I wanted to end the month with chocolate, I’ve managed to stay off it the entire month which is quite a feat for me! Wanting to make a slight twist rather than a ‘plain old’ chocolate ice cream I decided to make a sorbet instead. So, as a bonus this is dairy and egg free, assuming you’re using an appropriate chocolate, it’s vegan and lactose free, and it’s still yummy!

This really is nice and simple to make. Bring the sugar and water to a boil, add the cocoa powder and whisk it together. Here is where I failed a little and didn’t boil it out. My recipe said boil to get rid of the alkali taste, since I was using Dutched cocoa I didn’t think it would be necessary. Turns out I was wrong and it also gets rid of the powdery taste that the cocoa leaves otherwise.

I decided to up the chocolate and use the (specially imported by my Mum) 100% chocolate from Willie’s Cacao. This made it very dark, so not necessarily to everyone’s taste, but this recipe is good with semisweet (milk and white requires different ratios). Chop up all the chocolate and put it into a bowl, pour over the boiled cocoa mix.

Let it sit for a minute or two then whisk together. Bring up to volume with some ice, this helps cool it down, and gives the right ratio of water. It can be churned as soon as it is cooled, or it can be chilled overnight. If you do chill it overnight it may separate out but it’ll whisk back together just fine.

It does seem to get very hard once frozen, but it is very tasty and rich.

I wanted to serve this with something a little more interesting. Brandy snaps are something I’ve served ice cream in many times, their predominant ginger flavour would work nicely with the chocolate (unlike the sorbet they aren’t vegan). They’re very simple, just brown sugar and butter melted together.

Add some brandy and the mix will bubble right up. Stir together and add some flour and ginger. Spoon onto a baking sheet and bake for 8-10 minutes until they have become all lacy.

They will come out very soft and you need them to cool a little so you can pick them up and then mold them over a bowl (or in any shape you like, round a wooden spoon handle will give nice little tubes) while they’re still soft. Once they’re cool they will harden. Store in a cool, airtight container if you aren’t using them straight away.

Serve the ice cream in the brandy snaps, add fresh raspberries, et voila, a dessert fit for a king!

Caramel refers of course to cooked sugar, specifically sugar that has been cooked to the 320°-350°F range so it is an amber to golden colour.

The word caramel was first recorded in 1725, it comes from the Spanish caramelo. The source of caramelo is unknown, but some believe it is related to the Latin calamellus, a  form of calamus, meaning reed or cane—a reference to sugar cane, we think.

Soft caramel candy is an American invention, though no one is sure when. All that is known is someone added butter and dairy to caramelised sugar and created creme caramels, by the mid 1800s they were featured in recipe books.

All the flavour in this ice cream comes from the caramelised sugar, the aim is to get it as close to black jack (410°F where the sugar turns black and then decomposes) without burning it. A lot of dairy is being added which will weaken the flavour, so a caramel at 320°F which is barely amber won’t be noticeable in the finished product. This lead to me declaring a new stage of sugar, “heart in the throat,” where you’re so afraid to turn away or even blink for fear of it being burnt and ruined before you can add the cream.

This is actually just a standard vanilla ice cream recipe, it’s just the process that’s different. Rather than whisking the eggs and sugar you caramelise the sugar (with a hint of water if you’re not a fan of dry caramel), adding the cream and milk when it hits that “heart in throat” stage, then once it’s whisked together and smooth temper it into the yolks. This takes a little more care as the caramel with cream added will be much hotter than scalded cream that you would usually temper the yolks with. Plus the sugar is usually whisked with the yolks to help stabilise them and prevent them from curdling. So temper slowly and carefully. Then heat gently until it’s coating consistency.

I’m afraid the caramel and tempering happened so fast no photos were forthcoming. This is the mix right before it was chilled though.

This ice cream came out fantastically, definitely one of the winners for the month. The deep bitter undertones reminded some of the tasters of coffee, even some non caramel fans found it pleasing. It’s not super sweet and that’s the key, getting the caramel dark enough so the bitterness counters the sweetness and balances perfectly.

To help you with shopping, a bike that folds into a shopping cart has been created.

