Cinnamon Ice Cream – Sweet Pea’s Kitchen
It’s supposed to be 80 degrees today, so it seems like a good time for the first ice cream post of the season! I discovered home-made ice cream when I first got my KitchenAid mixer, and every time I make it I struggle to remember why I don’t do it more often (other than the fact that it’s a 24-hour gratification process, which might really be enough of a reason).
I actually made this cinnamon ice cream for Thanksgiving last fall, to go with mom’s apple pie, and it was amazing. My favorite part of making my own ice cream is that the flavor is entirely up to me – if I want more or less of something, I don’t have to whine about Breyer’s choices – I just have to change the recipe! I have big plans for the ice cream season this year – chocolate, black raspberry, ginger… I also want to experiment with some sorbets and frozen yogert. We’ll see what I actually get around to.
Like the cardamom rose ice cream, this was a custard base, which I’m pretty sure just means you cook it. It’s a little time consuming because you have to watch and stir it constantly, but not terribly so, and the results are much creamier than an uncooked base.
Once the custard base is cooked, it has to be strained to make sure you didn’t get any clotted milk clumps (because that’s what milk and cream do when you cook them). This part involves too many hands, but it’s actually sort of fun. And ice baths look neat.
Once it’s strained and cooled a little, it has to be refrigerated overnight to completely chill it. Before you do that, you usually add most of the spices and flavorings (if they weren’t already in the custard). I use the same air-tight plastic containers for chilling that I do for freezing the completed ice cream, because I have tons of them.
I didn’t end up taking any pictures of the churning this time, for some reason, but it worked a lot like the cardamom rose or the peach ice cream I made ages ago – pour the chilled custard in the frozen mixer bowl (They have a separate bowl for this that also has to be frozen, so don’t let that throw you off if you’re making ice cream yourself. It needs at least 18 hours frozen, so I just keep mine in our chest freezer at the ready for “spontaneous” ice cream making.) and churn until it’s done, following the instructions in the ice cream maker manual. And every now and then sneak a taste of what’s splashed up the sides. (They always leave that part out of the directions, for some reason…)
Cinnamon ice cream was perfect with apple pie. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this years ago – I’m pretty sure it’s going to become an annual occurrence. (Ha. I like to predict things, but I’m not so big on going back to see if I ever follow through. Don’t hold me to that.) But it’s also a really easy mix, since it’s just flavorings and no extra ingredients. Highly recommended!
Mmm, now I may need to sneak out for ice cream after my lunch.
Cinnamon Ice Cream
Sweat Pea’s Kitchen
Makes 1 quart
Ingredients:
- 1 1/2 cups whole milk
- 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
- 3/4 cup granulated sugar
- 4 inch piece vanilla bean, slit lengthwise and seeds removed, pod reserved OR 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 4 large egg yolks
- 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
Directions:
- Set a fine mesh strainer over a medium sized bowl and set the bowl over a large container of ice water.
- In a medium saucepan over medium heat, heat the milk, cream, 1/2 cup sugar and the vanilla seeds and pod, stirring occasionally to break up the vanilla seeds, until steam appears and the liquid is hot (175 degrees) about 5 minutes.
- When the milk mixture is cooking, in a separate bowl, whisk the yolks and 1/4 cup of sugar together until smooth.
- Slowly whisk about 1 cup of the hot milk mixture into the yolks to temper them.
- Then slowly whisk the tempered yolk mixture back into the remaining hot milk mixture.
- Continue to cook the custard mixture over medium heat until it is very hot but not simmering (180-185 degrees).
- Pour the custard mixture into the strainer bowl set in the ice bath and let cool, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes.
- Remove the custard mixture from the ice bath and add cinnamon.
- Cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate until very cold (40 degrees), about 3 hours.
- Remove and discard the vanilla pod from the custard (or add the vanilla extract, if using) and stir well.
- Pour the custard into the ice cream machine canister and churn, following the manufacturer’s instructions, until the mixture resembles soft-serve ice cream, about 20 minutes.
- Transfer the ice cream to an airtight container, press plastic wrap flush against the surface, cover the container, and freeze the ice cream until firm, at least 2 hours.
