Butterbeer Ice Cream: Some Book Magic Turned Edible

My obsession with making ice cream continues with a slight turn towards my other favorite fan girl-ing interest--fantasy and sci-fi. I'm proud to say that I'm part of that group of kiddos that had the special privilege of growing up with Harry Potter. I take it as an assumption that anyone I meet that is my age has read Harry Potter. And if they haven't, I will happily give them either my paperback set, or my Chinese set if they read Chinese (unlike me LOL). If they want to read the British version of the first book, I have that as well. The hardcovers I can't loan out for two reasons. One, the third book's spine is broken after being read a few too many times out of love (there could be some excellent, albeit somewhat weird book reading and love comparisons going on here, but I'll just leave this song from Stars instead). The second reason I can't loan them out is the typical sentiment reason. I have certain memories relate to the purchase/reading of each of them that I will list below because its my food blog and if I want to have a list about my Harry Potter memories on it, I can. 

1. Sorcerer's Stone: Thank goodness for Scholastic Book orders or it might have taken me a lot longer to find these books.
2. Chamber of Secrets: Birthday present from my mother. She hid it at the top of our kitchen cabinet (ha! a food connection!) and gave it to me during my very special sleepover birthday with my (I think) three closest friends at the time. I still talk to two of them (if I'm remembering the right people).
3. Prisoner of Azkaban: Well, as I noted above, I destroyed the spine of this one. Probably my favorite out of the series.
4. Goblet of Fire: I read this once while sitting on the ledge near my family's dining table while my parents were having a dinner party. I think I wanted attention. The chapter "Padfoot Returns" smelled really bad for some reason.
5.  Order of the Phoenix: Remember when these books would come out and you'd just see a giant stack of them in Costco on a wood flatbed? Those were amazing times that solidified my love for Costco.
6. Half Blood Prince: Another one I bought at Costco and started reading while in Costco.
7. Deathly Hallows: Couldn't wait to go to Costco to buy it so I preordered on Amazon. Had to volunteer the day it was release and forced my sister to finish reading it during the day so that I could read it when I got back. Finished around 2 or 3 in the morning I think. 

Now that I have some of the theoretical readers of this blog in a fantasy book-induced nostalgia, let's talk ice cream. Or rather, foods inspired by fictional works first. It's somewhat amusing to think that a magical food/drink such as butterbeer has an "official recipe" or "real taste" in the real world. A fictional drink item can't possibly have an official or real taste if its taste, textures, smells are described by a few well-chosen words filled in with rich imagination that differs from one reader to the next. The closest you could possibly get to "real" is the author's interpretation of the food. JK Rowling can taste the butterbeer at the Warner Brother's Studio Tour or at Universal Studios Orlando and say yes, this is the warm butterbeer that Harry would wrap his hands around while sitting amongst friends in Madame Rosmerta's or yes, this is the drink that created a lifelong addiction problem for Winky the house-elf. But, like any interpretation of a book, be it the themes associated with its imagery and diction or the relationships between characters, do readers have to accept that as the canon version of butterbeer? If people can actively and maybe even justly ship JohnLock, whose to say you can't have your own non-canon version of butterbeer that can get Winky drunk just as effectively? 

 

I pose that somewhat gratuitous question because I'm actually not a huge fan of the "real" butterbeer that I tried at both the Warner Brother's Studio Tour and in Orlando. It was really quite sweet and did not taste like the happy memories of a snowy Hogsmeade that I tend to associated it with. Plus, in the real world, I've never been a huge fan of butterscotch. However, I was a huge fan of 1) the pumpkin juice (duh), and 2) the frozen butterbeer. Frozen butterbeer at the Harry Potter theme park is more like a slushy with cream than something actually frozen. But since slushy butterbeer tasted better than chilled liquid butterbeer, the logical conclusion is that the colder the butterbeer, the better it is (based on a total of two data points of course). Hence, butterbeer ice cream.

Since we're talking about official/canon/real, it doesn't seem that the "official" recipe used by Universal or Warner Brother's is actually available online. There are dozens of different homemade versions of various difficulties and taste, so clearly lots of noncanon butterbeers are out there. I mean, we're talking butterbeer ice cream here, a treat that was definitely not mentioned in the novels, so I'm not even sure why I'm still amusing myself by trying to describe fiction-inspired food under canon/non-canon labels. Maybe its food commentary on the heated debates fandoms sometimes get into over the merits of maintaining canon in fanwork.

