mix, mix…stir, stir

The only thing we love more than hearing about the different ways that SpiceCare has helped people tame the spice chaos in their kitchens is when we get to see pictures! We thought we’d share a few of the ones we’ve received so far.

It seems only fair to start with our own spices. The drawer shown on the left was only one of several places spices were stored throughout the kitchen. At right, a much more organized and functional system!

Customers in Montana transformed their unruly spice drawer into a thing of beauty!

Up in Anacortes, Washington, a pile of baggies was replaced by an elegant selection of SpiceCare containers on a lazy Susan.

In Altanta, a rack of messy bottles and jars became much more usable once SpiceCare was employed!

This SpiceCare owner in California gained a considerable amount of shelf space.

If you’re getting ready to replace your current spice mess with a SpiceCare system, don’t forget to take a picture of it now so you can better appreciate the transformation once it’s all finished. Then send up copies of the pictures and we’ll include them in our next update.

Vanilla ice cream is about the pleasure of tasting pure ingredients. It is the naked truth of ice cream. There are no ripe berries, rich chocolate ribbons, or crunchy mix-ins to hide behind, so if the ingredients aren’t top notch, the ice cream will be, well, rather vanilla. Though I dressed my dish of vanilla ice cream up with a papaya accent and some candied nuts, this vanilla ice cream is anything but hiding.

It’s 103 degrees F in Seattle today and 99 degrees F in my house at the moment. Somehow writing about ice cream seems like it should make me feel cooler, but it’s not working. Weather this hot is as befuddling to Seattleites as snow is. Having a stash of freshly made vanilla ice cream in the freezer from this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe has made for many brief escapes from the heat, so thank you to Lynne of Café Lynnylu for picking such a timely recipe for us to make. You can find the recipe on her blog if you need to create a summer escape of your own.

I grew up eating ice milk. I have such fond memories of ice milk with the sweet icyness that melted so easily on my tongue.  Ice milk, which is defined as having less than 10% milk fat, has been replaced by modern-day low fat ice creams. These new fangled low fat ice creams are designed to mimic the texture of full fat ice cream making them a completely different experience from eating ice milk. The imprint of ice milk on my young palate makes me biased toward lighter ice creams, which is one of the reasons I really like this recipe. Dorie uses equal parts cream and milk and 6 egg yolks. I have made many recipes with a higher proportion of cream and up to 9 egg yolks, and find them to be too heavy.

Have you ever wondered what the key is to making really luscious smooth ice cream at home? The length of time it takes to freeze the ice cream is key. I learned this from Kate Zuckerman in her book The Sweet Life: Desserts from Chanterelle. She is a big proponent of ice cream freezers that use a frozen canister rather than the more expensive machines with built-in cooling mechanisms. This is because they are so cold they get the job done in about 15 minutes, and the faster the freezing time the smaller the ice crystals, which results in smoother ice cream. The machine that I own has a built-in compressor and takes at least twice that long to freeze a pint. One tip she gives that I employ is to churn less ice cream at a time which makes it freeze faster, so I broke this recipe into two batches to freeze it.  Obviously having a really well chilled base is important, but by letting the base rest in the refrigerator overnight it becomes slightly thickened and will have a nicer texture once frozen.

A number of years ago I came across a recipe for Five Herb Ice Milk that was published in Gourmet magazine. The combination of herbs, cream (or milk in this case), and sugar is shockingly delightful. It was a jump-up-and-down-around-the-kitchen-squealing-with-joy type of flavor discovery.  If you are an ice milk fan you will love the consistency of this, and if you aren’t, just infuse the herbs in your favorite ice cream base recipe.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 84 recipes completed 137 to go!

I usually have a general idea of what something will taste like as I am making it, but there are those occasions when the first bite of the finished product is a complete surprise. Of course surprised can be good or bad, and this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe was a delightfully good surprise.

Blanc-Manger (for those of us that don’t speak French, it’s pronounced blah-man-jhay) is cream, milk, sugar, ground almonds, and gelatin. I expected it to be like panna cotta or flan in texture and when I tasted the batter before it chilled that seemed like a logical conclusion. It behaved quite like a panna cotta or flan would when unmolded from the pan, but the moment the first bite hit my mouth this dessert immediately deviated from the smooth  texture familiar to custards and other gelatin desserts. It was light and foamy as though it was effervescing with every chew. This was much more of a creamy rich mousse that just happened to be in the unexpected form of a tart. The big difference between this and panna cotta for example, is the cream is whipped and folded into the milk /gelatin mixture which incorporates air bubbles; air bubbles that pop and tickle your mouth as you eat it. It was the most delightful and unexpected surprise.

Now, a light airy gelatin tart might seem intimidating to make, but it’s as simple as whipping some cream, warming some milk, adding a few flavoring agents and spreading it in a pan to chill for a day. How perfect is this when you need an elegant dessert for a dinner party and you don’t need one more thing to do the day of? I cut out the rounds and placed them on a cocoa-star anise cookie so I could deliver these to friends and they could easily be eaten out of hand, but for a plated dessert I would opt for a thin layer of sponge cake under the tart. I spread a bit of raspberry jam spiked with Chambord and a touch of gelatin over the top. Overall I loved this dessert and thank Susan of  Sticky, Gooey, Creamy, Chewy for selecting it for this week’s baking activity. Susan has the recipe posted on her blog if you would like to experience the delicious effervescence yourself.

I experimented with leaf or sheet gelatin for the first time. Though there seems to be some debate about it being any better than the common granular gelatin, I wanted to try it because it’s what all the cool kids use. The trickiest thing about working with it is trying to decide how much to use when a recipe calls for granular gelatin. I have seen all sorts of different conversion rates in my research. For this recipe I settled on 3 ½ sheets (3” x 6” each) and the texture was perfect.  Like granular gelatin it must be soaked in cold water before being added to anything hot; if gelatin isn’t pre-soaked it can clump and not dissolve easily when added to warm mixtures. The texture of the soaked sheets is very strange. They become very slippery and floppy, but surprisingly are still very strong. Once added to hot liquid the sheets seem to dissolve instantly, which I suspect is the primary appeal of working with leaf gelatin. The other big benefit for me is I don’t end up spilling little granules of gelatin everywhere while measuring.  Somehow I always manage to spill gelatin and yeast when measuring them.

Two last little notes:

According to the food science guru, Harold McGee, gelatin doesn’t strengthen hair and nails. He says there just isn’t any good evidence to support this widely held claim. The protein found in our hair and nails is keratin and gelatin isn’t any better at creating the elements needed to form keratin than any other type of protein source. So you can eat gelatin, but you could also have a nice juicy steak, beautifully grilled piece of fish, or a tall glass of milk and provide your hair and nails with the building blocks they need.

If you want to add a little zip to chocolate cookies, but don’t want to go the common cinnamon route, try a little star anise. It adds the same warm sweetness like cinnamon, but with a fennel/anise flavor that is a nice twist.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 83 recipes completed 138 to go!

Sunny warm air and a bounty of ripe fruit can only mean summertime. Of all the luscious seasonal offerings a perfectly ripe peach stops my world. Plump and fuzzy with blushes of ruby red, orange and pale yellow, based on appearance alone there is a promises something lovely.

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe, selected by Tommi of Brown Interior, had me down at Pike’s Place Market searching for some beautiful peaches to make Honey Peach Ice Cream, and though I love ice cream, I knew it would be a challenge to forgo eating the fresh peaches to make this recipe. Standing at the counter staring at glistening pile of juicy ripe peach slices was a test of will, but most of them did make it into the ice cream.

I really can’t seem to heat milk or cream without the thought of a flavor infusion creeping into my mind. I became fixated on the idea of mace with this ice cream and infused one large mace blade in the cream and milk for 10 minutes, and then preceded with tempering the eggs and cooking the custard with the mace blade, removing it before chilling the mixture. The flavor was exciting, spicy, warm and peachy. The mace seemed a touch too pushy but when I tossed in a pinch of pink flake salt the flavors balanced to a lovely harmony.

The cool creamy texture initially hijacks the tasting experience, but once the texture is satisfactorily processed, the sunny flavor of fresh peach blooms bringing with it smooth spicy hints of nutmeg from the mace infusion. I used my good honey for this ice cream; the honey that gets to live in my new honey pot.  Last month I attended the International Food Blogger Conference organized by Foodista, and one of the sample products, or gifts, graciously bestowed to the participants was a ceramic honey pot from Le Crueset. Growing up we always used a honey pot with a wooden honey dipper, but I seem to have gotten by all these years using the handy upside down squeeze bottles, which are an amazingly clever idea. Though clever and handy, the squeeze bottle misses on the pleasurably tactile experience of dipping and drizzling honey from a pot.

Special honey now lives in my pot. I don’t know if it was a happy coincidence or a well planned strategy, but a beautiful jar of Guajillo honey from Range Honey in Texas was also gifted to us conference attendees. I had a Winnie the Pooh moment while making this ice cream when I was standing over the sink licking every last drop of honey out of the measuring spoon. Needless to say, I really like this honey.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 78 recipes completed 143 to go!

Chocolate cream pie is one of David’s all time favorite eats, so this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe caught his interest in a big way. No nuts, no raisins, no coffee, no coconut, no liquor, just pure chocolate cream goodness.

I actually followed the recipe as written, though I did double the salt in the crust. What did we learn from World Peace Cookies? Salt and chocolate are good! Though there is plenty of opportunity to spike the crust with spices, the whipped cream with liquor, or the filling with mix-ins, and I bet some of the other Tuesday with Dorie bakers took creative license to experiment with great results, I stayed true on this one.

The chocolate cream filling is a basic pastry cream made with cornstarch so the filling sets to a nice consistency that doesn’t run or ooze when cut. The flavor is rich and chocolaty and the use of bittersweet chocolate keeps it from becoming overly sweet. The dense rich texture is reminiscent of pots de crème   rather than chocolate pudding, which makes the tart quite decadent. The light whipped cream topping is a perfect contrast to the unctuous chocolate pastry cream.

Behold the saucier pan; essential in my mind if you like to make puddings, pastry creams, and various other creamy dessert items or sauces that require constant whisking. What makes this pan so outstanding for intensive whisking or stirring is the lack of a sharp angle between the bottom and side wall. The rounded transition allows you to whisk or stir the contents of the pan thoroughly and evenly creating a smooth evenly cooked result.

Kim of Scrumptious Photography selected this week’s recipe that was enjoyed by all. If you would like to make someone very happy by serving them this delicious chocolate tart, click on over to Kim’s blog for the recipe, or you can find it on page 352 of Dorie’s book.

I, along with over 350 other baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 71 recipes completed 150 to go!