Recipe Note: Two teaspoons of vanilla extract may be substituted for the vanilla bean. Stir it into the chilled custard just before churning. (I don’t like vanilla specks in my vanilla, so I went with extract. Also, beans are much more difficult than just pouring things out of a bottle.)
Cupcake Friday: Chambord Cupcakes – My Baking Addiction
I’m sneaking this one in here by the skin of my teeth, not to disappoint my loyal Cupcake Friday followers. Once again, I have failed to make cupcakes this week (although I did make my favorite stand-by cookie, stay tuned for that one if I ever get around to writing blog posts again). It’s been a really busy week, folks, and I know we’re headed into the busiest time of the year, and I haven’t even told you about my Thanksgiving recipes yet! I’m so sorry. I’ll try, I promise!
For now, here’s your last minute dose of cupcake lust: Chambord Cupcakes from My Baking Addiction.
These cupcakes combine two of my favorite things (chocolate and Chambord – which in case you aren’t familiar, includes one of my other favorite things, raspberries) into one of my favoritest things – cupcakes. I have some stories for you about Chambord. Would you like to hear them?
I invented my own drink once, many years ago. It’s a very chick drink, but it’s delicious and I highly recommend it. I can’t give you measurements, because when it comes to booze I basically just pour by instinct, but it’s basically this: start with Mike’s Cranberry Hard Lemonade. Pour it into a red wine glass (the enormous kind that can hold an entire 12 oz bottle of Mike’s, preferably), then add a shot or two (or three) of Chambord, and then a splash of Bacardi Razz. If you’re feeling frisky, also add a splash of Absolut Mandarin. For a long time, this drink didn’t have a name. Then a friend advised me that you should always name drinks after your invisible childhood friends. So the original version is the Lisa, and if you add the Absolut Mandarin, it becomes a Crazy Lisa. Try it, and let me know what you think. It could probably benefit from a bit of actual cranberry juice to cut the sweetness. I drank many of these in my early 20s. They were delicious.
Shortly after inventing the Lisa, I tried to switch to the cheaper stuff. You know, name brand liquor is expensive, and there are so many knockoffs, surely dropping down just one level wouldn’t be too bad, right? I bought a bottle of Chateau Monet. It was about $10 cheaper, but certainly not bottom of the line. I thought I was safe. Fate advised me otherwise, at least for Chambord. One night, when I was about to mix myself a drink in my dad’s still-under-construction kitchen with poured concrete floors, I picked up that bottle of Chateau Monet. I had carried it half way from the cabinet to the counter (a journey of about 48 inches) when the unthinkable happened – my hand slipped, and the bottle went crashing to the floor. It shattered.
Did I mention that the poured concrete floors were also cut into large tiles, a continuous pattern of diamonds across the kitchen and eating nook, towards the laddered hole that should have been stairs?
When the Chateau Monet shattered, the thick, dark purple, sticky sweet raspberry liqueur instantly discovered the wonders of that floor. It found pathways through the tiles that I never knew existed. It learned to creep both across the floor and under the plywood temporary cabinets. It crawled, seeped, and poured across the kitchen, filling crevasses with sugar and booze and berry.
I cleaned up the glass, wiped the tiles, and toothbrushed out the seams, thanking whatever gods that I had not just shattered a bottle of true Chambord. I never bought the cheap stuff again.
One of my daydreams is to make Chambord Ice Cream. I did actually find a recipe, but I haven’t tried it yet. I’m expecting I’ll get around to these cupcakes first, but maybe I’ll make them both together. Chocolate Chambord cupcakes with Chambord Ice Cream. How could you go wrong?
Thanksgiving 2012: A Survival Guide
Well, we made it. I feel a bit as if I’ve just emerged from a food-coma-induced cloud, only to discover that someone filled my fridge with delicious leftovers.
Since this is my third annual Biggest Little Thanksgiving, I thought I had this down. I thought that making a ton of food was making a ton of food; because it is, isn’t it? I failed to take into account two important factors: 1) the size/quantity of the bird(s), and 2) people, and therefore time.
