don’t want then to flatten out.

Bring a pot of water to a boil. Dunk each of the pretzels into the boiling water for 5 seconds, then place them onto a baking sheet and sprinkle with salt or other toppings.

Place the baking sheet into the oven and bake about 15 minutes or until golden brown.

Remove from the oven and eat immediately. Enjoy.

Cupcakes Outside the Comfort Zone

I have mentioned that I am a picky eater. I know that I can be a little ridiculous with it sometimes, but it isn’t really something I can control either. It’s just who I am. However, with the experimentation I am doing with this blog, I want to step outside of that comfort zone and get a little daring. (Keep in mind something daring for me will probably be normal for most bakers).

It’s probably a little ironic to use something as comforting as cupcakes (which bring up happy icing-covered memories) for something like this but the end result sounded great so I thought it would be a good idea to just dive in.

At this point you’re probably asking yourself what it is about this recipe that is so daring. It’s actually not one, but two things: mayonnaise and sour cream. The mayonnaise because of an incident when I was a kid making sandwiches with mom and tasted from the wrong knife….and the sour cream because of my great aversion to anything with the word “sour” (it took much googling to convince myself that the tart I made a couple months ago wouldn’t actually be “tart.”) I am sure there is a deeper meaning to that one too but I really don’t need to know all the varying depths of my insanity. 😉

Anyways, this recipe marries the wonderful goodness that is chocolate with two things I have taken great pains to avoid in the past, and thank god it turned out well. I also had a new and very enthusiastic helper, who ended up wearing almost as much chocolate as we put in this, so I was too busy enjoying the company, the chocolate, and the scent of these to-die-for cupcakes to really worry about the end result. Which, by the way, really did turn out incredible. 🙂

Mint Cupcakes
Slightly adapted from: The Reckless Chef

2 cups sugar
1 3/4 cups flour
3/4 cup cocoa powder
3 oz chocolate, finely chopped
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
3/4 cup milk
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 teaspoons mint extract
2/3 cup water
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1 tablespoon sour cream

Preheat oven to 350.

Mix your dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Add the eggs, oil, milk, and water and fold them into the mix with a fork. Add mayonnaise, sour cream, and vanilla, and beat the mixture on low-speed. Add in the mint extract, and if the batter smells like plain chocolate instead of mint chocolate, add a bit more. Blend until the dry ingredients are no longer dry, and you have a consistent texture throughout.

Melt the 3 oz of chocolate in a double boiler then mix well into the batter.

Put cupcake papers into your cupcake pan. Pour batter into each cupcake paper, being as generous as you want. These raise decently but it’s always more fun if they come out as monster cupcakes.

Bake the cupcakes for 17 minutes, and test for doneness at any point after that. When a toothpick stuck in the middle of the biggest cupcake in the batch comes out clean, take them out of the oven and let them cool for a few minutes before removing from the cupcake pan.

Decorate as desired and enjoy 🙂

These are really amazing cupcakes. Perfectly moist and the mint chocolate is just irresistable. The kind of thing you can impress everyone with…if you can bear to part with any of them. 🙂

Call Off The Dogs

Hey everyone. Assuming people are still out there.

I’ve been a very lazy blogger lately; I’ve been spending a lot of time with someone pretty great lately, but I want to assure you all that I have been baking, and taking pictures. I have a bunch of catch-up posts that I need to put up here, but first I wanted to just put up with little teaser.

I will be blogging about all of these in the very near future, so hopefully they will entice you to not give up on me yet 🙂

I hope all of these have peaked your interest, because I will be back soon with much more details 🙂

Brainfully Delicious

I’ve mentioned my friend Dean several times, but there is one thing I haven’t mentioned yet, one of the things that make him so fun and loveable.

You see, my dear friend is obsessed with zombies. Yes, zombies, those rotting, brain eating, undead creatures that might just bring about the apocalypse one of these days.

And no, I am not exagerating by calling this dear man obsessed. He has games and an unbelievable amount of movies (I believe he said he has 4 copies of Night of the Living Dead and I, being such a great friend, convinced him to buy Zombies Gone Wild… :)). He loves to pretend to eat his fiancee’s brains…..he even dressed up as Zombie Elvis for Halloween last year!

Yes friends, the King still lives….just not the way you might hope *g*

Anyways, I really wanted to do something special for Dean for his birthday, and what could a zombie lover enjoy more than brains?

This is more about the decoration than the cupcake itself, but as I wanted to post this I’ll give you the recipe anyways.

Brain Cupcakes

1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
3 large eggs
4 oz white chocolate, melted
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup plus 1 tablespoon milk

Preheat oven to 325F. Place liners in cupcake pan

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder and salt.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs one at a time then the melted chocolate and vanilla.

Working in two or three additions, alternate adding in the milk and flour mixture, making sure the flour is last. Mix just until well blended.

Divide batter into prepared pan and bake 20-25 minutes or until tester comes out clean. Allow to cool on a wire rack.