  

Recipe from Sweet Silly Chic. The butterscotch/butterbeer sauce used in her recipe is from a separate butterbeer recipe originally from The Huffington Post. This is by far one of the more complicated recipes for butterbeer I've seen, so I wouldn't necessarily suggest that this is the best recipe if you want a quick easy version of just the drink for parties. The butterscotch sauce did work very nicely for the ice cream though. I will note that the rum extract might be important for getting the full butterbeer taste. I didn't have any rum extract or dark rum, so I added in some tennessee honey whiskey, which I don't think *actually* did anything. The ice cream tasted more buttery than I would have liked in my butterbeer, but other people in my family seemed to enjoy it. Even my hard to satisfy mother.

Green Tea Ice Cream

This post is coming at the most seasonally inappropriate time ever. The high for the next week is 37, an outlier compared to the average 20 degrees on most days here. I have to wear leggings under my pants. I have to wear god-forbid-boots. I get to slip on frozen over slush and compact snow. It's all quite wonderful. 

While I do think snow is beautiful, I am not a fan of trekking in the cold or of weather that makes cold delicious things like ice cream and salads not ok to eat. I mean, usually I ignore those conventions anyways and still eat the ice cream, but I don't think I've been this cold since Freshmen year. THREE YEARS AGO.

I pine for the days when I will be able to eat ice cream again without completely freezing. Maybe when its 50 degrees again. Although since this is green tea ice cream, you could argue that since tea is sometimes consumed warm, that offsets the cold?

Anyways, this green tea ice cream was heavy on the green tea. This was my first non-egg custard style ice cream and while I was worried at first that might result in ice cream that was less creamy or more icy, it turned out to be just as silky as the other ice creams I've made. While I found the intense flavor to be enjoyable, I can easily understand why others may not enjoy the bitter taste. I'll probably only use 2 or 1.5 tablespoons if I use this recipe next time. And, it'll save me some money on green tea powder. Because, man, that stuff is pretty expensive. But delicious!

Recipe from Just One Cookbook, originally posted by Sweets by Sillianah, adapted from The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz and Live Love Pasta

Browned Butter Snickerdoodles: Flat or Puffy?

So its the middle of January. 2014. And I am STILL posting about Thanksgiving 2013. Woohoo!

But don't worry, this is the last Thanksgiving 2013 baking post I will have.

Snickerdoodles are usually a hit in my household due to their pillowly puffiness. I remember making browned butter snickerdoodles back in 2012 that turned out really great, though mildly burnt on top. So it was a little disappointing when these came out so flat. Some quick googling seems to suggest that snickerdoodles are more often flat rather than puffy. But wikipedia doesn't suggest any information about the texture of a traditional snickerdoodle.

Regardless, I think these may have been so flat because there was too much butter, or the butter was too soft. maybe I didn't let it cool enough before incorporating after I browned it? They did taste slightly on the buttery side. I'm pretty sure I let the dough chill for a sufficient amount of time, but I suppose I'll experiment the next time I make snickerdoodles, of whatever variety.

Being the type of person who hates wasting food and would rather risk losing friends by forcing them to consume baked goods than toss things out, these cookies ended up in quite a few desserts. Ice cream sandwiches, speculoos ice cream toppings, ect.

Recipe from Ambitious Kitchen. Ambitious indeed.

Speculoos Ice Cream: Belgium and Back Again

Cool points if you can get my pop/geek culture riff there. Hint:

Last year, I got the lovely experience of spending a summer abroad as many college students do if they are fortuitous enough. While my time in Belgium was spent mainly working (ish), a lot of it was spent consuming Belgium foods like beer, waffles, chocolate, and of course speculoos (aka biscoff aka delta airline cookies). Such dreamy, cookie richness. Naturally, I was obligated to bring back as much speculoos spread as possible. I literally had food stuffed in every possible corner of my suitcase. Upon returning to America, I proceeded to carefully instruct my family to leave the jars unopened until I returned home to incorporate it into every baked good possible.

Well, the baking part of this plan slightly changed after The Great Ice-Cream Machine Purchase of 2013. One of the best ways of consuming speculoos while in Belgium was in ice-cream form. Similar to flavors like pumpkin in the US, you can find loads of speculoos-flavored things in Belgium, like, speculoos alcohol, which was surprisingly delicious. Kahlua like.

Anyways, speculoos + anything = delicious. speculoos + ice cream = delicious x 2. This is definitely another recipe I'll make should I ever run out of other ice creams I want to try out.

Recipe from Serious Eats, with minor modifications:

• Couldn't find the star anise in our cabinet (which my mother found for me after I finished cooking the base). So that was omitted. 
• Too lazy to buy stroopwafel cookies so I just tossed in some snickerdoodles I had baked earlier.
• My family likes nuts in our desserts, so walnuts were tossed in at the end of the churning. 

