smitten kitchen » Ice Cream/Sorbet

classic ice cream sandwiches

deb — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:23:29 +0000

Look, guys, you’re never going to see my living room on a design blog. As lovely as the walls in landlord-chosen sallow yellow-beige are, as handsome as this coffee table once was (before the finish chipped off the top and we decided to ignore it until it fixed itself), and as charming as the explosion of half-deflated balloons, overturned fire trucks and other toys (some not even wooden, organic, or in sync with our decorating scheme, which, by the way, doesn’t exist) might be, this is hardly the stuff of Pinners’ Envy. Our parties are equally uncoordinated. There are no Mason jar cocktails with homemade bitters, flour sack table runners, or dishes sprinkled with fresh herbs from our window box garden (which also, uh, doesn’t exist, although if you saw the grime that accumulates on our windowsills from the avenue below, you might thank us). We’ve never sent guests home with a party favor aside from a hangover and we usually forget to make coffee at brunch. Our poor toddler has been deprived of organized birthday parties thus far, as I secretly hoped to stick with family brunches and homemade cakes (of course) until he was capable of expressing even the slightest interest in a more elaborate affair. (Although this year, he’s already made his intentions clear: “Jacob turn three. With cake. And guitar. And cake.” Noted!)

But, I do have my moments of high obsessiveness, such as my longstanding affair with creating homemade versions of things you normally buy at the grocery store, be they Oreos, goldfish crackers, graham crackers, fudge popsicles, pop tarts or marshmallows. I can’t help it; the homemade versions always taste a zillion times better and contain no mystery ingredients. So, when I spied a recipe for ice cream sandwiches in a new book about parties, even I knew I’d probably never make the gold luster cookie Oscar statuettes, Walk of Fame brownie stars or glitzy gold curtains in the chapter that focuses on creating an old-fashioned Hollywood-style movie night party, there wasn’t a chance they wouldn’t be in my freezer by that very weekend.

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peppermint hot fudge sauce

deb — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 01:34:11 +0000

You have all of your holiday shopping done, don’t you? I bet everything is wrapped and in gift bags, and that you know how to tie ribbons into bows without cursing. I suspect everyone but me knows how to… fluff? Is that what they call it? I bet everyone knows how to arrange the tissue paper inside the gift bags so that it looks perfectly festive and even a tad enthusiastic. I have a hunch that your gifts are homemade and hand-lettered; that you made your own cards. Oh, you didn’t? Well, come sit down over here. You’re among friends.

I ran to Duane Reade this morning and bought a roll of brown shipping paper and decided at once that the gift wrap theme this year would be “rustic”. I also wiped out the gift bag supply; sorry about that. Then I went home and made my first homemade gift. Yes, I know it is both Hanukah and Christmas week but I don’t like to be rushed. Plus, if you only have time this week to warm hearts and minds with but a single homemade treat, I hardly think this would be an unwelcome choice.

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fudge popsicles

deb — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 18:26:35 +0000

I have a tremendous crush on Matt Armendariz. It’s awkward, I know. I’m married, he’s married; I have a kid, he has dog children. It’s okay, my husband knows. He took a picture of Matt with his shirt half off a couple years ago, so I think we’re even. Fortunately for those who are now reading this uncomfortably at home, hoping this conversation ends quickly, my crush is more of a talent crush: Matt is a former graphic designer and art director and currently a food photographer, author and the man behind the Matt Bites blog. His photography is amazing, all natural light and unfussy, but what I find more addictive than anything else is his outlook, his energy for life. It’s hard to spend 5 minutes with him without getting hooked on his enthusiasm for family, good friends, great food and a life well lived with lots of travel to far-flung places. Seriously, he even went to Avery Island, Louisiana to learn how Tabasco is made. And didn’t take my husband with him. Alex is almost over it.

And now he is a cookbook author too. [Amusingly, I think Matt and I signed our cookbook deals the same week except his book is in my hands right now and my book is ... OH LOOK! Manhattanhenge! Did you catch it?] On A Stick! — yes, in which every recipe is speared or skewered or threaded on a handheld food device — is truly an exaltation of summer. It’s State Fairs and street fairs, frozen beach treats and the stuff picnics and backyard barbecues are made of: skewered salads, grilled marinated kebabs, melon with spices and fried pickles. Even unfathomable things get adorably impaled, like fried chicken and waffles, meatballs and spaghetti, potato chips (!) oh, and pizza too. It’s lighthearted, but there’s no skimping on the cooking: coconut shrimp, Chinese meatballs, pork belly and sweet and sour lollipops. Are you drooling yet?

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lemon mint granita

deb — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 16:47:31 +0000

Granitas have never exactly captured my imagination. Flecks of flavored ice in a bowl seemed rather dull, and their place in the dessert repository was kind of lost on me. Trust me, if I’m hoping you’re going to bust out some salted caramel dark chocolate mousse and you come out of the kitchen with pale icy chips? It’s going to be hard for me to feign enthusiasm.

But now I get it. People, granitas are a Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine of our kid dreams. They’re the perfect antidote to the sticky, oppressive summer days to come — frosty, crunchy and tart — tossing out that annoying plastic crank in favor of the unbranded simplicity of two forks and a roasting pan, and swapping the unnatural syrups in frightening hues for fresh fruit juice.

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buttermilk ice cream

deb — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:26:15 +0000

In the last week, we’ve made not-so-subtle hints about buns in ovens, cravings and peas in pods so it’s an only natural transition to ice cream, whether or not you eat it with sweet grape pickles.

