Orange Creamscicle Frozen Yogurt

When it comes to having bad weeks or being sad, I think its always useful to have some ice cream around. Not like an entire freezer full of emergency Ben and Jerry flavors (though you're certainly welcome to that lifestyle if you would like), but like one or two solid ice creams you can grab a scoop or two as you mope through it all.


Of course, I might only be saying this because it gives me an excuse/reason to justify my continuous ice cream making. Not that you need an excuse to make ice cream, please. Though, orange creamsicle isn't exactly the type of ice cream or frozen yogurt one usually draws to for moping. And if you're going to froyo as your moping food, you're probably doing something wrong.



Orange creamsicle needs to have a renaissance. As a kid, we'd literally buy these huge bulk sized bags of creamsicle popsicles. They were the best. Icy, sweet orange juice on the outside. Soft creamy vanilla on the inside. And when it all starts slowly melting and mixing in that way only popsicles determined to drip all over the driveway do? Perfection.

My recent foray into the world of frozen yogurt may be related to my growing laziness at the worst possible time in terms of things I need to focus on in my life and work. That aside, frozen yogurt is literally the easiest thing ever. Just some sugar, yogurt, juice, whisk it all together. Add a dash of lemon and salt for tartness. Chill for like 10 minutes. Then churn churn churn. It definitely suits my minimal work style at the moment.
My frozen yogurt ended up with semi-large chunks of grated orange peel. Mainly because I don't actually have a grater or microzester but rather just a vegetable peeler and a knife. But I kinda like the bitterness you get from a small chunk of orange zest in this ice cream.

Bonus notinthekitchenoronatable photo because #naturallight is a thing people are into. I might have to stop making fun of people to set up absurd food photo shots on old crates because you know, I'm becoming one of them.

Recipe via the one and only Serious Eats.

White Wine Frozen Yogurt: Not Cersei

This is literally the opposite of Cersei. The opposite of that red wine berry sorbet I made a few months ago. Aside from the whole white wine thing, the fact that this is frozen yogurt means Cersei probably detests it with a burning passion. Probably reminds her too much of snow.

Being the well groomed adult I am, the only wine/beer/whatever glass I have is this fantastic Game of Thrones one. Not that I'm having large dinner parties where this is a problem or anything given my n=1 lifestyle at the moment.

This frozen yogurt is great. The white wine flavor is pretty strong at first, but it matches well with the tangy yogurt base. Plus, there's no egg tempering, and custard making, so it takes all of 5 minutes to mix it all together and start churning it.

It being October, it seems inevitable that seem form of pumpkin should leak into one of my posts (or be entirely dedicated to it), so lo and behold here we have it. Pumpkin butter and pumpkin macarons. Courtesy of our favorite trader name Joe. The macarons were decently good given that they are from a grocery store freezer aisle. The pumpkin butter is a perennial classic. There are many online who discuss their "I bought 10 jars of this stuff!" adventures, but I honestly have a hard time thinking what to put it on aside from yogurt and weird grilled cheese or peanut butter sandwiches, so I think I'm good with 1 jar to happily last me through my "ahhh must succumb to pumpkin phase."

Recipe via Serious Eats

Chocolate Lavender Ice Cream: Flower Power

I've slowly become increasingly resentful of my dedication to the world of food blogging. The part where you take pictures that is. The thing about working in research is that 5 PM is not a set in stone end of the work day hour. So sometimes its a bit later, which combined with fall/winter means darkness by the time I get around to actually taking pictures. The great thing about research is that I could theoretically just leave whenever, like at 3 PM. But I don't like the thought of myself with that much power.

That being said, even with questionable lighting, its not like I'm trying to make it onto foodgawker or get named one of Saveur's top food blogs of the year, so even with unpleasant shadows and bright yellow lights, its still fun. Though its so easy to get carried away into wanting to be ~food blog famous~. But I have other goals and aspirations I can aim to excel in. Food photography? Not so much.

As you can tell, my obsession with incorporating lavender into literally everything continues. I swear I'm going to have enough lavender to last for the next 20 years even if I do add lavender to every single recipe. If you're wondering, those flecks of green are pistachios, but chocolate lavender pistachio ice cream seems like a mouthful, but the pistachios are definitely a nice touch and a nice distraction if you're honestly getting sick of lavender like a certain someone typing this.

