Tutorial: The Easiest Ice Cream

If you're reading this blog, you're probably the type of person who knows that National Ice Cream Month is in full swing.

Or perhaps you caught one of the countless segments about this all-important issue on most every morning news and talk show some time in the past three weeks?

I don't miss those crazy PR blitzes from my days as a morning show producer, but this is a pitch at which I would have happily bit.

It's clear that National Ice Cream Month was dreamed up by the dairy industry in a bid to boost sales, and I've certainly done my part to help. One summer in college, I inadvertently observed an almost all ice cream diet and ended up losing more than a few pounds.

What I'd do for a Wegmans in SF...

This year, on  National Ice Cream Day (the third Sunday in July) my family and I appropriately found ourselves at a dairy farm in Woodstock, Vermont.

My nephew getting a lesson on where ice cream comes from.

Dukan Diet be damned - of course I also had to sample the local offerings. I wondered how I spent two and half years living and working in the Vermont TV market without ever having being introduced to a maple creemee.

But I digress.

There are still almost two weeks left in this magnificent, once-a-year, 31-day celebration, and have I ever got an idea for how you can mark the occassion: make your own ice cream!

I'm not asking you to run out and buy a bulky machine, or rock salt, or anything fancy at all.
Are you ready for this? All you need are ten minutes, a mixer, and just two very basic ingredients to start making ice cream that will easily rival your favorite brand. 

Flavors and mix-ins are limited only by your imagination. Here I've got macadamia nuts to go with white chocolate, bacon to go with salted caramel, and a mix of strawberries and pomegranate.

 

 

Step 1

Start with 1 pint of heavy whipping cream.
Whip until peaks form.
You don't need a stand mixer, a hand mixer will do the trick.

 

Step 2

Empty a 14oz. can of sweetened condensed milk into a bowl.
Mix in flavors and ingredients of your choosing.

Step 3

Fold whipped cream into condensed milk mixture until uniformly combined.

Step 4

Pour mixture into a container and store in freezer.

(I hit up the clerk at a neighborhood take-out place for these cardboard tubs that were just perfect,  but you can use tupperware.)








And then comes the hardest part - waiting for it to freeze. And when it does, I promise this ice cream will be so creamy and smooth, you'll be able to convince people you slow-churned it by hand.

Caramel bacon on the left, strawberry-pomegranate on the right.

I know. It sounds too good to be true. But try it, and trust me, you'll be snickering to yourself the next time you see someone eyeing the elaborate ice cream maker display at Williams Sonoma.

Read This First: Demystifying the Macaron

I'm going to take another break  from writing about Paris sweets to, well, share a favorite post about a favorite Paris sweet, the macaron.

I started to notice how this delicate beauty was tres en vogue last summer, when it started showing up on most every dessert table pictured on most every party-planning or wedding blog.

So naturally I had to try making some.

I turned to the trusty interwebs to go about my research - reading post after discouraging post about how fickle macarons were, how hard it was to get everything "just right", and how one of many potential missteps would lead to disappointment. And if you know me, you know being meticulous is not really my bag.

But just as I was considering giving up, I came across this post on the BraveTart blog.

Read it before you read anything else on making macarons. 

Read it before you even read BraveTart's Ten Commandments of Macarons.

Read it before you finish reading this post, if you must.

Here goes nothing.

You don't need to take a class. And despite what you might read elsewhere, you don't need to buy a $200 scale, and you don't always need to grind your almond meal and sift your flour exactly 106 times at just the right altitude. Apparently you don't even need to use almonds, would you believe it!

I know because Stella at BraveTart took all the guesswork out of these once-mystical morsels, through a rigorous process of elimination.

From BraveTart:

I don’t know if my experiment would stand up to the rigors of the scientific method, but I did take a systematic approach. I standardized every aspect of my already stable recipe: the exact number of minutes spent mixing, weight and temperature of ingredients, oven temperature, baking time, etc.
Each day, I changed a single variable across multiple batches (generally three), and noted my results. I also tested variables by their absence. (Read more...)

I dove in head first, and look.

(Just ignore that one cracked one.)

