More Ice Creamy Deicioiusness

I love ice cream. Since I started making it myself every week, I've started liking it even more. This cannot be a healthy combination. Seriously.

The glorious thing about making my own ice cream is the freedom of flavour. Once I nailed the basic formula for making french ice cream (a rich, egg yolky custard base infused with whatever flavour I want topped off with pureed fruit)I realized that I could do anything. The sky is the limit! Honestly, this kind of freedom is a bit intimidating. With great power comes great responsibility and all. I will restrain myself from using liver pate or salmon roe in ice cream and calling it 'gourmet'. Euch.

When I have the opportunity to buy ice cream, I never choose strawberry. However the last two flavours I've made had a strawberry base. They're in season right now and you can't go wrong with fresh fruit in pretty much anything. The fresh part has this weird ability to make anything taste good.

Strawberry-Mint ice cream was probably the best. After infusing the milk with fresh mint leaves for nearly and hour, the milk had turned a bright green colour and the kitchen smelled deliciously fresh. This batch of ice cream was gone within minutes of coming out of the churner. The strawberry-anise seed ice cream needed to be stronger, but was very yummy nonetheless. I'll write up a post later about infusing milk or cream with fragrants and then you can do it too. It's really simple, but requires a fair bit of patience. Once you get it though, you'll have the world at your fingertips.

Weirdest cake I've made yet: Chocolate Avocado Cake with Avocado Buttercream

Weird. That's all I have to say about it. Weird.

Well I could say a little bit more about it I guess. I could say that I was really bored yesterday and was given the task to come up with some bizarre, unusual and absolutely delicious cake flavor combinations (my plan is to call these unlikely creations my Kinky Kakes. I think it works. Don't judge me.). Also, there were a bunch of avocados in the fridge that looked like they weren't going to be eaten any time soon. I figured I was doing the world a service by using these avocados to create something scrumptious and chocolaty instead of losing them in the chaos of the fridge and eventually chucking them in the trash.

Of course it wasn't like I had a cook book filled with recipes for avocado gateau-- "Odd and Unusual Gateau to Delight and Confound your Palate". I actually kinda like the sound of that. Copyright Erin!! Anyhow... I turned to the Google machine. Oddly enough, avocado cake is a really popular confection in the vegan world and pulls up thousands of hits (although how many of those are actual avocado cakes and not bizarre tree fruit kink, I have no idea). The first and most promising link was to Joy the Baker. Not being one to patiently sift through all the options, I went for this recipe without a second thought.

It's a super simple recipe, a lot like Martha Stewart's One Bowl Chocolate Cake actually. No mixer needed, no praying to the French gods of gateau for success ("gateau" is the word of the day in case you hadn't noticed). Sift, mix, combine, bake, Voilá! The chocolate cake that emerges out of the depths of the oven is beautiful to behold. A perfectly moist chocolate cake with little flecks of green and just the slightest tang that is nearly impossible to place (the green flecks kind of give it away).

Then comes that bright green avocado buttercream that tops everything off with a flourish. The exclamation point to this statement of a dessert. And I've got to say that it's this "buttercream" that makes the cake so... odd. It has a very nutty taste with a strong citrus overtone that confuses your tastebuds for a moment before you finally nail just what that green goo really is. A lot of credit goes to my little brother who ate an entire piece without flinching. Even when he figured out what was in it half way through.

All told, the cake was a bit odd, but not as odd as it could be. I would definitely make the chocolate cake again--it was moist and delicate and chocolaty and ... oddly healthy. Next time though (and there will be a next time), I will make it with a lime curd and only put the avocado buttercream on the top of the cake. Make it a little less intense. But just a little...

Recipe here!

Is it possible to have a food enemy?

There are three foods in this world that I just cannot enjoy (aside from cheese, which I am slowly starting to appreciate and even admire). Olives, liver and white chocolate. Don't get me wrong, I haven't just written these foods off because of their smell or a single bad experience, I just cannot for the life of me get myself to enjoy them. The really unfortunate part of this is that I desperately want to enjoy them.

Except for olives. They're just yucky.

My parents both love love love liver. They order it at restaurants and drool over it at home. By rights, I should enjoy liver too. However, instead of salivating at the sight and smell of offal, my esophagus closes right up and I can taste the bile rising in my stomach. Delightful, eh?
Believe me, I've tried to eat liver. After reading in Julie&Julia about the delicate buttery taste of finely prepared chicken livers and seeing carefully put together dishes of liver on menus, I have tried my best to gulp down a forkful. Not successful. Not even a little bit. So even though I want to be adventurous and cook up a pan of chicken livers with something french and fancy sounding to go along side them, I cannot. This makes me sad.

As for white chocolate... I mostly just find this confection to be a frustrating pain in the ass that pops up everywhere I don't want it to. I still use the stuff. I think I'm deluding myself by believing that if I use it enough I will learn to like it. So far I have only learned that white chocolate can be very expensive and never to mix it with cream cheese no matter what the recipe says.

I made a cake this weekend, a prototype cake for a 50th wedding anniversary that I'm baking for in August. The only request was that the cake be lemony. So I got out my books (of which I have way way too many) and searched through them to find the very best sounding lemon cake. Of course it would have to be the cake with the white chocolate lemon buttercream icing that looked the best by far. Couldn't be the one with the regular chocolate buttercream or the one with the fancy italian meringue buttercream... nope, it had to be the one that called for the really expensive and hard to find white chocolate that made up the buttercream.

