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Endless Ice Cream: Peanut Butter Pretzel Ice Cream Truffles

At some point last year I came across a recipe for ice cream truffles. It seemed easy enough. You scoop the ice cream, flash freeze the scoops, coat them in melted chocolate, freeze a little while longer, then indulge. So I grabbed a pint of  Häagen-Dazs vanilla bean ice cream out of the freezer and happily started away.

Good lord, it was a holy disaster. I’m pretty sure it ended with everything thrown unceremoniously in the garbage, quickly followed by the crack of a beer. But since I started making my own ice cream, my mind has often wandered back to that terrible day, and made me wonder exactly what went wrong. I started researching and I determined it was three things:

1) When the ice cream scoops started to melt I kept going instead of popping them back into the freezer.

2) When the temperature of the chocolate dropped and quit adhering easily to the ice cream I did not heat it up again.

3) Dipping the ice cream with my hands was messy and slow, increasing the speed of melted ice cream and cooling chocolate.

So I decided to give it another whirl, and this time the results were pretty fantastic…

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in Desserts / Endless Ice Cream / Featured / Recipe 0 comments
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What the Hell am I Supposed to Do With All These Egg Whites?

As I mention in the custard-based ice cream recipes, egg whites can be refrigerated or frozen and used later. If you refrigerate them they should be used within a couple days; in the freezer they will last for a couple weeks.

Now there are quite a few ways to use them up. One is to simply beat a couple into your omelet or scrambled eggs in the morning. Another is meringue topping for a pie, or light meringue cookies (like French macarons). Coconut macaroons are always delicious (and easily frozen for a make-ahead dessert). Egg whites are great for sealing homemade pierogies or raviolis. My favorite way to use up a good amount of egg whites is making these utterly awesome friands, or tea cakes, from Ottolenghi.

To say I’m obsessed with Yotam Ottolenghi is a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much. I love that man. The accessibility and ingenuity of his recipes never fails to surprise me. To date, I’ve easily made over 3 dozen of his recipes, and not one has been a flop. This is my favorite of his desserts.

Blackberry and Star Anise Friands

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Endless Ice Cream: Coffee-Maple-Bacon

My house in the summer gets disgustingly, unbearably hot. I once clocked 96 degrees in our living room. This means the oven pretty much gets a three-month vacation starting in June. However, no air conditioning can be the mother of invention. I’m forced to grill everything (I’ve made pizza, soup, bread, even lasagna on the grill), or get creative with no-cook and make-ahead recipes. This ice cream is in anticipation of those sticky, crabby mornings where it’s so hot I dream about moving to Alberta.

Whole bean coffee is steeped in cream, then cooked into a custard base. Maple syrup is whisked into the chilled custard. Then after it’s churned you fold in some pre-made chopped, candied bacon.

So there you have it: coffee, bacon, eggs, and maple syrup. Ice cream breakfast. If you’re lucky enough to have air conditioning, make pancakes and scoop this on top of ’em. I guess I’ll be tinkering with cast iron skillet pancakes on the grill.

Coffee-Maple-Bacon Ice Cream

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in Bacon / Breakfast / Desserts / Endless Bacon / Endless Ice Cream / Featured / Pig 1 comments
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10-Word Recipe: Roasted Strawberries

Sprinkle with sugar.

Bake at 350.

10 to 15 minutes.

Toss ’em in your oatmeal or on your pancakes. Just do it.

in Photos / Recipe 2 comments
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Sugar + Bacon = Pig Candy

Over on the ES Facebook page, we got a request in for a pig candy recipe. Well, ask and yea shall receive, ES-ers. Especially if it involves bacon and dessert. And yes, we will be putting this in ice cream later this week. Obviously.

1. Preheat the oven to 375F. On a foil-lined rimmed baking sheet (the sugar gets real messy) place the bacon strips about an inch apart. With the back of a spoon, press a tablespoon of brown sugar onto the top of each bacon strip. Now this is just your most basic recipe. To embellish it is really simple, just whisk the brown sugar with a little of whatever you want: cayenne, curry, ground anise, cinnamon, cocoa powder, black pepper…you get the idea.

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in Bacon / Pig / Recipe 2 comments
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Friday Fuck-Up: Just One More Minute

So these are Momofuku’s Corn Cookies. Yes, they should be yellow, not brown. I am pretty good about using a timer when I am working on several projects around the house at once. However, when the timer went off for these I peeked and saw two of the cookies still had a slightly uncooked middle, so I popped them back in for ‘just one more minute’. I promptly got distracted by laughing at all the things that are not artisan, and about 6 minutes later smelled something funny. So I quickly grabbed them out of the oven, but it was too late. The first batch were goners.

But wait! This fuck-up is two-fold:

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in Desserts 9 comments
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