I’m horribly overdue to finally dish out the recipe for Claudia Fleming’s incredible buttermilk ice cream — she of the scones, the gingerbread and the sandies — something I promised in January and have been going on about since December, when a friend sent me home with a pint she’d made. This stuff is perfection — all of the elements of a great vanilla ice cream with an extra tang that keeps it from being, well, “vanilla”.

Buttermilk is a funny thing. I can’t remember my mother using it once growing up and when I started baking more, was horrified by the stuff, which smells and taste a lot like the curdled milk that it is. How wrong is that? But now I love it. I mean, I haven’t taken to drinking a glass of it warm like a certain cooking instructor told me his elderly mother does — yeesh! — but when I smell it, I think of biscuits and cakes and muffins and I like it. So an ice cream that magnifies this deliciousness was not meant to last long in our apartment.

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hot fudge sauce

deb — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 18:32:35 +0000

Raise your hand if you’re surprised that my mother used to make us homemade hot fudge sauce for our ice cream? Right, I see you’re not new here! Welcome back. But really, the crazy didn’t start with my generation, despite the fact that I may or may not have crafted a really elaborate chicken dish this week when sick and not remotely interested in cooking or eating it. So I didn’t waste the ingredients. Also totally my mother’s daughter there.

Is it me, or does something about hot fudge sauce on ice cream seem distinctively retro? I don’t hear much about fudge sauce and their accompanying sundaes these days. Maybe I’ve stepped too far into the Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream in a pool of cognac, drizzled in the world’s most expensive chocolate, covered with shaved white, black and clear truffles, topped with edible 25-karat gold leaf world… Let me fix that right now.

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chocolate sorbet

deb — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:14:21 +0000

I’m going to take a brief break from your food phobias today to tell you about my newest one. It lives in the freezer. It controls my mind, and at times, my spoon. And at the rate we’re going, it will be the very end of me. Or my waistline. Or my husband, as he leaves me for the Paris-dweller who envisioned this masterpiece.

It goes by the innocent-sounding name chocolate sorbet but even typing those words was enough to send my resistance into a tailspin and I had to go into the freezer to get another taste, cursing Lebovitz the whole way there and whispering sweet nothings into my spoon on the way back.

I suppose you could say I’m having a Chocolate ~~Weak~~ Week, except it started last week when I was getting a pedicure and they had these tiny chocolate brownie nuggets out and I wasn’t even hungry but the entire 45 minutes of buffing and rebirthing my feet into the kind The Other Half walk on I was thinking “There’s a tiny bite of chocolate brownie in the corner. There’s a tiny bite of chocolate brownie in the corner…” ad infinitum. (When I finally swooped down on my prey an hour later, it didn’t even disappoint.)

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dulce de leche ice cream

deb — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:00:39 +0000

Two weeks ago, I had the honor to meet one of the people who has been reading this site in all of its incarnations for so long, she probably knows me better than I do. And yet she still wanted to meet me for lunch! The lovely Marce and I had a weekday lunch on a stunning day at Tabla’s Bread Bar, sitting outside discussing cameras and childcare, the food in Buenos Aires and the freelance life. It was fantastic, and not only because I can never resist an opportunity to have lunch at the Bread Bar but because she brought me…

A jar of dulce de leche from Argentina! I thought I’d won the lottery. I know that aside from being practically the national dish, it’s no big deal to find a jar a grocery store down there but I didn’t know that there is like a whole supermarket aisle of it! I … I think it’s safe to say that it’s best I never find myself in that aisle. It would get sticky; I’d never be invited back.

Of course, I immediately started scheming what I could make with it, but I wanted to be really cautious about not picking a recipe that would bury the dulce’s charms. Oh, I loved those Dulce de Leche Cheesecake Squares as much as you all did in January, but said then and maintain now that the dulce flavor was not particularly strong in the delicious end product. When someone lugs a one-pound tub of this caramel of the gods more than 5,000 miles to you, you want to treat it with the utmost respect.

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butterscotch ice cream

deb — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 23:56:02 +0000

Everyone needs a motto, an inspirational catchphrase or a daily affirmation and at least for the duration of this post, mine is going to have to be: when life gives you stupid, annoying pudding that never, ever sets, make ice cream. What? You don’t think it will work for t-shirts and taglines? I’m crushed.

But I have, indeed, come a long way from my late-February butterscotch pudding nadir. On the heels of the Valentines-timed chocolate pudding rave, it occurred to me that the world really needs more pudding recipes. They’re a great thing to master–not too difficult, not too heavy and complete and total comfort food. And while some (coughmomcough) have tried the chocolate pudding and still feel that it doesn’t have much on her beloved My-T-Fine [Deb shakes head in shame, clucks tongue] it is impossible to argue that store-bought or from-a-mix butterscotch pudding has any relation whatsoever to that which is coaxed from a brown sugar, vanilla and bourbon-hinted caramel.

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fennel ice cream

deb — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:39:08 +0000

I’m patting myself on the back right now–no, not for finishing NaBlo, because I think we have already established that an 86 percent effort doesn’t count–but because I have finally made the fennel ice cream from the October Gourmet and it is absolutely wonderful. You have no idea how many things have had the balderdash to get in my way.

It actually starts long before October, when I was trying to make the roasted banana ice cream from David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop. In a small kitchen with one counter, I rarely take pictures of my mise, as it is simply disgraceful. Things are piled and messy and muddled and as long as I can find a clear corner to work on, I excel in ignoring everything else. We all have our skills, non? This usually works for me (ahem) except for that day that it didn’t, and the ice cream maker, all of its parts and sticky, delicious banana batter ended up splayed across the kitchen floor, breaking the plastic paddle that churns the ice cream. Alex and I ordered a replacement part ($8 piece, $9 S&H) from Cuisinart that night which took EIGHT weeks to arrive, abruptly halting my ice cream making season in its tracks.

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