Even with my waning interest in lavender though, this was still a really great ice cream. Especially if you're looking to serve something esoteric. If you're not, this chocolate ice cream itself is super rich. It tasted more like fudge ice cream than chocolate ice cream. I'm personally very picky about chocolate in that the richer it is the better. So this chocolate ice cream was right up my alley. If you're not so into rich, dense, dark chocolate, I would suggest another recipe.

Chocolate lavender ice cream recipe from The Wholesome Pursuit, with ~1/4 cup of chopped, lightly roasted pistachios mixed in. Original chocolate ice cream recipe from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop. Also, if anyone wants to buy me a present at some point, hint hint.

Cannoli Ice Cream: Toppings Megabus

If only pistachios were $5. Not that Megabus is even $5 dollars these days. Sorry Boston friends. You are definitely worth the $35 or whatever they charge these days though. Friendships are worth above money. Though there is a certain element of responsiveness and genuine communication that seems to falter despite all the forms of "talking" we seem to have these days.

quality photo right there. the makings of a true food photographer.

Anyways, to break the 4th or whatever wall I seem to avoid by trying to make my posts timeless, its already Friday at midnight, I'm rather sleepy and running on 22% battery-life, so I'll have to make this fast and not-so-cute. Basically, banana loaf lasagnas means left over ricotta. Which means cannoli ice cream. Which means an abundance of toppings. Probably a little too much-pistachio, chocolate chips, and crushed sugar cones. The original recipe called for actual homemade cannoli shells, but I don't have that kind of time, so sugar cones it was. The beauty of ice cream toppings is that you can add or subtract whatever you want without a major recipe make over.



 Unfortunately, I forgot that sugar cones get soggy. While the crunchy was great when the ice cream was freshly churned, it wasn't so awesome on the 3rd day or so. Not sure if homemade cannoli shells would have that same effect, but I'm curious now since that wasn't really a disclaimer in the original recipe. The ice cream itself is absurdly easy since all the richness derives from the ricotta and your typical mixture of milk and cream rather than cooking a custard. I was a bit skeptical about whether it would actually taste like a cannoli both because 1) There was a lack of mascarpone which seems like a necessary staple for most real cannolis, 2) I've only had 2-3 cannolis in my current existing life so can I really recognize cannoli in ice cream form?, and 3) My last few ice creams have been kind of a miss on the full flavor side.

This time around though, it was obvious that the ice cream base was creamy in that cannoli sort of way. I've never been a big fan of chocolate chips in ice cream, but added them in just to try it out. Still don't really like chocolate chips, but loved the ice cream anyways, especially the pistachios and sugar cones in their non-soggy state. Maybe next time I'll try chocolate flakes because chocolate is still delicious. Just not in crunchy rock hard chip form. Gosh, imagine if I used full sized chips and not mini ones. That would have been a disaster.

As a general update, I ended up running to reserve battery power at the beginning of that last paragraph, so I had to grab my charger. I could re-edit this so that you would never know that I was in the midst of a battery crisis, but I like adding an edge of danger to my posts. Sorry that was a bit too hyperbolic even for me.

Recipe from Cooking Classy (yay alliterations!). I used a hand mixer with a whisk to blend the base since my blender was a bit occupied by pesto. I was concerned I would make whipped cream, but mixing with a spoon when it got too foamy seemed to resolve this. The final base was a little grainy from the ricotta, but the final product was still creamy.

Red Bean Ice Cream: Summer Vacays to the Homeland

I want to say that this is the first time I've had red bean ice cream while in the US, but I feel like that isn't true. It's not like red bean is a super absurd flavor these days. Regardless of the accuracy of my memory, red bean ice cream is something I tend to affiliate with hot, dusty, humid summer days in China visiting family. Every 4ish years or so, we go back to China and, if you have any sense of what Chinese family reunions are like, its a big old time. So much food. So much nice dining. So much one uncle insisting over the other to pay. So much fish oil to bring from the US (and chocolate of course). So much cutesy mechanical pencils and stationary to bring back. It's great.

One of the memories I have from these visits is the reasonable, yet possibly absurd amount of ice cream my siblings and I would consume on a daily basis while being shuttled from one monument to the next. Sure there were some normal flavors, like drumsticks and plain vanillas, but there were also some (at first) fascinating flavors that we probably only tried after the insistence of our mother. Some classic flavors include red bean, green bean, and one that we called "green tongue jello," whose actual name still evades me as a semi-adult.

