Backyard Mint Ice Cream from “Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home”

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Kiesha

So my friend Danae over at The Busty Baker has declared it Ice Cream Week on her blog, so I am shamelessly stealing the idea. I’ve made three different ice creams since my last post (Jeni’s The Buckeye State ice cream) and I’ve just been sitting on the photos. All the recipes have come from Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home and I’ve had great success for the most part.

Up first: Backyard Mint!

My favorite summer seasonal flavor at Jeni’s scoop shops was always Backyard Mint. It’s a delectable mix of cream and mint with nary a hint of vanilla in sight. It hits you in the face with mint and it was always fantastic on its own or paired with Belgian Milk Chocolate. Insert Homer Simpson noise here. I hope Jeni opens a shop in Park Slope soon.

Putting this ice cream together is super simple, probably among the simplest in the entire book. The only problem is adding the mint. The cookbook calls for a ‘small handful’, but that’s a fairly subjective amount. I went with about 10-15 mint leaves and it might have been a touch much. I love mint, but hooooo boy, was this minty! Next time I think I’ll tone it down just a smidge.

Out of the four flavors I’ve made so far, this is our second favorite. The Buckeye State is still winning and I’m planning to make a second batch this week!

Stay tuned, next up will be Watermelon Lemonade Sorbet!

Jeni’s The Buckeye State Ice Cream

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Kiesha

There are a few things I miss about Ohio. Friends top the list, but Jeni’s ice cream is in the Top 10.

If you’ve never been to Columbus, Ohio, you may never have experienced Jeni’s. Let me break it down for you; it’s the best ice cream you will ever eat. I know, I know, you think your local ice cream joint is the best, but you’re wrong. Jeni’s transcends ice cream and becomes something altogether different, wonderful and heavenly.

So when Jeni Britton Bauer announced that she was releasing a cookbook revealing all her ice cream secrets, a cheer went up in Columbus and around the country. Finally a chance to do it ourselves! And for those of us who have moved away, a chance to experience that taste fresh and not packed in pints and shipped to us in dry ice.

I ordered my cookbook and the day it came, I spent an obscene amount of time lusting over the pictures and the recipes. And I was thrilled to discover so many recipes for flavors that don’t have chunks or bits, which is one of my pet peeves. I can handle flecks of chocolate, but I absolutely hate chunks of fruit or seeds or nuts or anything that requires chewing. Here was Dark Chocolate and Backyard Mint and Apple Cider Sorbet and so many other smooth, creamy homogenous flavors.

I got my cookbook the week before we were leaving for a week-long vacation, so I decided to wait to make something. Yesterday, I settled on The Buckeye State; peanut butter ice cream with a touch of honey and dark chocolate freckles. I never liked peanut butter ice cream as a kid, but the first time I tasted The Buckeye State, I fell in love.

The recipe was very easy to follow, although it did require quite a few bowls. But doing dishes was worth it. It turned out perfect.

Luckily, we left the house for quite a few hours right after I put the ice cream in the freezer. I don’t know how I would have contained myself if I’d been home with that not-quite-solidified ice cream in the freezer. As soon as we got home last night, we dug into it.

Rob took one bite, looked at me and said, “You can’t tell the difference.”

Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at home, indeed.

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Kiesha

This weekend was definitely a Jerseylicious weekend. We spent Saturday with friends and Sunday with family. As the food front was covered in spades with our family, I decided to bring dessert to the friends’ gathering.

Lately I have been trying to bake things that I’ve never made before. It’s my goal for the rest of the year to make a lot of stuff that is off my beaten path. So I decided to bake a pie that was neither apple nor pumpkin. I’d bake a Strawberry Rhubarb Pie.

I’m not the biggest fan of strawberries. I love the flavor, but the texture always bothers me. I tend to find those little seeds in my teeth for days. And rhubarb? I can’t say that before Saturday I ever ate it in my life. It certainly doesn’t look like something that would be good in a pie.

Nevertheless, I busted out Martha Stewart’s Pate Brise recipe from her Baking Handbook and found a fairly simple filling recipe over at Epicurious.

I also cut out hearts out of pie crust dough for the top of my pie, although the next time I do this, I’m going to buy a smaller heart cookie cutter. These hearts looked like I’d spooned biscuit dough on top of my pie and they sorta resembled hearts…

Epicurious recommends baking the pie for 20 minutes at 400 degrees and then lowering the temperature to 350 and baking for another hour and 20 minutes. I pulled my pie out 20 minutes early, because it had reached that point between smelling good and emitting smoke. I think I made the right decision, as the crust was a beautiful golden brown and the filling solidified within two hours.

