I’m back! We had an absolutely spectacular wedding and a wonderfully relaxing honeymoon, and now we’re back to real life, which I think is awfully nice, too (I actually really missed my kitchen while we were away and was so happy to be back in it). I promise that I will have photos and stories, but for now, I have ice cream. This week’s Tuesdays With Dorie selection was Caramel Pots de Creme, which sound good to me, but seriously? Every time I make some kind of pudding/spoon dessert, no matter how small a quantity, it never gets finished. So I figure that since the ingredients were the same as ice cream, I might as well turn this recipe into ice cream - and it worked!
The original recipe, which you can find here on Peggy the Baker’s site, calls for two whole eggs and five yolks; I omitted the two whole eggs and kept the rest of the ingredients the same. After all the ingredients were combined, instead of pouring the custard into cups and baking it, I put the mixture back on the stove and cooked it until it reached 170 degrees, chilled it, then put it through the ice cream maker. Around this time last year the group made Burnt Sugar Ice Cream, and despite two attempts, I never quite achieved the deep color and flavor that ice cream was meant to have. I think I have now finally made real burnt sugar ice cream.
This recipe rated an 8 for Deliciousness and a 3 for Effort, for an EDR of 2.666. Many thanks to Peggy for hosting this week. I look forward to catching up and seeing how my fellow bakers fared with the actual recipe!
In this household we divide baked goods into three general categories: categories are breakfast, snacks, and desserts - with many subcategories and crossovers, of course. We are pretty benevolent went it comes to breakfast and typically can convince ourselves that most loaf cakes are breakfast fare. However, even Josh admitted that this week’s Tuesdays With Dorie selection, Basic Marbled Loaf Cake was a stretch - not that it’s stopping him. It looks unassuming, but the version I made, peppermint, contains half a pound of chocolate, which is kind of a lot for a breakfast food.
Dorie offers lots of fun flavor combinations for this cake and singles out the peppermint as her favorite. The peppermint version also contains white chocolate, which I enjoy baking with occasionally (and happen to have a stash of), so I figured it was the one to try. I made a tester ramekin, which was a good decision since the cake got huge in the pan, and it was excellent straight from the oven with ice cream.
Though we thought the cake was tasty, it was a skosh dry, so its Deliciousness rating is a 7. Many thanks to Carol of The Bake More for a great selection this week. You can find the recipe here on her site and visit the TWD site to see what other enticing flavor combinations the creative bakers came up with.
Dessert Watch 2011: A few weeks ago I mentioned that Josh had decided that there would be a dessert moratorium the two weeks before the wedding. Well, we’re 11(!) days away and the no-dessert rule has been revised, for a couple reasons. Instead of going cold-turkey on desserts, Josh has been bringing fewer snacks to work and having smaller portions for dessert. The rule is it has to fit in the dessert bowl, rather than the cereal bowls he typically uses. I took a photo of the bowls to show the difference in size.