When the recipe specifically asked for Green & Black's white chocolate with Madagascar vanilla bean seeds I let myself think that maybe my disdain for white chocolate came from the lower quality white chocolate that I just bought from the bins at Superstore. So I (naively) phoned around to find this elusive brand of chocolate that turned out to cost $4.87 per 100grams at the community health foods store. Awesome. Not only did I have to shell out $15.00 on chocolate I wasn't even gonna like, I would have to go to the grocery store that smelled like patchouli, body odor and guilt (for eating pig) (I love pig).

Long story short, the cake was delicious. A buttery almond lemon cake that, while dense, absolutely melted in your mouth with the lemon curd that filled each of the layers. I didn't even mind the tangy white chocolate taste that came from the buttercream. When placed with the cake and the lemon curd, it all balanced out really nicely. But is it worth the super expensive imported chocolate? I gave out samples of the cake to people at work and they seemed to agree that yes, it was worth the money.

But I still don't like the stuff. I can't help it.

Saskatoonberry Ginger Ice Cream

I bought myself another toy. This new toy (like all my toys) has made me very excited because in 10 minutes and $70.00 it allowed me to venture into a whole new area of delightful food: the frozen dessert.

Frickin' ICE CREAM!!! I bought an ice cream maker and it is awesome.
Yes, it was a little bit more than I would have liked to spend on an ice cream maker--the ideal amount being closer to $0... But from what I've read, this baby will last me for a very long time if I give it the proper love and attention it deserves. A good thing because I plan on trying out a new flavour as often as I can manage.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to learn to be patient with my new little toy (and in life). The instructions that came in the box said to let the canister cool in the freezer for 6-22 hours, so naturally I figured that 5 hours would be enough to bust out some world class Hagendaz. Oh Erin... how naive. After standing over the mixing soupy swirl of purple cream for 45 minutes (when the instructions said only 25) I decided that I should maybe just throw it all in the freezer before I blow the motor on the first day.

After a night in the freezer though... wow. That ice cream was decadent and creamy and a little bit gritty because of all the seeds that I was too lazy to strain out, but good god it was delicious. I managed to create a roomful of smiling people with black chunks of saskatoonberry in their teeth. It was glorious.

The Saskatoon berry Ginger Ice Cream was adapted from Not So Humble Pie with saskatoons substituted for raspberries, a minced knob of fresh ginger in lieu of the candied variety, and a splash (that's right, a 'splash', I went there) of vanilla added in with the whole milk. I think it worked out amazing considering I completely botched the (very essential) churning step of the ice creaming process. Next time I think I'll try using just whole milk instead of mixing it with the heavy cream and maybe less sugar. Also, slightly less ginger. I really enjoyed it, but I don't think my family really appreciated the acute burning sensation that accompanied their ice creamy goodness...

Hee hee!! I love my ice cream!!

Fowl, Fleurs and Failures

I've been lazy lately. In an ideal world, I would update this blog with some new and exciting gastronomic adventure every single day. As it is however, I have discovered that making something fantastic (or truly awful) every day is more difficult than I had expected. It's tempting to give in after work and go to Macdonald's for dinner (delicious delicious Macdonald's...) or to just whip up some scones for dessert and say that they aren't worth it to share (even though they are scrumptious). I also make the excuse that I can't put enough pictures up on here because the ravenous hoards get to my food before I can get to my camera, and while this is very much true, I could make a more concerted effort to fend off such ravenous hoards that come my way.

So here I give to you my failures and successes of the past two weeks along with a fresh resolve to update much more frequently (and with more photos).

Vanilla Bean Butter Cake with Saskatoonberry curd filling and "Classic Americana Icing" from Organic and Chic--FAIL
I made these mini cakes that I thought would be really fun in bright colours and varying sizes. The cake itself was really yummy, and while the saskatoonberry curd was a bit bland, I'll admit it was a hit with everyone. The real issues for me went along with the "Classic Americana Icing"--an icing that consists of one cup of butter and SEVEN cups of icing sugar. The book said that this particular icing was good for little cakes like this because it was so versatile and good for decorating. Not true. The icing was so thick and dense that it was nearly impossible to get it on the cakes without the cakes crumbling into mush. Added to that, it was very very overwhelmingly sweet. Blech. One lick of the spoon and my pancreas was in overdrive. Maybe this icing would do better on sturdier cupcakes or something aimed at a more sugar-centric demographic, ie. six year olds. Someone else's six year olds.

Stuffed Maple Glazed Cornish Hens from... somewhere on the web--SUCCESS
I found cornish game hens at the supermarket for cheap and decided that I would take a running jump at these miniature birds. It was a good jump. In fact, it was such a good jump that I did it again not five days after the initial jump. Never having had cornish game hens before, I had no idea what to expect, so when the result was tender, juicy, succulent meat that was stunningly easy to prepare, I was thrilled. The key was the glaze that I poured on the hens half way through their time in the oven. A mix of maple syrup, dijon mustard, and melted butter. Sweet baby Jesus. Alas, due to the delicious nature of these little birds, there are no pictures. Re: Ravenous hoards.

Some Fluers-- SUCCESS (surprisingly...)
This is what I have been doing on my time off from work:

I think I'm getting pretty good at it. Aside from parts of it being so frustrating that I want to pull out my own hair, it's pretty fun. And I think this is what makes the failure: success ratio so encouraging. Or at least has made me forget the other things that could be squeezed into the FAIL column.