And talk about solidifying! This was quite possibly the easiest chunky fruit pie I’ve ever sliced up. No oozing, no falling apart, just clean, smooth slices. Beautiful!

Everyone loved this pie. Even I liked this pie! The texture was good, chunky, but still solid and the flavor was great. Not too sweet, not too sour, but somewhere right in the middle. And I think it was my best pie crust to date.

I’ve also got to say I’m pretty pumped with my photos from this pie. I was working with less than ideal sunlight, but after a little Photoshopping, they came out looking pretty snazzy.

Vegan Cookies and Cream Cupcakes

Posted on June 22, 2011 by Kiesha

This past weekend Rob and I had a backyard barbecue for Father’s Day. We invited Rob’s dad as well as his sister and her fiance over on Sunday for some beer and grilled meats.

Well, grilled meats and a grilled black bean patty for my vegan sister-in-law.

I knew I’d be baking something vegan for dessert, so I pulled out my trusty copy of “Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World”. There was a very tempting lemon and blueberry number that I almost went for, until reading that it needed to be served immediately after assembling. I planned to bake the night before the barbecue, so I needed something that would hold up for 12 hours or more.

I flipped to the beginning of the book and looked at the chocolate cupcake and noticed the Cookies and Cream variation. It’s basically a chocolate cupcake with vanilla ‘butter’cream frosting with half a package of chocolate sandwich cookies crushed up and thrown in. Sounded like something i could definitely do.

I forgot to make a turn down the organic section at our grocery store and quickly discovered that that is probably where they keep the Newman-O’s, so I picked up Oreos instead. Yes, folks, Oreos are vegan! Which means that there isn’t anything even resembling milk in those bad boys. Hooray for chemicals! Tasty, tasty chemicals.

Anyhoo, everything went according to plan, save for the fact that I used a large round tip to frost them when I should have went with a star tip. It worked out okay, I think. Everyone was very happy with these cupcakes and four of us polished off two each in short order. Rob’s dad was the only one with any restraint.

Photos!

So stunning in black and white!

Doukhobor Baked Goods at Largehearted Lit

Posted on June 19, 2011 by Kiesha

As you might remember, a couple of weeks ago I posted about my friend Alina Simone releasing both a book and an album at the same time. Another friend, David over at Largehearted Boy, hosts a monthly event at Word bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. For June’s event, he welcomed Alina Simone as well as Wesley Stace and a special performance by Amanda Palmer.

You may also remember that Alina asked me to provide refreshments for the event, in the form of Doukhobor baked goods. I selected two items from her Doukhobor cookbook and crossed my fingers. Rob and I went over to Alina’s apartment (she has a bigger kitchen than I do) and about five hours later I had created Apple, Raspberry and Apple/Raspberry Fruit Tart Pastries as well as Orange Cookies. They got good reviews from Alina and Rob and on the night of the event, there were only four Apple tarts left out of the three dozen tarts and three dozen cookies. I would say they were a hit!

It was actually pretty cool hearing Wesley Stace (AKA John Wesley Harding) tell me that my Raspberry Tarts were delicious. Yay!

Some photos of the baked goods and the event:

Doukhobor Baked Goods

Orange Cookies

Fruit Tart Pastries

David from Largehearted Boy

Alina Simone

Wesley Stace

Amanda Palmer

As a side note, because we drove Alina to the event in our car, we ended up driving Alina, Amanda Palmer and Eugene Mirman home, as we all live in South Slope. It was one of the more surreal nights I’ve had in New York.

As a second side note, this post definitely wins for most links embedded in a post.

French Toast and Bacon Cupcakes

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Kiesha

This past Sunday I took a DIY Food Photography class at Brooklyn Brainery, a ‘trade school’ that offers cheap, informative classes on pretty much anything you can imagine. In addition to DIY Food Photography, this month they also offered classes on Knot Tying, WordPress and Intro to Urban Forestry, among others.

We were instructed to bring a piece of fruit or a vegetable to photograph, or, if we were feeling more adventurous, something a little more complex. I figured that since I’ve a baking blog, I should probably take a baked good. And what would be a good, complex thing to photograph that wouldn’t take hours to create?

The answer came in the form of The Busty Baker’s French Toast and Bacon Cupcakes, cupcakes which blew me away the first time I saw them back at CupcakeCampColumbus 1.0. They were delicious and a sight to behold, with a little crowning piece of bacon on top.

