Sweet Milk Ice Cream

Here's a recipe for ice cream that tastes like the kulfi we are used to eating in India. This recipe for Sweet milk ice cream is from King Arthur catalog. It is one of the few recipes that I made the same day I saw it.

Fortunately I had all the ingredients on hand and the ice cream base came together in no time, though I had to wait overnight to freeze and make the ice cream. This recipe is made from a predominantly milk base instead of a custard base (with eggs) but it is creamy and almost gelato-like. The tapioca starch takes the place of the eggs to stabilize the base, lending it a rich, creamy texture to the finished ice cream.

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Almond Rice Pudding with Homemade Caramel Sauce

Blogging Marathon#65: Week 2/ Day 2

Theme: 1 Sauce -- 2 Dishes

Dish: Almond Rice Pudding with Salted Caramel Sauce

I LOVE rice pudding but hardly ever make it because of my husband is not fond of milky desserts. When I saw this rice pudding with caramel sauce, I was initially skeptical to try because I feared it was going to be too too sweet. But it was probably the best rice pudding I ever made.

I had some almond milk that needed to be used, so I used it to make the rice pudding. You can use regular or other non-dairy milk. But the creaminess of the dish might suffer a little bit with some of the milk alternates.

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Eggless Strawberry Cream Cheese Cupcakes

Bake-a-thon 2015: Day 7
Bake of the Day: Eggless Strawberry Creamcheese Cupcakes
Did you know that yesterday, December 15th, was National Cupcake day? I didn't either, but it was on my daughter's calendar and that's how I found out :-) So here's a recipe celebrating the cupcake day.

I actually made these for my mom's 60th birthday couple of months ago. We also celebrated my daughter's 3rd birthday on the same day, hence the 60 & 3 toppers on the cake. I decorated some with fresh strawberries and some with fondant toppers. Base is my favorite vegan vanilla cupcakes stuffed with a piece of cream cheese which is in turn topped with strawberry jam.

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Parsi Falooda

Blogging Marathon# 52: Week 1/ Day 3

Theme: Parsi Dishes

Dish: Parsi Falooda
For the final day of this week's 'Parsi Dishes' I made this colorful dessert drink called Falooda. I wanted to make Parsi mawa cakes, but after all the sweet bakes from last month's marathon, I didn't want anymore extra calories. So the mawa cakes will have to wait for some time later.

Instead I made this rich and delicious Falooda drink. I had falooda bookmarked to make for a very loooong time and finally got a chance to make it. I didn't really know Falooda was a Parsi dish until I started looking for Parsi dessert recipes. It is an Iranian cold dessert drink called faloodeh, consisting of thin vermicelli noodles mixed in a semi-frozen syrup made from sugar and rose water.

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Mini Éclairs with Strawberries & Cream

Blogging Marathon# 47: Week 4/ Day 2
Theme: Bookmarked Recipes
Dish: Mini Eclairs

For Day 2 of this week's marathon, I have these cute little mini eclairs I made back in April for the Easter party at home. I was always under the impression that eclairs are very difficult to make, on the contrary these are quite easy to put together and are sure to impress the guests.
The first time I heard the word 'Éclair', I thought it the Cadbury chocolate eclairs we used to eat as kids. But this one is actually a French pastry that is made with choux dough filled with a cream and topped with icing. It is very interesting to know that the word comes from French éclair 'flash of lightning', so named because it is eaten quickly in a flash.

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Basic French Macarons -- My First Attempt

French Macarons have been on my to-bake list for a very very long time. Macaron is a meringue based confection made with egg whites, almond flour and powdered sugar. I have never tasted macarons, but saw a lot of them on various blogs. I read that macarons are very temperamental and there are a lot of variables that can go wrong while making them. So even though  I was tempted to make them, I never actually tried for the fear of failure.

When I saw them for this month's Home Baker's Challenge, I thought this might be time to give them a try. Big thanks to Sri Nuggehalli @ The Brave Cook, the host for this month's challenge.