Whipped Cream Frosting

2 tablespoons sugar
1 cup whipping cream
1 tablespoon chocolate liqueur
1 box white chocolate instant pudding
Red food coloring

Mix all of the ingredients for the whipped cream except the pudding mix in a bowl and put in the fridge with your beaters/whisk to chill while you make the cupcakes.

Beat until stiff peaks form then stir in the pudding mix and add food coloring until you reach a nice brain color shade.

Scoop the icing into a frosting bag with a medium round tip or a ziplock bag. Draw a line of icing down the middle, then squiggle the two halves to make it look like brains. Invite all zombie friends over and enjoy 🙂

This is really a fun cupcake. If you really wanted to get into the swing of things you could use food coloring to color the cupcakes themselves and even add a gooey filling. I have a hard time believing my dear friend is not one of a kind, so it isn’t likely you’ll know someone with the same obsession, but these would be great for a theme party or for halloween…as long as you don’t mind eating a twisted treat 🙂

Taste & Create XII: Birthday Madelines

This month is very special for Taste & Create. Though it has only been a few months for me, this monthly event has been bringing food bloggers together for a year. Yes it is Taste & Create’s first birthday!

I was hoping to special birthday cupcakes or something like that to help celebrate, and instead my partner, the talanted woman behind Fuss Free Flavorsoffered something I had been considering making for a while. Instead I made chocolate drizzled birthday Madelines 🙂

Madelines
Source: Fuss Free Flavors

75g Unsalted butter – melted and cool
100g Plain Flour
1/2 tsp Baking Powder
2 Large Eggs
90g Granulated Sugar
1 tsp Vanilla Essence
Pinch of salt

Whisk the eggs and sugar together until they have doubled in size and are light and fluffy. Slowly fold in the flour, baking powder and salt. Add the vanilla. Slowly add in the melted butter, gently folding all the time.

When mixed cover the bowl and put in the fridge for at least 30 minutes, the batter should be foamy and full of air. Put a dollop of the mixture into a well buttered Madeleine tray, each mold should be about 2/3 full.

Place in an oven at 375F for around 7 minutes until risen, golden and shrinking away from the edges of the mold.

Leave for a few minutes and then turn out. Add a drizzle of melted chocolate and enjoy.

Happy Birthday Taste & Create 🙂

Devilishly Devine

I have really been a naughty blogger this month. With friends’ parties, birthdays and a procrastination inducing heat wave, I haven’t posted in quite a while, but hopefully the next few posts will make up for it.

Yes, I have continued baking, while I was baking in my air-condition-less apartment. These particular cookies are absolutely evil. Or at least perfect for inducing evil giggles, especially considering the below is considered one cookie if you go by the recipe.

Are you giggling wickedly yet?

The cookies themselves are great, but honestly the cookie dough is better than any you’ve ever had. It’s hard not to eat it all raw.

Jacques Torres’ Chocolate Mudslide Cookies
Source: New York Times

1 1/2 cups unsweetened chocolate, in chips or chunks
8 cups semi-sweet chocolate, in chips or chunks
3/8 cup unsalted butter
2 cups sugar
5 eggs
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat an oven to 400 degrees. Melt the unsweetened chocolate and 4 cups of the bittersweet chocolate over a double-boiler.

Cream the butter and sugar in a mixer until light and fluffy and add the eggs one at a time, blending until mixed.

Add the flour, baking powder and salt to the butter mixture and mix just until combined.

Add the melted chocolate and mix until combined and stir in the nuts and remaining chocolate pieces. Pour the mixture onto a parchment-lined baking sheet or tray. Put the mixture into a refrigerator for 5 to10 minutes until slightly, but not completely, hardened.

Reverse the sheet or tray onto another piece of parchment paper on a hard surface. Use a knife to divide the mixture into 30* squares. With your hands, roll each of the squares into a ball and evenly space them on one or two parchment-lined baking sheets (leave much room for them to spread).

Bake the cookies for 15 to 25 minutes, until crusty on the outside (they should still be gooey on the inside). Allow to cool for at least 20 minutes before eating.

*The original recipe called for only 20 cookies, but they never bake right for me that big. It’s up to you if you wanna try them mondo or a little smaller 😉

With this much chocolate, this recipe isn’t one I make often, but it is well worth trying at least once, just to nibble the raw dough 😉

S’More Please

I’ve been trying to think of a good introduction for this one for a while but for some reason nothing has come to mind. Which is actually pretty funny considering the idea for this tasty treat came to me pretty quickly.

That whole weekend was actually the same. None of the recipes I had recently collected sounded good but I knew I wanted to make something chocolate (does that surprise anyone? hehe) I was thinking along the lines of making a pie, something with pudding, maybe some whipped cream…nothing really special.

It was just one of those days where nothing really sounded right, and then I saw a picture of s’mores. A simple tasty treat that we have all had before, just revised a bit. 🙂

 

These need a little work to be perfect because the crust was a little fragile. Then again, that helps keep it much more faithful to the original treat.

