BAKED Sunday Mornings: Coffee Ice Cream

Amazing!  A Baked: Explorations recipe that didn't involve every dish in the house.  This week's pick was coffee ice cream.  Now, I am not a coffee person, but I love coffee ice cream.  I have made David Lebovitz's coffee ice cream before and it is good ice cream, but the bitter coffee flavor is a little bit too strong for me.  Maybe it is the beans I am using?  I was hoping that this version might have a different coffee flavor, since it uses espresso powder and Kahlua to give the coffee flavor.  I think something might have gone wrong when I added the salt (like maybe I added 2 teaspoons by accident or something), because the base was really salty.  It actually reminded me more of salted caramel ice cream than coffee ice cream. It was actually really interesting and I enjoyed eating it, but I want to make this again to see what it really tastes like.  Head over to the Baked Sunday Mornings blog to see how everyone else did.


I put this ice cream on top of a chocolate cake with coffee glaze (that I will blog about later) and the combination was great.  The cake was able to cut some of the salt flavor.

MSC Club May: Tiramisu Cupcakes

I'm back with the Martha Stewart Cupcake Club.  After taking the last few months off (there was a lot going on around the 15th of March and April, with Jewish holidays), I'm back and I'm really glad it is for tiramisu cupcakes.  I love, love, love tiramisu.  Whenever I am in a good Italian restaurant, I will usually order it for dessert.  I have never actually made tiramisu at home, although I have heard it is not so hard, but I have made Dorie's Tiramisu Cake (amazing -- you should totally try it!) and now these cupcakes.

The recipe for these looks really complicated, but they were much easier to put together than it would seem from reading the recipe.  I made 1/3 of the recipe and got 5 cupcakes. I made the frosting and the coffe syrup (minus the marsala wine) this morning.  As you can see in the cupcake cross section, I didn't let the syrup sink in enough.  As a result, the coffee flavor was really concentrated in the top of cake.  The frosting was delicious -- very light, with a little something extra from the mascarpone cheese.  Theses tasted a lot like tiramisu, and I think they would have been even better if I let the syrup sink into the cupcakes.  I may try one in a few hours and see if it made any difference.  Thanks to Jen at The Rookie Baker for the great pick!

Adventures with the Ice Cream Maker: A St. Patrick's Day Treat

Hi all! I hope you had a wonderful Pi Day - I sure did. As per our annual tradition, Emily and I made Emily's foolproof pie, which was delicious as always, although I'd recommend adding some salt to the crust next time. Nevertheless, that pie is foolproof for sure.

Our pi(e) before it went in the oven

Tomorrow, as I'm sure you alcoholics out there know, is St. Patrick's Day. I spent last St. Patrick's Day in London, where they rather pointedly did not give a rat's ass, so it's nice to be back here in America (or more specifically, in college, where any excuse to drink becomes a major holiday). Wasn't it nice that we had this interfaith cooperation so that St. Patrick's Day and the Jewish drinking holiday, Purim, could be in the same glorious alcohol-poisoning-filled weekend? I thought so too.

Is there any point to this rambling? Why yes, dear reader, there is. But first, some additional rambling. When I was fifteen, a young Machoner at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires, my age cohort went on a lot of trips, including to Canada. On our way up to the border we stopped in Vermont at the Ben and Jerry's factory. We took a tour of the factory and each bunk ate a Vermonster, which is 20 scoops of ice cream and all the toppings. On the tour we were permitted to sample some of the flavors the company was going to debut soon. One was some raspberry sorbet thing, which was fine but nothing special. But the other one was amazing, and has been my favorite Ben and Jerry's flavor ever since - Dublin Mudslide. Bailey's ice cream with chocolate chocolate chip cookie chunks and a coffee fudge ripple, is there anything more delightful? So for this St. Patrick's Day, I was inspired to try and recreate Dublin Mudslide ice cream.

For some reason there was no readily available guide on how to do this. I am such a pioneer. The first thing that I was worried about was the coffee fudge ripple. What does it meeeeeean? David Lebovitz to the rescue! Well, sort of. While searching for Bailey's ice cream recipes I came across his recipe for Irish Coffee ice cream. Bam. Problem mostly solved. I wasn't a huge fan of the first David Lebovitz coffee recipe -too strong - but since this one only involved steeping the beans and had no additional coffee added, it was a lot more palatable to me.

Next up, cookies! I made the tried-and-true Dorie Greenspan chocolate chip cookies, only with the cocoa powder substitution for some of the flour. I halved the recipe and only ended up using half of those again, which I crumbled and added to the churning mixture about five minutes from the end, but they're such delicious cookies that you won't mind having a few left over to eat plain.

Finally, the mysterious fudge ripple. Thank goodness for David Lebovitz, whose Perfect Scoop had a simple and delicious recipe. I didn't chill it for as long as I should have - in fact, I barely chilled it at all - but it still came out so professional-looking and, of course, tasty (though a bit more crystalline than I had hoped).