So I whipped up a batch. The most difficult part of this cupcake (besides realizing I was out of piping bags and wasting half a batch of frosting trying to use a piping tip in a Ziploc bag) was cooking the bacon. I’m a skillet girl myself, but I wanted my pieces of bacon to be as flat as possible, so I went the microwave route. The first round of microwaved bacon got burnt black and left my entire apartment smelling like a pig in an incinerator. I finally got a handle on the cooking times and turned out some lovely pieces of bacon.

They certainly were a talking point at the class. Everyone else brought fruit or vegetables, which are very pretty, but come on. How often do you just NEED to photograph an onion? I am of the opinion that most of the people in that class will find themselves documenting full dishes than just the ingredients.

The class was great and I learned some very important things about my camera’s setting and how to use Photoshop to manipulate photos. I also learned that if I really want to get serious in photographing my food, I need to buy another lens. Isn’t that always the way?

Update: You can read another blog post about this event at Julia C. Smith‘s blog. Check out her pretty radish photos!

More photos!

Vegan Orange Cupcakes with Orange Pudding Filling and Orange ‘Butter’cream

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Kiesha

On Memorial Day weekend, my husband and I threw our first barbecue of 2011. We fired up our grill and made some delicious Pat LaFrieda burgers and invited over our friends Brian and Alison and their three kids.

The two eldest kids have some dairy sensitivities, so I decided to make vegan treats for them. A chance view at a baking blog revealed Orange Cupcakes, which I realized came from “Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World”. They looked delicious, so I decided to tackle to them.

These are fairly simple to make, if a little time-consuming. And they’re soooo tasty. We all really enjoyed them and they’ve made the list to be repeated.

Literary Treats in Brooklyn: Doukhobor Baked Goods for Alina Simone/John Wesley Harding

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Kiesha

My friend Alina Simone is releasing both a new album AND a book in June and asked me if I would be interested in providing baked goods as refreshments for her release event at Word bookstore on Wednesday, June 8. There was just one catch; she wanted Doukhobor baked goods.

You can read all about the Doukhobors here. They’re basically a group of people of Russian descent who now mostly live in Canada, whose ancestors left the Russian empire way back in the late 1800′s due to religious differences. That’s the super-duper Reader’s Digest condensed version of the story.

Anyway, a chapter of Alina’s new book “You Must Go and Win” concerns the Doukhobors and during the research process, she bought a Doukhobor cookbook in Canada. Alina thought it would be a lot of fun to feature some of those items at her book release event and sent several scanned pages to me.

As I plan to bake the night before the event, I needed to select some items that would hold up overnight. I ended up going with the mini tart pastries (which will most likely be filled with apple and/or sour cherry) and orange cookies.

This free event is sponsored by Largehearted Boy and will feature both Alina and musician/author John Wesley Harding reading and performing music. Come on down, get some culture and try some of the baked goods! You can RSVP here on Facebook and I look forward to meeting you!

Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

Posted on May 22, 2011 by Kiesha

A couple of weeks ago I finally decided it was time to bust out one of my favorite recipes; Lemon Meringue Cupcakes. I don’t make them often because they are fairly labor intensive, but the craving had reached astounding proportions and I knew it was time to whip up some lemon curd and get to business.

I took these to work, where they were devoured in seconds flat. The best response came from one of the women in my office who ate hers and then left a note for me on my desk:

The recipe comes from Culinary in the Desert and hasn’t failed me yet. I highly recommend giving this one a try. But you’ll have to do your very best to not just stand in front of your refrigerator, eating the lemon curd as it cools. It’s incredibly addicting.

Bloggers Bake for Hope

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Kiesha

Don’t those Oatmeal Cream Pies look good? Wouldn’t you love to sink your teeth right into one? What’s that, you say? You don’t live in the New York area, so how can you possibly get your hands on one of these?

Well, if you have the winning bid, you can get your hands on 12 of them!

I am participating in a virtual bake sale Wednesday and Thursday as part of Bloggers Bake for Hope, a sort of silent auction wherein people can bid on various baked goods donated by bloggers. The person who wins each auction then gets the baked goods baked fresh and shipped to them! All proceeds from this virtual bake sale go to the Massachusetts affiliate of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure organization (the organizers of the bake sale are from Massachusetts).

Beginning at 12 a.m. on Wednesday, May 4 and running through 11:59 p.m. Thursday, May 5, you can place your bid on my Oatmeal Cream Pies or on one of the many other delicious-looking baked goods available by visiting this link. Starting at midnight tonight, the bidding links will go live and you will be able to click to submit your bid.

Be sure to keep checking on the item you bid on, because other people may outbid you and you will NOT get notification.

Here’s to raising money for a good cause and getting baked goods in the mail!