S’more Bites

pudding:
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
pinch of salt
2 cups whole milk
4 oz chocolate, finely chopped
1 tablespoon unsalted butter

crust:
2 cups graham cracker crumbs
1/3 cup sugar
1 cup melted butter

mini-marshmallows

Whisk cornstarch, sugar, cocoa and salt for the pudding in a saucepan, then gradually whisk in milk.

Bring to a boil, whisking constantly. Allow to boil until it’s nice and thick. Do not stop whisking while it’s cooking. Remove from heat and whisk in chopped chocolate and butter until melted. Allow to cool completely.

Preheat oven at 350F. Mix all of the ingredients for the crust into a large bowl and press into the cups of mini-tart pans. Bake for approximately 8 minutes or until lightly browned.

Carefully remove the graham cracker cups from the pan and fill with the pudding. Top with marshmellows, move to a cookie sheet and place in the broiler until the marshmellows are lightly browned. Enjoy while still warm and messy 🙂

 

These are simple and tasty and lots of fun. A little more work than the original treat, but still worth the time to experiment with 🙂

Taste & Create XI: Sugar and Spice…

For a while now, a friend of mine has been unwittingly torturing me with his many tales of waffles for breakfast. I have been a good girl, and have resisted so far (it’s more about resisting the syrup that must go on those waffles than the waffles themselves) but when I saw that one of the recipes my partner, Magpie from je le vous dirais had on her blog was for a Dutch Baby, I knew I had to finally break down.

Now, I have never had a Dutch Baby before, but from what I have heard it is much like pancakes, so I went for it, and I am glad I did cause even if I messed something up, it was well worth it.

Dutch Baby
Source: je le vous dirais

1/2 tablespoon butter
3 eggs
1/2 cup of milk
1/2 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Preheat the over to 400F. Please empty glass pie plate in oven to preheat.

Mix the eggs, milk, flour, cinnamon and salt in a bowl.

Take the pie plate out of the oven and add the butter. Pour the batter on top and sprinkle with additional cinnamon and/or sugar.

Bake for 15-20 minutes until lightly browned. Cut into wedges and devour immediately with topping of choice. Enjoy.

This recipe called for way too much better, so I adjusted the numbers for the recipe here. If you try it yourself and it doesn’t look like it’ll be enough to grease the pan, just add a touch more.

This recipe was very tasty, and well worth breaking down….let’s just hope that now i have syrup in the house again I will be able to continue resisting it’s call 🙂

The Finer Things in Life

One of the things about being an adult, is that time seems to move so much faster than it did when we were kids. When we’re young, we spend our days imagining the future. Our biggest concern is avoiding the bully at school. We count the days until summer, then spend every moment we possibly can outside, enjoying the sun, and air, the sand at the beach, the trees we can climb…and those we can’t. All the little things that make our lives beautiful. We can’t wait until we grow up and can enjoy everything that’s held back by the adults in our lives.

Then once we become adults, other concerns crowd our minds. We think about bills, our health and that of our loved ones, and taxes. We spend our days, locked in an office, many of us without even a window. We have to force ourselves to eat well, rather than just what we manage to fit in. We crowd every hour of the day we can with the things we feel we have to get done, counting the minutes until we can go to bed. Even our weekends tend to be crowded with errands. And if you’re like me, you even feel guilty for taking a vacation or a single day off.

Thankfully, though we have mostly lost touch with the carefree children we once were, we can still force our selves to spend time on some of the finer things life has to offer. Like the sounds and smells of a summer storm, the taste of good chocolate or wine. Or both.

And of course, the feeling of a good dough in your hands, the smell of it baking and the taste of that first piece. I know not many of you enjoy making bread, and it has unfortunately become one of the things far too many people try to avoid these days, but I realized the other day that it had been way too long since I have made myself any bread, and it was a situation I personally had to remedy.

Crispy Loaf
Slightly adapted from: The Joy Kitchen

2 teaspoons instant yeast
1 1/4 cups warm water
4 1/4 cups flour
2 tablespoons shortening
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/4 teaspoon salt
2 egg whites

Mix 2 1/2 cups flour, the yeast, shortening, sugar and water in a bowl, then mix in the salt.

Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form, the fold into the dough. Gradually mix in the remaining flour until the dough is soft but no longer sticky.

Knead until the dough is smooth and elastic. Transfer to a greased bowl, grease the top of the dough and cover with saran wrap. Allow to rise for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, or until doubled.

Punch down the dough, knead it briefly then let rise again until doubled. Repeat once more, then shape into a loaf. Allow to rise until doubled.

Preheat the oven to 425F. Transfer the loaf to a parchment covered baking sheet, then place in the oven and immediately throw in some ice to steam.

Bake for approximately 40 minutes, turning once half way through. Loaf should register about 200F on a thermometer inserted in. Allow to cool completely before cutting. Enjoy

This loaf was better tasting than anything I could buy, and well worth the time for that smell alone.

I hope you’ll try this, or something else that you’ve been putting off for lack of time. It’s well worth it to do one little thing like this, to make time for yourself and indulge a little.