Travelling about and out of wine, have no fear, the wine rack is a bra that stores wine for you, since it’s going to have to be drunk warm you may want to stick to reds!

Inside Insides has been putting fruit and vegetables through an MRI… because they can! It’s pretty cool to look at.

Changes are on the way for the Austin Food Trailer scene.. New legislation is being brought in to help make sure the trailers are legitimate and not going to give anyone food poisoning!

Did you know there was an underground Kombucha network in Austin? I didn’t until I saw this post, started when kombucha was getting pulled off the shelves for it’s trace alcohol content (well, it is fermented). The Austin Eavesdropper shows you how to make your own.

Austin Food Lovers Companion has a list of everything that’s going on until the end of the month. If you don’t follow her already I would strongly suggest it.

And to end the week on a strange note, how about a vegetable orchestra?

I wanted something light and summery, fruity and refreshing. There are plenty of fresh peaches around at the moment but I didn’t want to do peach all on it’s own. By a wonderful coincidence it’s also mango season (although you can get them all year anyway). I’d seen peaches and mangos together and so my thought process was mostly along the lines of “why not”

This is one sorbet I didn’t have a recipe for, I was making it up as I went along. So I started with a simple syrup and simmered the peaches and mangos in until they were tender. Out came the stick blender and once smooth it was strained, just to be sure.

Since I didn’t have a recipe to go off of I needed to make sure I had the right sugar content in my sorbet so it would churn properly. Thanks to Michael’s brewing we had a hydrometer on hand. Being the… thorough *grins* person he is we had the triple scale that had Brix on one side. One degree Brix (bx) is equal to one gram of sucrose in 100grams of solution. I did my research and a fruit sorbet is ideal at around 25°bx. My sorbet needed to be chilled, the hydrometer is calibrated to 60°F so an ice bath was in order.

Once chilled appropriately I started measuring the sorbet. At first it was way too sweet, the hydrometer didn’t even sink low enough to get onto the scale. So water was added, just plain filtered water, nothing special. This took it to 30°bx, so I gradually added more water, stirring it in well and measuring after each addition to get it to 25°bx.

Once there I finished chilling it and then churned it. My research was correct, it churned beautifully and once fully frozen it scooped out like a dream.

I would have personally preferred less peach compared to the mango, but other reviews said it was perfect so maybe I’m just odd! Either way it turned out just as I hoped, light and refreshing and summery. What a wonderful way to spend an afternoon, sat in the sunshine with a scoop or two of this on hand.

Or What To Do When Your Brown Butter Ice Cream Refuses To Taste Like Brown Butter.

I was so looking forward to making the brown butter ice cream, it’s the one I had to have on the list when I was deciding what to make for this month. It’s light, delicate nutty flavour, smooth and rich. I even had some pecan tartlets on hand, they would complement each other perfectly.

It started like any other ice cream making session. I had my egg yolks and sugar in a bowl, whisked together. And I got my butter going in a small frying pan.

It took a long time, I went for the low-and-slow route for browning. It starts to change colour, it gains little flecks and it has the most amazing nutty aroma. It gets tempered into the eggs and then the ice cream is finished as usual. Strain right at the end to get all those flecks out. Then chill.

I gave it a quick taste before chilling, I was excited to see what it would be like. Nothing! Nada! Not a thing! All I could taste was that teeny tiny teaspoon of vanilla that had gone in there, nothing buttery or nutty at all. But, I didn’t worry, sometimes chilling can make the world of difference to a flavour. Maybe it just needed to be cold for the flavour to come out.

Fast forward to the next day. I take another taste. Still nothing. It’s vanilla ice cream. Albeit a really nice vanilla ice cream, the brown sugar and butter adding depths of flavour and richness. But not a single hint of brown butter.

Well, I can’t just leave it as vanilla, that’s no fun. So I think about ice creams that were on my “maybe” list. Hoky Pokey comes jumping out.