I'm not sure if this ice cream was a strongly red bean flavored as I would have liked. The super DIY-er in me bought red beans rather than just pre-cooked, sweetened red beans--definitely the easier route. In my defense, I was not deliberately trying to be a hipster or snob. I literally did not realize that pre-made red bean paste exists. This is probably also pretty telling of how terrible I am at grocery shopping if I didn't notice the red bean paste sitting a few shelves away from the dry red beans.

Thankfully, making your own red bean paste is not that difficult- and probably even better if you're particularly picking about the texture or sweetness of your paste. My stove is unnecessarily hot at times, so I did accidentally burn some of the beans when the water got dangerously low while "simmering." Its unclear if this is a placebo effect, but I do feel like after a few days, the ice cream has gotten richer in red bean flavor compared to when it was freshly churned. Orrrrr, I just have really really messed up taste buds from all that sugar.
Regardless, it may not be my best ice cream yet, but its definitely one I plan to try making again at some point. And as a side note, happy belated mid-autumn festival! Go eat some mooncakes!
Ice cream and red bean paste recipe from food52.

Chai Ice Cream: Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice

I usually have a hard time picking favorites. Maybe its because I'm a sibling, and the idea of favorites seems mean. Or that I have problems making definite decisions. You see, its that whole parallel universe idea from those sci-fi/fantasy books I read as a child. The minute you make a choice, you close the door to another alternate reality. Amber Spyglass anyone? (hint, Golden Compass, hint, Phillip Pullman)

Anyways, even if I did have the ability to travel through different worlds or realities, this Chai Ice Cream would remain the one constant in my exciting and dangerous little life. My totem if you will (if you're into Inception). It's rare for me to have a favorite, as my parallel world's intro rambling just told you, but I'm pretty confident that Chai Ice Cream is by far my favorite homemade ice cream yet. Yes. Even above pumpkin and apple pie and speculoos ice cream. Maybe it was because I took the extra two hours to boil my own chai-spiced custard base. Which I probably would have consumed on its own without freezing if I didn't love ice cream freaking much.

There are Chai Ice Cream recipes out there that probably entail just soaking chai tea bags in hot water to create a concentrate, but please please please please take the extra 2 hours, 1 hour of driving around to grocery stores, and extra $20 bucks to buy whole fragrant spices if you have the freedom of post-graduate life. Because man, while I hate recipes that call for a million things that I would only use for one recipe, this is so worth it if you're a fan of either ice cream or chai or being happy. Well, scratch the last one. I can't tell you what makes you happy, but just thinking about a bowl of this ice cream and my backyard on a stereotypically lovely Californian day certainly makes me happy.

An ice cream recipe this perfect can only come from my favorite food blog itself--Serious Eats. The comments mentioned adding sugar because it wasn't sweet enough, but ignore them. I did not ignore them and added an extra 1/4 cup, but in the end, the extra sugar was quite unnecessary.

Red Wine Berry Sorbet: The Stuff of Fantasy

I think authors and daydreamers have a romanticized notion of red wine. I can easily imagine several of my favorite fantasy characters sitting around a hearth fire with a glass of red wine mulling over their next enemy or the fates they have been dealt by the gods. Ok, so I'm mainly thinking about Cersei Lannister at the moment, but I'm sure that you too had someone pop into your head.

As I, and so many other college/young professionals have been told, alcohol is an acquired taste (that is, if you're not dousing it in orange juice first). While I have acquired a taste for beer and to a certain degree white wine, red wine continues to challenge me. Sure, it has a nice warmth to it, and I don't think I particularly mind the tannins, but something about it just makes me excessively sleepy and occasionally gives me a mild headache. But red wine in the books seems reserved to be sipped only by the oldest, most elite, most evil, or most wise. Perhaps I need to work on losing more of my sense of rationality and morals before I can sip away at wine like Cersei can. Or you know, just grow very old with wisdom in a cold, mildly post-apocalyptic setting.