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Basic Vegan Vanilla Cupcake

Today's post is for 'Cooking from Cookbook Challenge', an event started by Valli @ Cooking4allSeasons. This basic vegan cupcake is my go-to recipe and I was surprised that I haven't posted it here yet. I have made these a number of times and they have never failed me. Recipe is from 'Vegan Cupcakes take over the World' by Isa Chandra & Terry Hope.

I made these recently for my son's birthday and took pictures to post them. This is a multipurpose, no-nonsense cupcake that is great to bake for birthdays, bake sales and baby showers.

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Vanilla Ice Cream (Eggless Recipe, No Ice cream maker needed)

This is my go-to recipe for Vanilla Ice cream. Recipe is from Eagle Brand site. It is super simple to make with just 4 ingredients. All that is needed is to mix all the ingredients and then churn in the ice cream maker. If you don't have ice cream maker, don't fret I've included the procedure to make it without the ice cream maker too.

Original recipe uses 4 cups of light cream or half-and-half, but I always have heavy cream and whole milk in the fridge, so that is what I used to make this ice cream. If you don't have ice cream maker, then use only Heavy Cream to get a creamy, smooth ice cream. Using light cream or half-n-half will make the ice cream too icy.

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Pinwheel Cookies (Vanilla Chocolate Marbled or Pinwheel Cookies)

Pinwheel Cookies are the second cookies I baked for this month's Home Baker's Challenge. The first cookie I bakes was these peanut butter cookies. Actually the first one I wanted to bake were these pinwheel cookies, they looked so cute and the pics that Viji shared from Heritage Cook were to die for. I knew right away I wanted to bake these and I'm do glad that I did.

These cookies look so fancy, but they are not that difficult to make. Even my chocoholic son loved them because both the flavors of vanilla and chocolate are balanced. The only hard part is the waiting for the dough to chill, other than that these cookies can be made in no time.

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Eggless Vanilla Cake for Wilton Course 1-Class 2

Blogging Marathon# 27: Week 4/ Day 5
Theme: Miscellaneous - Wilton Decorating Course 1 - Class 2
Dish - Eggless Vanilla Cake with Wilton Butter-cream frosting

Wilton decorating course is a once a week 2 hour class for a total of 4 classes. For the second class, we were required to bring a 8" cake and 2 recipes of butter-cream frosting ready to use in the class. This class focused on torting (slicing a cake into layers) and leveling a cake, frosting and then transferring a design on to it. Again we were asked to buy quite a few tools to do this. Since I'm planning to make more cakes, I bought everything they had in the list, like this cake leveler, turntable and cake lifter. Fancy stuff, eh?? Good thing was I had a 25% off store coupon which saved me quite a bit.  

What I learnt was to always use thin consistency icing for frosting the cake and it's not as easy as it looks (at least that's what I think). We also learnt some piping techniques, like curving lines, zigzags and filling in.

I made an eggless vanilla cake and I think this will be my go-to vanilla going forward. I saw the recipe on Sharmi's blog and than Suma made it too, so I went ahead and made it for the class. It is a fluffy and moist cake that stands up to the frosting. Double the ingredients and make 2 cakes if taking to the decorating class.
Just as a side note, it was my choosing to make eggless bakes for the course, you can make any of your favorite recipe or store-bought mix. Also Wilton's butter-cream recipe has meringue powder in it, which is nothing but pasteurized powdered egg whites, so if you want to make this completely egg-free, then you might want to not use it in the recipe.

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Eggless Chocolate Vanilla Cupcakes with Mocha frosting

Today's "Eggless Chocolate-Vanilla Cupcakes" are a result of contradicting requests from the kids. When you ask kids what flavor cupcake they want, half of them scream "VANILLA" and the other half want "CHOCOLATE". But most of the time we only have time to make just one type of cupcakes and these two-in-one cupcakes seem to satisfy everyone.

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Strawberry Ice Cream (Eggless)

Even though it's not technically winter yet in our neck of woods, temperatures have been hovering around freezing for the past few days. I have started to think about summer already and to remind me of the hot weather I'm posting my Strawberry ice cream recipe. This post has been in my drafts since summer but I haven't had a chance to post it, I thought it's better late than never. Also it's probably summer in some part of the world and I'm sure they have strawberries in season.