Birthday Cake Oreo Cheesecakes: tbm Blog Birthday!

By tbm I mean throwback monday, the cousin of throwback thursday. Anyways, I interrupt my weekly posts for a special post in honor of the blog's birthday. While I'm personally not particularly keen on celebrating my own birthday in real life, today is the "birth date" of this food blog. In the world of online food blogging, it seems like a time honored tradition to bake a cake in honor of your food blog. Since people rarely finish the cakes I bake for human birthdays at home, I can't really justify a cake for an online internet entity until I find more friends and family members who will eat cake. Or until I make cake that people will want to eat.

So instead, here's a throwback post to some birthday themed baked goods I made before this blog was born. I guess you could think of this as looking through the ancestry of this blog? Back in 2012, Oreo was turning 100 and released what were supposedly ~limited~ edition birthday cake flavored Oreos to celebrate. But I'm pretty sure I've seen them around since then.

Oreos are those classic childhood cookies that all American young adults seem to have fond memories of and still love as a "sometimes treat". They're terrible for our fab fit bodies, but the nostalgia is crushing. Everyone has their own way of eating them that reminds them of that certain relative or that one summer by the lake, ect. My memory? Having to make up "my method" of eating Oreos for a third grade class assignment on how to write instructions. My family was not, and never will be, an Oreo household. So I wrote that I ate Oreos by first twisting the cookies open, scraping off the frosting with my teeth to leave a thin sheer layer of frosting, putting the cookies back together, then consuming. In the interest of full disclosure, I have never eaten an Oreo like this since turning in that assignment. The vision of the total disruption of cookie:frosting ratio is making me cringe even now.
But, anyways, despite my lack of history with Oreos, I seemed to feel that it was my calling in life to bake cheesecake Oreos using birthday cake Oreos back then. It was also my golden birthday too. So maybe it was related to that.

On a related tangent, I wonder if this blog will ever make it to its "golden" birthday. 6 years from now? Maybe. Good thing I didn't start this blog on January 31 or something.

I didn't bother to save where I found the recipe for these cheesecakes back in 2012 for some reason, but I believe the recipe was from Pink Parsley with the substitution of birthday cake Oreos instead of normal Oreos. I'm 80% certain that they still sell the birthday cake variety. I recall seeing some a few months back at Walgreens, so they're probably still around if you want to try these! Otherwise, I'd be really interested in using some of those crazy Oreo flavors they have. Like, candy corn Oreos...with pumpkin cheesecake? Do I even want to go there? Then again, I did name this blog awkward platters for a reason I guess.

Cheers to more blogging and gratuitous food pictures!

Carrot Cake Cheesecake: Adios 2013

I've come to the conclusion that I am very very very very bad at making cakes. Maybe its my lack of experience, sheer clumsiness when it comes to mixing till "just combined," or the fact that decorating cakes is just really hard, but I've yet to make a cake I've been completely satisfied about or proud to share with ~everyone~. Lucky for this cake, I need a blog post, and firmly believe in documenting even the bad things.

As the last cake, or really food item, I made in 2013, it's also the first post I make for 2014. New Years is a time we start a lot of things. New exercise regimes (not leaving the room except for food), new dietary regimes (making up for a childhood absent of Cheetos), new sleep regimes (setting alarms for 7am only to wake up at 10am). Yea. Lots of those things. 

And its also a time we stop a lot of things. Old habits (staying in the same room for the entire day), old addictions (Cheetos deprived childhoods), Old relationships (having your bed as your significant other). Yea. All those things.

This cake as the bridge between 2013 and 2014 might symbolically represent those two concepts. New blog posts as I try to keep this whole weekly post thing going as I try to figure out how to live without school. Old baking skillz such as subpar cakes that no one wants to actually eat.
But, sadly, the old habits tend to carry along into the New Year's anyways. Which tends to undermine those new things. Which is ok. Because there will always be bad things, but that doesn't mean the good things don't matter. Sometimes they'll just cancel each other out, or won't make any difference, but they're still there. Take this cake (its a food blog, I have to talk about my cake). Even though this cake was awkwardly not that great, it was still fun to mess around with a fancy camera and take photos of cake using lots of weird focuses.

And, just because this cake failed doesn't mean I won't keep making cakes. After all, maybe I'll make a blog worthy cake when I least expect to. And then work my way backwards to figure out how I pulled off such a magical feat to create more! So, here's to a new year that'll probably be much like the last one! Or better!
Carrot Cake Cheesecake recipe from Mel's Kitchen Cafe, with the singular modification of adding walnuts because my mother likes walnuts. Even though she didn't eat any of it.