But until that happens, I'll have to get my serving of red wine (since thats a key part of the nutrition plate of course) via the one food group almost everyone easily fills--dessert. In this case, red wine berry sorbet. After making white wine cupcakes, I felt I needed to make something out of the other wine. While I throughly researched several potentially great red wine and chocolate cupcakes, a little visit to a winery during senior week where we sampled a chocolate red wine (yes, it was literally a red wine flavored with chocolate) turned me off from the pairing. Especially after one of our friends commented that it tasted a bit like cough syrup and it was forever imprinted into my taste pallet (Thanks--you know who you are).

Since the chocolate and wine combo was off the table for now, I ended up making this sorbet instead (incidentally my first sorbet). Luckily, there was about a half cup of Cabernet Sauvignon in our fridge at home, which was just a little less than what I needed for the recipe I used from Today's Nest. I believe the recipe says you can use either frozen or fresh berries, so I just used a the frozen mix that my one true love Costco sells. While the sorbet came out sorbet-like in the end with both berries and wine present, I think I would have liked it if it were a little more creamy. The taste was a lot like a berry smoothie with a bite of red wine at the end. I personally prefer my sorbets and ice creams on the creamier side, so perhaps I should have used a creamier milk than 2%. I might stick to custard based ice creams for now since they are just so delicious, but maybe I'll peruse the sorbet side of frozen treats again one day.

TL;DR:

• Red wine is used a lot in fantasy. Even one of my favorite bands titled a song after it.
• Sorbets aren't as creamy as ice cream.

P.S. I know my pictures are usually not very good, but these have some seriously questionable lightening/color. So for that, I apologize profusely.

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

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. 

Apple Pie Ice Cream: Random Kitchen Appliance Adventures

A new 2 year tradition: buying a random kitchen appliance from Macy's during the Thanksgiving holiday sales. Last year, it was a waffle iron. We had just finished brunch on black Friday. I wanted a waffle, but my mom insisted I get something more, um, grown up? So I got Eggs Benedict's. They tasted awful. So we bought a waffle iron at a sale to make up for that. And I made delicious pumpkin waffles for dinner and all was good.
This year, it was an ice cream maker. Except instead of post-Thanksgiving sales, it was pre-Thanksgiving sales, on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving. My musings on the timing of American consumerism aside, this thing is a monstrous beautiful thing.

Technical ramblings: The ice cream machine surprisingly quite large, with the majority of its bulk occupied by a coolant-filled lining thats frozen to keep everything maximally chilled and freezing during an otherwise pretty simple and boring period of turning. Its basically just a really really really cold bucket and constant churning that makes for ice cream.

I've been pining for an ice cream machine for ages. The number of times I've stared on amazon at ice cream makers and the number of times I've gazed forlornly at an ice cream recipe is a little upsetting. For my first batch of what I'm sure will be many, I made apple pie ice cream. I had leftover apple filling from the apple pie cupcakes I made previously that sounded like would go great mixed in with a vanilla bean custard ice cream. The overall recipe with links to each part is below:

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Apple Pie Ice Cream

servings: ideally 1, but if you have to share, maybe 10?

time: wibbly wobbly timey wimey (prep 1 day in advance)

Things you need:

• for Vanilla Bean Ice Cream-- recipe from Cuisinart Recipe.
• for Apple Pie Filling--recipe from food fanatic. (literally the Apple Pie Filling Section)
• Optional: Walnuts
• Necessary: Bowl or another dessert as a vehicle for ice cream

Instructions:

1. Make vanilla bean ice cream base and chill in fridge according to recipe.
• generally between 6-24 hours depending on a) how well you plan ahead and b) patience
• make sure your ice cream machine bowl is chilled 24 hours or you'll be sad. :(
2. Make apple pie filling and allow to cool according to recipe before storing in fridge.
• generally--you want anything in your ice cream as cold as possible.
3. Before putting ice cream base into your machine bowl, mix apple pie filling into ice cream base.
4. Make according to your ice cream machine's manufacture instructions.
• In the last 5 minutes of churning, toss in walnuts.
• per instructions, you'll probably also have to store ice cream in the freezer for an addition 2 hours to allow it to further firm up.
5. Consume. On everything.

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Step 5 is particularly difficult, so I've added some photos below of some different ways to successfully approach it.

A la mode style on top of an apple pie cupcake.

Smashed and melting between 2 snickerdoodles

With yo favorite seasonal pie