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CheeseCake Frozen Yogurt

For the last day of the marathon under the "Calcium Rich dishes" theme I made this decadent cheese cake flavored frozen yogurt. Yogurt and milk are great sources of Calcium. 

Here's the Calcium content of the ingredients used: Greek Yogurt (1 cup - 25% DV), 2% Milk (1 cup - 297mg), Mascarpone cheese (1 oz. - 3% DV).

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Jazzed up Vanilla Cupcakes made from Cake Mix

After making a breakfast & an entree from ready to cook stuff, I decided to make a dessert using the same. I was debating between making an Indian dessert of Western cake. Since I had to make something for the kids for a party last weekend, I decided to make these vanilla cupcakes from store bought cake mix; this way I had a dish for the marathon and kids had something that they like.

It has been years since I bought store bought cake mix. After making the cakes at home from scratch, it somehow does not feel right buying store bought mix. I know they are very convenient, but all the additives in the mix, makes me not want to buy any.

Well for this challenge, I made an exception and since I was running out of time and options to make something for the kids, I decided to buy a cake mix anyway. I used only half the box since the full box (18.5oz) makes 24 cupcakes and I only wanted to make a dozen. I weighed the mix and halved it by weight.

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Split Level Pudding

It's the final day of the Blogging marathon and I had so much fun making and eating all these yummy Holiday/ Weekend special dishes. I wanted to make something sweet for the last day with the whole milk and cream I had in the refrigerator. I had rice pudding in mind, but didn't think that I had enough time to make it on a weeknight. 

When I saw this Split level pudding recipe in Dorie Greenspan's "Baking: From my kitchen to yours", I decided to give it a try. Also my son has been pestering me to make pudding for a while, so went ahead and made it yesterday night.

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Peach-Mango Jam with Vanilla

What do you do when there are only 2 adults (and one kid who doesn’t eat fruit AT ALL) and crate full of peaches and mangoes to eat before they go down south into the garbage. First thing I would do is to bring some sense into the people who are buying these excessive fruit. But come on who can resist those sweet smelling mangoes in Indian grocery – one fruit is definitely not enough and the next best (cheapest) is the crate with a dozen of them, I picked up the latter. Also peaches had a $2 coupon at BJs, so they came home too.

After eating the fruit for a week, I started thinking of options of consuming them in bulk. Some of the peaches went into this yummy summer soda that I made for the BBQ – very summery and refreshing. With the rest of the peaches I made this peach-mango jam and added some ground vanilla as flavoring. I still have a couple more mangoes that I’m planning to make mango lassi with – don’t want to end the summer without enjoying an ice cold lassi.

Traditionally whole vanilla beans are used to flavor the jam, but I used pulverized vanilla (ground vanilla??) instead. I added pectin to the jam to get a more jam like consistency. I also used a hand blender to make a smooth jam instead of chunky.

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Eggless (Yet Creamy) Vanilla Ice Cream

The last ice cream I made was sooo good, rich and delicious, but it had way too many eggs in it that I couldn’t pull myself to make it again. At the same time it was soooo good, creamy & yummy, that couldn’t go back and make my eggless icy crystal version.

So that meant the ice cream maker had to collect dust for a couple months until I found this eggless version that is just as good but without the eggs. So when I saw this recipe that uses corn starch to thicken the ice cream, I had to make it right away.

I made this basic vanilla ice cream thrice already and it was a hit each time. Recipe also uses just little bit of cream cheese to give the final ice cream better scoopability & softness. The final result was this creamy with no crystals and an ice cream that melts in your mouth. I used whipped cream cheese on my second try and it made life much easier as you can use it right out of the fridge and don’t have to worry about softening it on the counter.

Ingredients:
Whole Milk – 2 cups
Heavy cream – 1 ¼ cups
Sugar – 2/3 cup
Light Corn syrup – 1½ tbsp
Pure Vanilla extract – 2 tbsp
Corn starch – 1tbsp plus 1tsp
Cream cheese – 3tbsp (1½ oz.), softened.

Method:

• Mix corn starch with 2tbsp milk in a small bowl and set aside.
  
• Add the remaining milk, heavy cream, sugar and corn syrup in a large sauce pan. Bring the mixture to a boil and cook on moderate heat until sugar dissolves, about 4 minutes.
• Turn off the heat. Gradually whisk in the corn starch mixture. Return to boil and cook on moderately high heat until the mixture thickens a little bit, between 1-2 minutes.
  
• Remove from heat and mix in the softened cream cheese. Let cool. Once the mixture is slightly cooled add the vanilla extract. Chill the milk mixture for at least 3-4 hours or overnight.
• Once thoroughly chilled follow your ice cream machine instructions to make the ice cream. Enjoy right away or freeze for later.

I served my ice cream topped with the chocolate ganache I made here.

Vanilla Ice Cream Layered with Strawberry: Guilty Pleasure

OK.. let me start by saying this is not for people who are on diet or for the extremely health conscious. I am both of the above most of the time, but for this one time I said to self "to heck with icicle like ice cream, let me enjoy real creamy, loaded with calories ice cream for once. I'll skip my dinner......... lunch.... and even that evening snack."

I usually make eggless ice cream with half and half and I found that it has a crystalline texture, it satisfies your sweet tooth for sure, but I was missing the creamy, decadent and rich taste of real ice cream (basically I missed fat from the ice cream, 'cos higher the fat content, the richer and creamier the result). So I decided to go ahead and indulge in this sinfully delicious treat. I followed the recipe from Cuisinart's recipe booklet.
Yet another reason to indulge in ice cream is because July is National Ice Cream Month. Three great bloggers Savor the Thyme, Tangled Noodle & Scotty Snacks are hosting Ice Cream Social event and asking all of us to send in our home made or favorite ice-cream shop ice creams.

Ingredients:
Whole Milk - 2 1/3 cups
Heavy Cream - 2 1/3 cups
Vanilla Bean - 1 whole bean (I used the vanilla powder I bought from Sweden)
Eggs - 3 large whole & 4 large yolks
Sugar - 1 1/8
Pure vanilla extract - 2tsp
Strawberry Puree - 2 cups (recipe follows)

Method:

• Combine milk and heavy cream in a medium saucepan. Split the vanilla bean in half lengthwise, scrape the seeds with the edge of a blunt knife. Stir the seeds and bean pod into the milk/cream mixture.
• Bring the mixture to a slow boil over medium heat, reduce heat to low, and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
• Combine eggs and egg yolks and sugar in a medium bowl. Use a hand mixer on medium speed to beat until the mixture is thick, smooth and pale yellow in color, about 2 minutes.
• Remove the vanilla bean from milk/cream mixture and discard.
• Now temper the eggs with the hot milk/cream mixture. Measure out 1 cup of hot liquid, and with the mixture on low speed, add this hot liquid to the egg mixture in a slow, steady stream.
• When thoroughly combines, pour the mixture back into the saucepan with the rest of the milk/cream mixture and stir to combine.
• Cook, stirring constantly, over medium-low heat until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of the spoon.
• Transfer to a bowl, stir in vanilla and let cool a little bit. Then cover with a plastic wrap directly on the custard to avoid skin formation, and chill completely.
• Then follow the ice cream machine instructions and make your batch of extremely decadent vanilla ice cream.
• Now to make Strawberry layered Cake, simple spread a layer of vanilla ice cream in a freezer safe bowl followed by a thin layer of strawberry puree; repeat the layers with the remaining ice cream and puree. Cover and freeze for at least an hour to set.

Strawberry Puree: Puree 2 cups of hulled & chopped strawberries with 1/2 to 3/4 cup (or more depending on the sweetness of your fruit) of sugar. Bring this mixture to a slow simmer until slightly thick. Chill thoroughly before using in the ice cream.