Cupcake Friday: Better-Than-Box-Mix Cupcakes
Happy Cupcake Friday!
I made these cupcakes ages ago, and somehow managed to save them until I had started a Cupcake Friday feature on my blog. How appropriate! Don’t they look delicious? Now I want to make more this weekend… (more…)
Cupcake Friday: Halloweeny Pumpkin Cupcakes with Pumpkin-Cinnamon Icing
Happy Friday everybody. :) Turns out I never posted my Halloween cupcakes post, and how better to celebrate the coming weekend? So here they are! Halloweeny pumpkin cupcakes with pumpkin-cinnamon cream cheese icing!
Inspired by Katie, created by Miz Purple, iced and eaten by Helper Hubby.
It’s never the wrong time to make cupcakes, but cupcakes in the fall get high marks, especially if they’re pumpkin. (more…)
Pumpkin in Many Forms: Pumpkin Bread
When a man with a toothache says he wants pumpkin bread, you make it for him. Especially if you’ve already been planning to make some, and it’s a Sunday afternoon, and you really want the house to smell good.
I have been planning on this for a while, but I didn’t actually bother to find a recipe until it got time to settle down to it. I figured I’d try my cookbook collection first, but they turned up nothing of consequence. (Okay, that’s a stretch – they turned up plain old nothing.) So I turned to my trusty internet, with its trusty other-people’s-cooking-blogs (and with AllRecipes – let’s give credit where it’s due), and low and behold found an amazingly simple recipe on of my old faithfuls – My Baking Addiction.
Apple Picking is Good For The Soul: Part 2 – Apple Crisp
Don’t miss Apple Picking is Good For The Soul: Part 1 – Cinnamon Applesauce!
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After the applesauce extravaganza, I still had quite a few apples left (surprise, surprise… 18 lbs is hard to get through!), so one night I decided to make an apple crisp. It was a night when I had help eating it, so it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Ultimately, although this tasted reasonably good, it didn’t turn out at all the way I wanted it to. The biggest problem was the volume of liquid in the crisp, which I think was because I used fuji apples. (They’re sweeter and crunchier, so I think they have more water in them? How to Cook Everything gave me an apple chart, and fujis were listed as “eating apples” not “baking apples” or even “all purpose apples”, so there’s probably a reason for that – although they were great in applesauce.) (more…)
Lemon-Blueberry Yogurt Loaf Disaster
As promised, I’m posting my outrageously unsuccessful attempt to make one of Sweet Pea’s blueberry recipes…
After much perusal of my list of options, the one that stood out the strongest (and seemed like I could make it fairly easily in my sister Caitlin’s small kitchen while she made guacamole and her boyfriend Eric prepped steaks for the grill) was the Lemon-Blueberry Yogurt Loaf. I’ve never really made a loaf before, but when I make another one (or if any of you have never made one and need to) I now have a few pointers by way of epic malfunction.
It all began promisingly enough. I had the ingredients; I had a pan; I had a kitchen. I put everything together and stuck it in the oven. (Failure part 1 – I totally forgot to take pictures during any of this. The light was bad anyway.)
Blueberry Muffins
I made these amazing muffins a few weeks ago, but I haven’t had a chance to post them yet. Just looking through the pictures is making me hungry – I might have to make them again this week!
I have a serious soft spot for blueberries. One of my neighbors growing up was a pick-your-own blueberries (and raspberries and blackberries) farm, which was always fantastic on those long summer days when I wasn’t in school. It’s much harder to make it out there now that I’m working during normal business hours, but I fantasize about pints and pints of blueberries, and I drool over any recipe with blueberry in the name (or ingredients list). I recently discovered a list of favorite blueberry recipes on Sweet Pea’s Kitchen (the list is at the end of her post on Individual Blueberry Buckles – every single one of them looks incredible) and nearly went mad trying to pick one to make RIGHT NOW. (Look out for a post on this disastrous attempt later this week…)
Ghirardelli Chocolate Chip Cookies
Cookies might be my favorite thing. Or cheese. Or chocolate. Or tea. But probably cookies. And the best cookies are chocolate chip cookies. And the best chocolate chip cookies are soft and chewy and warm from the oven. They should be so soft and chewy and warm that you can barely hold them without them falling apart, and the chocolate chips should leave chocolate smears on anything they touch. Ghirardelli is the master of chocolate, so it just makes sense that they would be the master of chocolate chip cookies, too. And they are.
