First, cakes. I tried and tried to think of something better to do than put pears on it—because you, Katie, had done the pears and I didn't really want to be a copycat—but nothing better occurred to me. And I like pears. And I trust your judgment. So I made the same recipe, doubled the cardamom, sauteed some peeled pears in butter with cardamom, and made the cakes.
Nothing special, right? Just making cakes that had already been made. Then, genius kicked in.
How do you keep the recipes that you see and mean to make but haven't yet made? When I see a recipe that interests me, I'll whip out my handy Mac command+shift+4 function and take a screen shot of the recipe. Then I name the picture after the recipe and file it away in a desktop folder called, uncreatively, "food." And there it sits until I decide to go through the folder, which maybe happened during class last week. What did I find? Cardamom saffron ice cream.
Take some whole green cardamom pods.
Infuse some milk with the pods and saffron.
Do all other ice cream make-y things, following the basic custard recipe.
From the cakes, I also had even more leftover mava and leftover sauteed pears. But, you know, that mava is thick. So I heated it up with some milk (between 1/4 and 1/2 cup), added some sugar (less than 1/4 cup), then the mava melted. I cooked it so that it got thicker, but that sugar made it different in a borderline caramel sort of way, and I kind of lost my guts about 15 minutes into it because caramel will do that to a girl. The mava-milk-sugar mixture was kind of thick and then I did my favorite thing of adding about 1/2 tsp of baking soda to it, which makes the caramel-like mixture get really fluffy and bubbly, in a delightful way. Then I remembered to add the pears, and that ruined the fluff.
My idea was to have the mava as a strip of something running through the ice cream, but this plan was thwarted because (1) I lost my guts and it didn't get thick enough and (2) it wasn't cold when I added it to the almost-ready ice cream and, instead, made the ice cream melt a little bit, so that everything mixed together in a fantastically delicious way.
The result:
i like the title of this post -- so determine to kick mava's butt. how did these taste? was there anything similar you could compare the ice cream too? and, i liked your talk about how you save the recipes you want to try -- i keep mine on a spreadsheet, though i need to update it.
ReplyDeletei guess the ice cream reminded me a bit of a caramel ginger ice cream i had in LA this summer (at scoops, if you ever go...). the best part is that i made the ice cream with the leftover cream from the mava. know what rocks? ice cream with real cream in it. and whole milk. it makes the flavor of the cardamom so smooth.
ReplyDeletei'm so not-surprised that you keep your recipes on a spreadsheet. your organization is adorable. that sounds condescending, but it's not meant to be.
I'm so overdue on this comment, but it's a bold comment that has NEEDED to be made, and it is:
ReplyDeleteThis was the best ice cream that I've ever had.
Seriously. I'm trying to think of better ice creams: that homemade strawberry I had at the summer fair when I was a kid, Scoop's (Mariana mentioned) Brown Bread ice cream, frozen custard in Wisconsin, oh and Godiva made this raspberry truffle ice cream that was amazing. BUT NO. this was, is, the best ice cream I've ever tasted.