I made these last May, having never set foot in France, and having only ever eaten a macaron maybe twice in my whole life. This lover of short-cuts and occasional experimenter achieved success on the first try. 

Except for one little experiment with caramel sauce, hee hee.

Don't use caramel topping as caramel filling. DUH.

Do use chocolate ganache...

or lemon curd, if you're into that.

Impress your friends and yourself.
Here's that link again, to BraveTart's blog post on Macaron Myths. Recipes follow.

2-minute Microwave Mug Cake

We interrupt our regularly-scheduled programming (i.e. my Paris Top Ten List) for this important message:

TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY. Time to kick it up a notch.

The day started with a completely corrupted version of what's supposed to be a healthy breakfast - oatmeal topped with crème brûlée at Zazie in San Francisco.

Criminal.

Why even bother with the oatmeal. I barely ate any of it (or many of the bananas, for that matter) if only because I had to save room for pancakes. It wouldn't be my birthday without pancakes.

Fast forward to night-time. Post chicken parmesan dinner, made by the mister, came dessert part one: Secret Breakfast Ice Cream from Humphry Slocombe. For the uninitiated, that's bourbon ice cream with corn flakes - Humphry's most popular flavor, but nowhere near its most offbeat (from NYT: Who Wants Prosciutto Ice Cream?)

And if you think the aforementioned prosciutto ice cream is wackadoo, up there on the right is Humphry's foie gras ice cream sandwich. That's right. Ice cream made with fattened goose liver, between two ginger snap cookies (a limited time offer, considering a ban on foie gras goes into effect in SF in July.)

Quite the line-up on my special day. But how does a guy really impress a girl whose life passion is cake?

Why, you get out the flour and bake, of course.

Or in the case of my better half, you get nukin'!

My Sweet (the human, not the blog) had filed away a blurb from Lucky Peach Magazine, which laid out instructions for a chocolate cake, that you make in a mug, in two minutes, in your flippin' microwave!!! 

Mind. Blown.

You could buy this:

Spotted at Cost Plus World Market

But why would you?

Recipes abound on the World Wide Web (just Google "mug cake.") A Pinterest search yields a Nutella-flavored version (mmmm...) repinned dozens of times.

Here's the Lucky Peach version, which calls for a few simple ingredients you probably already have on hand:

3 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 tablespoons whole milk
1 large egg
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 tablespoons (20 grams) all-purpose flour
4 tablespoons (45 grams) sugar
2 tablespoons (10 grams) unsweetened cocoa powder
Pinch salt
3 tablespoons (30 grams) semi-sweet chocolate chips 

In a medium sized microwave-safe mug, add the vegetable oil, whole milk, egg, and vanilla extract. Use a fork or small whisk to mix until combined. Add the flour, sugar, cocoa, and salt and mix until combined. Stir in the chocolate chips.
Bake in the microwave on high for two minutes. Serve immediately.

"Serve immediately?" Who's making this in advance? It only takes 2 minutes. And therein lies the danger of this magical microwavable love in a mug: low commitment plus instant gratification equals sweet, sweet temptation.

Encore!

Happy birthday to me.

Tart Art

Several of the new malls that have cropped up since my last visit to Singapore feature entire areas designed around the Japanese food hall concept. Tonight I visited one that had a Japanese tart shop that my mom had been raving about, Fruit Paradise Cafe.

The tarts were so artfully decorated with fresh fruit, they shellac'd a whole bunch and lined a wall with them.
 

But the real oohs and aahs come when the tarts are cut. Look how the perfect layers of sponge cake and bananas have been carefully inlaid in the tart below, creating a precise pattern suspended inside the cream filling.

These pictures really don't do them justice - I was trying to be fast and sneaky with my camera lest they tell me to stop taking photos like they did at the Icing Room.

 I read somewhere that when the chain first set up shop on the Island, they attracted such long lines of food-crazy Singaporeans, orders had to be limited to a maximum of 4 slices per person.

Green Grape Tart



The Japanese really do take their love for cute food very seriously. I'm wrapping up my trip to Singapore with a renewed desire to visit Japan, if for nothing else, the food art.