Line-Item Thanksgiving – Turkey Day (with no turkey)
Extravagant Thanksgiving 2011!
Last year, my sister and I cooked the Biggest Little Thanksgiving in her tiny kitchen in Baltimore. We had such a ball that we wanted to do it again this year – but this time, we decided we needed a bit more space. So we told everyone that we were posting up at my house this year, and anyone who wanted to could come by, but we were not going to leave until everything had been cooked and eaten.
Chewy Chocolate Gingerbread
Let the annual cookie-thon begin! I apologize in advance for the change in quality of my pictures – most of these were taken with my handy iPhone, since I didn’t even think to take my camera with me as part of the cookie-making supplies. Nonetheless, I think they adequately represent the sheer absurdity of this cookie dough extravaganza.
This is the second annual Chewy Chocolate Gingerbread Insanity. Parthy has been making them for much longer, but Alice and I just joined in the fun last year. Parthy has been telling us for years that these was the most difficult, time consuming cookie recipe in creation (Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. I’m sure she has quite a few seriously high maintenance cookie recipes.) and for years we’ve been telling her we didn’t care, we still wanted to make them. So we did. And she’s right. This year I had broken thumbs to prove it. (Okay, not broken. But really, really sore.) (more…)
The Biggest Little Thanksgiving
This Thanksgiving, for the first time, my sister and I decided to thwart family tradition and strike out on our own. We, and two friends, and three dogs, created our own outrageous feast of astronomical proportions. And considering that we weren’t planning to feed the dogs, the volume of food in the house that day was verging on true madness.
Also madness was our well-intentioned plan to make things we’ve never made before. Fortunately (Thankfully?) the fates were on our side, and nearly everything we tried worked out well. We learned how to halve Cornish Game Hens; I learned how to make a pie crust (which, with a food processor, was a cinch); we discovered that neither of us really like our new green bean casserole recipe, but that it works…; and we failed, as usual, to discover the outer limits of our gastronomic abilities. Clearing your plate (or the table) runs in the family.
Brie-fest 2010
Once upon a time there was a food that was so much more than a food. It was an appetizer. It was a dessert. It was a meal by itself.
This food that was more than a food was lovingly known as “Baked Brie.”
Molasses Cookies: A Study (Part 1)
As a 2010 Holiday Special, I’m going to be doing a study of various cookies and cookie recipes. This study has come about in part because of these particular molasses cookies and the fact that, while they are delicious, they did not come out exactly the way I wanted them to. So I’m going to fix them, and I’m going to tell you all about it.
Let’s begin: (more…)
Retro Post: Adventure #3: Lemon Cheesecake
These next few posts will teach me my lesson, since I am trying to go back almost three weeks and remember exactly what I did and why. Hopefully once I catch up with myself I will be more successful at staying in the present…
The Lemon Cheesecake adventure was another co-venture with Alimonkee, which will also explain some of the modifications made to the recipe. It was also, I have to say, one of our most successful kitchen adventures to date (even including pre-blog cooking experiences!). This cheesecake was deadly amazing, and a huge hit with our diners, and also so impossibly rich that it was nearly explosive to try eating more than one piece. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Retro Post: Adventure #1: Cardamom Rose Ice Cream
I think it’s appropriate that my first foray into a cooking blog is also my first foray into ice cream makers and electric mixers.
When we closed on our first house several months ago, I immediately ordered myself the KitchenAid Professional 600 Mixer, unable to resist the allure of Empire Red and 575 watts of Mixing Power. This weekend was our first full weekend in the house, and we decided we were together enough to host a small Mothers’ Day dinner. Naturally, I planned the dinner deliberately to incorporate as much mixer usage as seemed reasonable.
LivingWithPurple 