Strawberry blender ice cream!

That is, "strawberry" and "blender" are both adjectives that modify "ice cream," rather than "strawberry" modifying "blender." Just for the sake of clarity. Also, I'm frankly kind of impressed with myself at how long-winded I can make a post about five-minute ice cream.

I've cooked quite a few Delishus Thangs since my last post which I haven't talked about (including egg drop soup several times, because it is amazingly easy and yummy and filling and I think it's going to become to me what tuna casserole was to my mom, and also a red velvet cake and curried butternut pear soup for a friend's birthday), but I'm unearthing this again because I've been experimenting with a particular recipe. And experimentation with recipes makes me feel like a Real Cook!

Okay, rewind. So I wanted to make homemade ice cream for a party last Wednesday, but I didn't have an ice cream maker. When I found a recipe for cooked-then-frozen custard, I thought I'd hit the jackpot and made a big double batch. And it was perfectly tasty! Unfortunately, it was also not nearly fluffy enough, so it froze nearly solid in the mixing bowl and even once thawed enough to serve was crunchy with ice crystals. It also had so much heavy cream in it that after eating it the inside of your mouth felt like you'd just wolfed a big, yummy bowl of vegetable shortening. Blech. I made a valiant effort to eat the leftovers (almost all of it) and every time I had to eat nearly an entire sleeve of soda crackers to get the residue out. I ended up tossing the rest of the custard in the garbage.

Disappointed, I decided to try a recipe that I'd seen but passed over because, I'll admit, it was much simpler and thus less impressive. Three ingredients: frozen strawberries, heavy cream, and sugar. The cream nearly spooked me away, but it turned out there wasn't not enough of it to result in shortening-mouth. I'd expected such a shortcut recipe to be only-kinda-ice-cream, but the texture is very nearly perfect, and it tastes like something between strawberry ice cream and strawberry sorbet.

Here's the thing, though, if you try it: Measurements aren't that important (when I tried it a second time I didn't even measure at all; I just approximated and poured directly from the cream and sugar containers) but if you want ice cream, don't serve immediately like the recipe says, or it'll end up being more of a creamy smoothie. Pop it in the freezer for a couple hours. It tastes delicious either way, but it's hard to get the pretty little scoops in the recipe picture if your ice cream is glop. (I was surprised to find that if put in the freezer immediately it didn't turn into an ice cube either. Yay!) Another tip: It may just be my blender, but chopping up the strawberries did require repeatedly stopping to push the berries down into the blades. 'S cool, it all works out in the end.

Closing thought of the day: Made pancakes in a pan for the first time, and I'm forced to wonder... Would the awesomeness of being able to flip pancakes in the air and catch them be worth the inevitable catastrophic mess required by the learning process? Hmmmmmm.

Continue reading...

Yankee Doodle Yummies and Lemon Sponge Pudding

I'd sworn off baking for a while a couple days before the Fourth, but when my friend Rachel invited me to come with them for fireworks I decided I'd make an exception for some picnicky treats. After all, I wouldn't be eating them--mostly--and so they wouldn't go to MY hips, right? I'd had my eye on my roommate's cake decorating bag tips (don't worry, Joy, I washed them out afterward!) so I got on allrecipes.com for a cookie recipe and an icing recipe. I wasn't trying to get creative, since I was saving that for the decorating, so I didn't do anything daring with my picks. There were just two differences from the recipes as given: Since I didn't have any lemon extract, I used almond extract instead in the cookies, and since I wanted the icing to air-dry and allow the decorated cookies to stack afterward, I left out one of the tablespoons of milk. I didn't figure it would harm the icing that much, and indeed it didn't seem to negatively affect the stiffness while decorating at all, and the icing did dry nicely afterward. Oh, nearly forgot--I didn't have enough flour for a full batch of cookies, so I divided the recipe in half, and it STILL made way too many cookies! XD

The cookies were very crisp, especially the ones that didn't get iced, for the good reason that they were pretty dang greasy. They didn't taste greasy, but the ones I left drying out on a paper plate overnight left grease marks. I'm not really surprised; if you look at the recipe, it has both butter AND vegetable oil! Glah! Glad I gave most of those away, haha. The icing was delicious and not nearly as grease-laden. I divided it into three batches and colored two of them, and spent a while the night of the 3rd decorating a pie-plate full of them. THEY SO PURTY. x3





























I also made some meringue cookies as a low-cal alternative, but almost all of them collapsed or kind of melted except for one little batch, which I took over to Rachel's, and even those were pretty crumbly by the time we opened the tupperware tub. I expressed concern over my apparent inability to make a meringue, and Rachel's mom pointed out that it was because of the humidity. MAJOR FACEPALM. I feel much better about it now, but that hasn't kept the humidity from pretty much dissolving the leftover collapsed meringues back home until I finally had to throw them out.

Now that we're all caught up! So today I had a root canal, and they numbed my face all up, right? Well, after trying to eat a bowl of ramen and chomping all over my lips and tongue, I thought "You know what would be yummy? Some pudding!" But of course I have no pudding in the apartment, and no money to buy pudding mix with because my debit card STILL hasn't come. -_- So I looked up some recipes, and after flipping through a couple dozen on allrecipes.com, finally found one that didn't call for cornstarch or molasses or a dozen egg yolks or any number of other things I had no more of than pudding mix.

It was this recipe for lemon sponge pudding, and, well, long story short, although I tried very hard and believed in myself and even had half a fresh lemon still hanging around, something went wrong at some stage of adding the egg, I think, and I ended up with kind of a lumpy lemon soup. Also way too much zest. It was still tasty, though, despite the something to be desired in the texture, and I could eat it without chewing up my tingly face. It was just five minutes of prep time, and served two very nicely in individual mugs (I don't have custard cups, so I improvised), so I'm sure I'll have to try this again for my roommate and I.

Continue reading...

Welcome to my new blog! Have a cookie!

I moved out for the first time around three weeks ago. Since then, I have baked about four batches of chocolate chip cookies, meringue-topped cookie bars, a wild-berry cake, a spiced peach pie, a banana cream pie, Swedish cardamom cookies, meringue cookies, lemon curd sandwich tea cookies, two loaves of banana bread, and ginger candy.

When the parents said I could have our old standing mixer, I'm sure they had no idea what it would end up going through.

Cooking and baking is my new favorite therapy. I shudder to think of the amount of money I've spent on flour, sugar, and butter already. The ideal outcome of all this is that I become the kind of cook who can tell when a recipe has too much of one thing or another and can tweak and improvise and maybe even someday invent. To do that, though, I have to know what I choose to do different each time, so this blog is going to be where I keep track of stuff like that! It's also where I'll show off my creations and vent about whatever went wrong this time around. So, yay!

Continue reading...