I wanted to buy a pint of Dublin Mudslide and do a taste test along with my homemade version, but I couldn't find any in my local grocery stores/minimarts. Can you believe it? What a travesty. But Dublin Mudslide had initially been released as a limited time only flavor - that would have REALLY been a travesty! So we have to be grateful for what we've got. In any case, this didn't really taste much like Dublin Mudslide, mostly because of the coffee flavor in the base. I couldn't taste the Bailey's at all, which is also the case for the original, so no big deal there. My favorite part was the chocolate chocolate chip cookie chunks. Regardless of its differences with the original, I think that this is an ice cream worth making in its own right. After all, it's less money and effort to just go to the store and buy a pint of Dublin Mudslide if that's really what you're after, but trust me, this confection won't let you down.

You can find the ice cream recipe here, the chocolate chocolate chip cookie recipe here (take out 3/4 cups of flour and replace with 3/4 cups cocoa powder) and the fudge ripple recipe here. Happy St. Patrick's Day, see you on Friday for some Purim treats!

Do a Little Dance in That Mississippi Mud

Sometimes, your friends hate the things you love, and vice versa, to the extent where you wonder how you could even be friends with them. This is the case with my friend Emily. She has been mentioned on this blog before as a certifiable health nut, a lover of broccoli, exercise and extra-virgin olive oil. She is also a hater of baked goods! Can you believe it!? We lived together for three years and she ate everything I made, and now that we are living separately she comes out with the truth. For shame.

Thank God she likes ice cream, or it would really be curtains for us. She also loves coffee, so for her birthday I wanted to make her the beautiful espresso cake in Baked Explorations. Then she was all blah blah blah I hate baked goods, so I decided not to waste me time. But she had been requesting that I make some coffee ice cream. And suddenly, the idea for her birthday treat came to me!

This post is actually a double-header. It's the Mississippi Mud Pie recipe (B) from Baked Explorations, made with the coffee ice cream from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop. I won't say much about the ice cream, since Rebecca already blogged about it and I have basically the same impressions. The coffee flavor is VERY strong - too strong for a non-coffee drinker like me. In fact, I decided to put it in the pie because I didn't think I would end up finishing it otherwise, and it's a shame to waste ice cream, even ice cream you don't really care for. The pie, on the other hand, was awesome. On balance, I think the coffee ended up going well with the sweeter, ever-so-slightly-alcoholic chocolate flavors, with neither one overpowering the other, and the nuts were just tasty extras, giving it additional taste and texture. I was not already in possession of bourbon, not being an elderly Southern gentleman, so I bought the cutest little bottle of bourbon there ever was. The whole thing was probably four tablespoons. So adorable. This was a big hit at Emily's birthday celebration and I would totally make it again, but to be honest I'd probably use my coffee ice cream of choice, which is Starbucks brand. Yummmm.

You can find the recipe here. Plus, they have the same bowls as me so there's an additional layer of authenticity.

Coffee Ice Cream with Brooke

My friend Brooke is awesome.  Really, really, really awesome.  You see, she and her daughter came all the way here, to Texas, to visit us.  Really.  On an airplane (actually two), here to Texas.  That is why she is awesome.  If anyone else would like to earn awesome status, you know what to do.

As a reward for Brooke's awesomeness, we had to have yummy treats and what is yummier than coffee ice cream?  Especially coffee ice cream that you make yourself.  And then eat it, with Thin Mints and whipped cream.  Mmmmm!!!!!

If you like coffee ice cream, this ice cream is excellent.  It had a strong coffee flavor (although that might have been because we allowed the beans to steep in the milk for longer than the recommended hour because we were putting the kids to bed).  It was really delicious.  We also at it with chocolate chip cookies and it was still good then.  We made it with decaf beans, so we would not be up all night.

Here is the recipe, from David Lebovitz:

Ingredients:
1½ cups whole milk
¾ cup sugar
1½ cups whole coffee beans
Pinch of salt
1½ cups heavy cream, divided
5 large egg yolks
¼ tsp. vanilla extract
¼ tsp. finely ground coffee or espresso powder

Directions: 
Combine the milk, sugar, coffee beans, salt and ½ cup of the heavy cream in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat.  Once the mixture is warm and just begins to bubble, remove from the heat and let steep at room temperature for 1 hour.  

After steeping, return the saucepan with the coffee mixture to the burner over medium heat.  Pour the remaining 1 cup heavy cream into a large bowl and set a mesh strainer over the top.  In a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks until smooth.  Once the coffee mixture has become warm again, slowly pour the mixture into the bowl with the egg yolks, whisking constantly to temper the eggs.  Return the egg-coffee bean mixture to the saucepan over medium high heat. 

Cook the mixture, stirring constantly and scraping the bottom, until the mixture thickens and coats the spatula or spoon (about 170-175° F.)  Pour the custard through the strainer and stir it into the cream.  Press on the coffee beans in the strainer to extract as much of the coffee flavor as possible, then discard the beans (I used a heavy-bottomed drinking glass to do this.)  Mix in the vanilla and ground coffee or espresso powder.  Chill the batter over an ice bath, or in the refrigerator.  Chill thoroughly in the refrigerator and then freeze in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions.