Basil ice cream

 

In that blissful time where it's hard to keep up with the explosion of basil before mornings turn cool and the basil turns rusty, I thought I'd try something beyond vats of pesto.

Basil ice cream
From “The Perfect Scoop” by David Lebovitz
Note: I used a mix of the standard Genovese basil most commonly grown here and some lemon basil.

Ingredients
1 cup packed basil leaves
¾ cup sugar
2 cups of cream, divided
1 cup milk
5 egg yolks
Zest of 1 lemon

Method
In a food processor or blender, puree basil, sugar and 1 cup of cream, trying to make basil pieces as small as you can.

Put a layer of ice inside a large bowl. Put half of the pureed mixture in a medium bowl set inside the larger bowl to serve as an ice bath. Add the remaining cup of cream to the mixture in the bowl.

Put the remaining pureed mixture into a medium saucepan over medium low heat. Heat until hot and steaming, but well before the simmer stage. Remove pan from heat. Place egg yolks into a medium bowl. Add small ladlefuls of the hot mixture to the eggs, one at a time, whisking mixture in vigorously as you go to prevent curdling. When the eggs have been slightly warmed, add back to the pan and put the pan back on the heat. Heat, stirring constantly with a heat-proof spatula, until mixture thickens slightly and coats a spoon dipped into it. (Be careful not to let the mixture boil.)

Remove pan from heat. Place a fine mesh strainer over the mixture in the bowl sitting in the water bath. Strain heated mixture into the mixture in the bowl. Stir in lemon zest and stir until the combined mixture is cool. Cover somewhat loosely and store in the refrigerator until well chilled. Freeze according to ice cream maker instructions.

Rating: For a recipe that doesn’t have that many ingredients, this dirties an amazing number of dishes. And getting the basil bits out of that strainer is super fun. So I kind of had an attitude going in that it might not be worth it. Plus, that color is slightly off-putting.That said, the flavor is really quite nice. Subtle, but nice. There's a slightly noticeable texture to it that you wouldn't associate with ice cream, probably from all that fiber. So, I would say that I'm enjoying eating it, but I probably won't go out of my way to make it again. There are higher uses for all that basil glory, if you can dodge all the pollinators to get to it. (Bees apparently adore basil blossoms.)

Mini pumpkin cheesecakes with maple whipped cream

 

Remember when Posh Spice drew more Google searches than pumpkin spice? Yes, this recipe involves pumpkin, and it involves spices. But I assure you, no coffee drinks were adulterated in the process.

 Mini pumpkin cheesecakes with maple whipped cream

Adapted from a recipe posted to the former recipezaar.com many years ago by Michele7. A search of the new food.com site does not turn up the identical recipe, although it does have another version that also purports to be the Cheesecake Factory version, as this one did. The two were noticeably different, both from each other, and from several other recipes alleged to be a copy of the restaurant’s version. I can’t weigh in on that, having never been to a Cheesecake Factory. 

The original recipe was for a full-size cheesecake that served 8. It would make 36 mini cheesecakes using a mini cheesecake pan. While I’ve mixed up the whole recipe and then baked it in three stages in the mini pan, that’s tedious, and generally speaking I don’t need 36 cheesecakes until it’s a big party. So this version is approximately a third of the original, designed to make one batch of 12. If you understandably don’t have a mini cheesecake pan (although they are super fun and make slick work of removing the cakelets), you could try it in muffin tins. I got my pan from King Arthur, but they don't seem to carry it any more. It is still available from Amazon, however.

 Ingredients
1 cup graham cracker crumbs
3 tablespoons butter, melted
⅓ cup plus 2 teaspoon sugar, divided
1 (8-ounce package) cream cheese, softened
½ teaspoon vanilla
⅓ cup canned pumpkin puree
1 egg
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
⅛ teaspoon nutmeg
⅛ teaspoon allspice
Maple whipped cream (see recipe)

Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix cracker crumbs, melted butter and  2 teaspoons sugar in a medium-size bowl. Divide mixture among mini cheesecake pans. Tamp down crumb mixture to flatten. (Love my tart tamper I got from Mom for this purpose!) Place a layer of tinfoil under the pan and place in the oven, unless you really enjoy cleaning up oozed butter from your oven floor. Bake for 5 minutes. Remove from oven and set aside to cool while you prepare the filling.

Combine cream cheese, vanilla and 1/3 cup sugar in a large mixing bowl. Beat until smooth. Add pumpkin, egg, cinnamon, nutmeg and allspice and beat until smooth. Divide mixture evenly on top of cracker crusts, using about 2 tablespoons per cheesecake.

Bake for 20 minutes or until just set.  Set pan on a wire rack to cool at least 30 minutes. Run a butter knife around the cakes to carefully loosen them. Lift out and place on a serving plate (or storage box if you’re chilling them to serve later). These gain more structural integrity as they cool, so the tops are less likely to separate from the crust if you give them some chilling time before serving. The tops will sink slightly in the middle as they cool, but a garnish of whipped cream covers that nicely. Serves 12.

Rating: These are wonderfully light, not heavy like pumpkin pie or dense like some baked cheesecakes. Every time I take them to an event, they go over quite well, because, well, they’re cute, super small  and have a nice spice profile.

Maple whipped cream
From Berlyskitchen.com. This makes way more than you’d need for garnishing 12 mini cheesecakes, but as she points out, it can work for serving on pancakes, French toast, hot drinks or cupcakes, and it keeps fairly well made in advance without separating.

Ingredients
1 cup whipped cream
3 tablespoons pure maple syrup
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Method
Mix at low speed until foamy. Then increase speed to medium and beat until stiff peaks form.

 

 

 

Sandwich cookies and beer

 

Happy Solstice. We figured it was a day for warm soups and cold beer, and what better night to open the bottle of Surly's Darkness?

For your beer-cookie pairing, may we suggest the Cinnamon Cookie Butter Sandwich Cookies, one of the finalists in this year's Star Tribune cookie contest? You can find that and oodles of other options at the cookie finder here. 

A friend made all five of this year's winning recipes, which is possibly a case of overachievement, or else just what's called for in a year that involves a pandemic.(For those keeping score at home, she liked the fig cookies the best.) So far I've only tried the sandwich cookie recipe, but there's still plenty of butter on hand. They don't quite stack up to the Pistachio Orange Cookies, a previous winner, or even the almond stackers I made a few years ago, but they're no slouch.

Happy baking, and may all the coming days be sweeter and brighter. 

Peanut butter oatmeal no-bake cookies

Yes. These are no-bake cookies. Yes, I'm slumming. What's my excuse? All those leftover little bits of things from holiday baking that are languishing in the cupboard taking up precious space. This recipe used up a couple of those.

Peanut butter oatmeal bites

Adapted from Better Homes & Gardens

Ingredients

½ cup peanut butter

⅓ cup honey

1 teaspoon vanilla

1¼ cups shredded coconut, divided

1 cup rolled oats

¼ cup semisweet chocolate pieces (or bittersweet if you prefer)

¼ cup snipped dried cherries (or other dried fruit)

Method

Mix peanut butter, honey and vanilla in a bowl until well combined. Stir in ½ cup coconut, oats, chocolate and fruit. Cover and chill 30 minutes.

Roll mixture into 30 balls, each about 1-inch around. Roll in remaining coconut to coat. Store in refrigerator.  You can store the unrolled dough for a week, rolling them into balls as you need them and have time. The original recipe called for pulsing the coconut you use for coating into smaller pieces, which I imagine gives it a slightly different look as a finished cookie, but I didn’t bother and it still stuck fairly well.

Rating: Let's face it. No-bake cookies are really pretty tasty, one of those things that fall into the guilty pleasure category. Unlike the no-bake cookies that were the stuff of school cafeteria legend growing up, these at least sneak some fruit into the mix. But at 111 calories for a tiny cookie, who are we kidding? 

They do have the advantage that they're pretty easy to make gluten free, providing you buy gluten free oats and vanilla, so if you've got some GFreers on the horizon, there's that. They make a perfectly dandy thing to stick in a picnic basket as a small finishing treat.

If this has you nostalgic for those school cookies, here's the recipe I copied years ago from Marguerite Bauer of Manning, Iowa, as submitted for the Carroll Times Herald's annual "What's Cookin' for the Holidays" special section published Nov. 9, 1983. I still have that reader-submitted issue grown yellow with age, although it hasn't seen much use. One only needs so many recipes for Seafoam Salad.

No bake cookies

Ingredients

2 cups sugar

¼ pound of butter

½ cup peanut butter

3 cups oatmeal

½ cup cocoa

1 teaspoon vanilla

Method

Combine sugar, butter and milk in a medium-size saucepan. Bring to a hard boil for 1 minute. Stir in peanut butter, oatmeal, cocoa and vanilla. Drop by spoonfuls on foil. Store refrigerated.

Rating: If you liked the no-bake cookies they gave you in junior high, you'll like these. If you didn't, you still won't.

Strawberry rhubarb sorbet

Strawberry rhubarb sorbet

From “The Perfect Scoop” by David Lebovitz

Ingredients

12 ounces rhubarb, cut into ½-inch pieces

2/3 cup water

¾ cup sugar

10 ounces fresh washed strawberries, hulled and sliced

½ teaspoon fresh lemon juice

Method

Combine rhubarb, water and sugar in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 5 minutes or until the rhubarb is tender. Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature.

Puree strawberries and rhubarb mixture in a food processor until smooth. Chill thoroughly. Freeze according to ice cream maker instructions.

Rating: It turns out a recipe can be both nice and disappointing. If no one had told me there was rhubarb in the recipe, I would have thought it was a nice pleasant, mildly sweet refreshing dessert. And it is, but it's one that sadly gives no clue that it contains rhubarb, which is why I tried it in the first place. To recipe makers everywhere, I say: Embrace the rhubarb! Dave, however, enjoyed it wholeheartedly. It reminded him of when one of his grandmothers would give him a box of frozen strawberries to eat. (The other one would give him frozen raspberries. As he says, "If you work it right, the world can be your grandmother.")

Blueberry cream cheese ice cream

I ran across this recipe on Pinterest, and since I had bought heaps of blueberries in peak season and wanted to try a blueberry ice cream recipe, I gave it a shot. It called for swirling in crumbled graham crackers at the end to further mimic the cheesecake effect, but I opted not to for texture reasons.

Blueberry cheesecake ice cream

Adapted from JoytheBaker.com

Ingredients

1 cup fresh blueberries

¼ cup granulated sugar

2 teaspoons cornstarch

¼ cup water

1 tablespoon lemon juice

Pinch of salt

1 8-ounce package cream cheese, softened

1 cup whole milk

1 cup whipping cream

1 cup lightly packed light brown sugar

¼ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon bourbon

Method

Stir together blueberries, granulated sugar, cornstarch, water, lemon juice and pinch of salt in a small saucepan over medium-low heat. Cook, stirring frequently, until berries burst and the mixture thickens. Remove from heat. Cool in refrigerator. (Can be made a day ahead.)

Combine cream cheese, milk, cream, brown sugar, ¼ teaspoon salt and bourbon in a food processor until smooth. Transfer to an ice cream maker and process according to the ice cream machine instructions. The standard size Cuisinart model took about 25 minutes.

Transfer into a freezer-safe bowl. Add blueberry mixture and swirl it in. Chill in freezer.

Rating: In my food diary I not infrequently note whether a new recipe is CR, meaning company rated. The only reason not to make this recipe for company is it’s hard to discreetly lick the bowl. Very reminiscent of cheesecake without the crust, and very tasty indeed. Nice creamy texture, and not overly sweet. Next year I’m making more than one batch of this during blueberry season.