Hokey Pokey (not the song.. which is the hokey cokey to all you Brits out there) is vanilla ice cream with honeycomb in it. Not honeycomb as in from bees, but the candy. Ever had a Crunchie bar (you’ll see them in the imported food isle), no? Well, honeycomb candy is caramelised sugar that you trap carbon dioxide bubbles in, forming a light airy crisp, caramel-y wonderfulness! It’s called honeycomb because the bubbles give it the look of, well, honeycomb (apparently it can also be known as sponge toffee).

Apparently this is a popular flavour in New Zealand, and I recall finding it in some ice cream parlours in the UK. Hokey Pokey was a generic term for the street ice cream vendors in the 19th to early 20th century in England and also New York. I also hear tell that Hokey Pokey is a Cornish term for honeycomb.

Thankfully honeycomb doesn’t take long to whip up (the vital stages come and go quick though, so only photos of the finished article), just boil the sugar and honey with a dash of water to 300F. Then stir in baking soda. It rises alarmingly and you actually want to gently knock it back a little or it will become too airy and collapse. Of course knocking it back too much leaves you with a slab of hard caramel. Pour it out on a tray, greased parchment will do, but any excuse for me to get my trusty silpat out! Leave it to set. It really doesn’t take long. I left it an hour as I pottered about do other bits and pieces, 30 minutes would have done the trick.

Then break it up into pieces. I went for smallish chunks and doing that gave me plenty of crumbs too.

Once the ice cream is churned fold in the chunks and all the crumbs and leave to freeze.

The honeycomb loses some its crispness frozen in the ice cream, except for some of the larger chunks. But finding the pockets of it makes for fun eating. Those crumbs spread throughout the mix adding a nice overall flavour to the ice cream.

What Would Jesus Eat, the Axis of Evil and Testicles. All are the basis of cookbooks you didn’t know existed.

The secret to the smoothest iced coffee, cold brew. It is less acidic that regularly brewed coffee.

A subject dear to my heart, the 12 coolest teapots! I love the Garfield one. Another subject we love, zombies! Braaaaaaaain Caaaaaakes.

It is National Ice Cream month, here are some crazy flavours.. still feeling hungry after those suggestions?

Are you able to tell your peppers apart? Epicurious has a visual guide to help you along.

Time produced a study this week showing that organic eggs are no healthier for you than battery farmed. While guacamole and salsa have been linked to food poisoning.

Artist Liz Hickok has been creating cities out of jello. Her San Francisco is pretty awesome.

Ending this week, following the belief that meat sections make everything better an artist has been breaking everything up into meat section diagrams, including rainbows, the fail whale and a vuvuzela!

Who doesn’t love a glass of “bubbly” to celebrate?.. Well, actually, I don’t, I find it too dry. This wonderful sorbet however adds sugar to the mix making it sweeter, much more palatable.

True champagne comes from the Champagne region of France, however American laws aren’t as strict as the French so any sparkling wine can be labelled as champagne.

Champagne is made from a blend of chardonnay, pinot noir, or pinot blanc grapes. Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon, celler master at the Abbey of Hautvillers until 1715, was credited for his work in the blending of champagnes and prevention of bottle explosion from carbonation by using thicker bottles and better corks. He did however consider the presence of bubbles a fault and spent his life trying to reduce their occurrence. He believed that pinot noir grapes gave the best flavour and by limiting the contact with the skin of the grapes helped him to produce white wine from red grapes.

In 1662, the English scientist Christopher Merret presented a paper detailing how the presence of sugar in a wine led to it sparkling, and that nearly any wine could be made to sparkle by adding sugar before bottling. This is one of the first known accounts of someone understanding the process of creating sparkling wine and suggests that British merchants were producing “sparkling Champagne” even before the French Champenois were deliberately making it.

Following the death of Louis XIV in 1715, his nephew Philippe II, the Duke of Orléans became the Regent of France. The Duke  enjoyed the sparkling Champagne and featured it at his nightly petits soupers at the Palais-Royal. This sparked a craze in Paris as everyone sought to emulate the Duke’s tastes.

Since then champagne has had it’s ups and downs but it still remains central to many celebrations today.

This sorbet was remarkably easy to make. I made a simple syrup (equal quantities of sugar and water) and then added it to a bottle of champagne. Chilled overnight (more for convenience than necessity, just chill it down however fast or slow you like) and then churned.

It had a soft texture, it melted very quickly, a sign of too much alcohol. Not too much however as it did churn and freeze beautifully.

It had a very light and refreshing taste, perfect for the summer, the flavour a blend of dry and sweet at the same time.

I was never a fan of rum raisin ice cream as a child, I couldn’t tell you why.. I don’t remember it having a strong rum flavour, but maybe I remember wrong as that would certainly explain it.. For some unknown reason it took me til my twenties (don’t forget, it’s legal to drink from 18 in England) to find rum appealing.

I can’t find anything that will tell me when rum raisin ice cream came into being, who had that spark of genius. The internet tells me that when Nelson Mandela was released in 1990 he had his first meal of freedom with Bishop Tutu, the dessert was rum raisin ice cream. It also tells me that the Haagen Dazs rum raisin contains little to no alcohol.

My recipe did.. oh boy did my ice cream contain alcohol!

I failed to plan ahead and get my raisins soaking overnight, so I put the rum and raisins in a pan and heated them to just below boiling and then turned the heat off. Left to sit for an hour or so  in warm rum the raisins will soak it all up and get wonderfully plump and juicy.

I didn’t do a standard vanilla custard, I swapped out the sugar for brown sugar to give it a deeper flavour. A little bit more rum got added to the custard too, I’m not cooking it out!

Churned like usual I folded the raisins in as I transferred it to it’s freezer container.

This was a fun ice cream, you could smell the rum as you lifted the spoon to your mouth. The custard didn’t have a strong rum flavour, just a little warmth if you ate a lot of it. But the raisins… ooh the raisins. Little pockets that burst and emptied rum into your mouth as you ate them, they were divine!

I am definitely a fan of rum raisin ice cream now I’m all grown up!

Southern California seems the return of the milkman.. Finally looking like the milkman jokes will make sense again *grins*

That amazing British ingredient, Lyles Golden Syrup, has undergone a takeover.. Either we’ll see it more commonly on American shelves now or people with no idea of the British tradition will change it and ruin it completely. The author asks if there’s still a place for syrup in the kitchen and I say most definitely yes! It provides a distinctive flavour that no other ingredient can replicate.

The psychology of what men and women eat. Why do women prefer chocolate, and men steaks.. ever wondered?

Got a thing for kitchen gadgets? Ever tried some of these?

Have a great weekend folks!

I decided an ice cream and a sorbet a week seemed a good balance. So today is the day of the sorbet. This flavour was mostly decided on the fact that I gained a new book on ice creams and we had some strawberries in the freezer. Yes, it would be great to use fresh, but we had frozen so frozen it was, and it didn’t seem to hurt it in any way.

Strawberry and balsamic have an interesting relationship. They complement each other, they really do. It was a pairing I had heard about for a while but never tried.. Michael thought I was a loon and they would never work together. But I was determined and made it anyway.

The strawberries were mixed with a simple syrup and the balsamic vinegar and then blended together, strained and chilled. I couldn’t taste the balsamic at this point but left it until it had chilled.

Just before churning I still couldn’t taste the balsamic so I started adding more, and then some more. The balsamic has a very odd effect, it makes the strawberries taste ever more like strawberries, like super intense berries! Then giving a mild kick at the end. It smelt a lot stronger than it tasted so your mind told you it was going to be really balsamic-y and instead you just got super strawberry.

A few minutes into churning the recipe called for egg whites to be added… it apparently helps stabilise and emulsify the sorbet improving the texture.. It seemed to work the day after, even a couple days after. But a week after and the sorbet seemed icier than I would usually expect, I don’t know if the egg whites had anything to do with that.

Obviously, we served it with fresh strawberries, a few splashes of balsamic over it is a nice garnish too.

Most of our taste testers approached this one with caution, like Michael they hadn’t heard of strawberry and balsamic being paired together. We got good reviews though, everyone was surprised at how intense the strawberry flavour was thanks to the balsamic. A few people would have liked to see more of a kick at the end, maybe that’s something your guests can add themselves, garnishing with balsamic to the level they like it, not everyone wants that kick at the end, finding it strong, and in some cases just plain confusing to taste in a dessert.