blueberry ice cream

A belated TWD posting this week....it has been an eventful week. This week was Blueberry sour cream ice cream chosen by Dolores at Chronicles in Culinary Curiosity. The ice cream maker was put back into action. I lazily skimmed the recipe and misread it, throwing all the ingredients (blueberries, sugar, sour cream, cream and lemon zest) in the saucepan together. No worries though, this didn't seem to matter, as the mixture blended up and churned nicely to make a lovely creamy ice cream. This must be the easiest recipe in Dories book! The sour cream gave it a beautiful creaminess that non-custard based ice creams sometimes lack, tending sometimes to be a little grainy. Perfect spooned straight from the churn to top our hot apple and almond crumble for pudding tonight on this cold wet night.

pear, date and ginger cobbler

TWD this week = Cherry and rhubarb cobbler, chosen by Amanda from Like sprinkles on a cupcake. Owning neither cherries nor rhubarb at this point in time I substituted pears with a handful of dates for good measure, seeing as they go so perfectly with ginger. Not being a cobbler lover I was surprised to quite enjoy this.

After the last cobbler attempt was so bland I decided to add a topping of brown sugar, cinnamon and ginger to the top of the cobbler so it had a nice crunchy sugary crust, and upped the ginger in the dough. This called for a generous pour of yoghurt, hence the pool of it in the pic below...

a teacup of heaven

The TWD recipe this week is Chocolate Pudding, and was chosen by Melissa from Its Melissas Kitchen and I suggest you visit her blog immediately to obtain the recipe!!

This pudding is divine. The plain jane name comes nowhere near doing this pudding justice, and lacking a picture in the book this is one recipe I would never have been inspired to try without the prodding of TWD. It is like a dense chocolate mousse (I am not into 'fluffy' chocolate mousse) and has the perfect balance of chocolate/cream/sugar so that it is not cloying or overly rich. It has a superb smooth velvety texture and tastes like it should be a lot naughtier than it actually is.

I halved the recipe and still used a whole egg plus the extra yolk. No full fat milk so I figured a splash of cream and some skinny milk would suffice. Dark chocolate with 72% cocoa. I made two generous teacups of pudding, the first of which was devoured spoonful at a time while it was trying to set in the fridge. This is addictive! The second one had been left alone to chill for a couple of days and was even more delicious, the texture was much denser. I ate this one with a spoonful of sour cream which worked beautifully.

Love it and this one shall be reappearing on the menu again soon, just need to figure out a more enhancing name!

blueberry pie raincheck

You may have noticed that Dorie hasn't featured yet this week with TWD....the recipe being for a lovely looking Blueberry Pie. Last week I seemed to have on hand all of the components (ie. an excess of ripe bananas, toffee sauce) for banoffee pie ...and with a banoffee pie fiend in the house it seemed appropriate. I will definitely try the blueberry pie next time I have some berries to hand. You can check out how the blueberry pies turned out here, it looks like a goodie. In the meantime here was our banoffee substitute. The topping is half cream, half sour cream and the bottom is a cookie crumb meringue cake with dark chocolate and toasted almonds.

Meringue cake with dark chocolate and almonds

4 egg whites

225g caster sugar

250g sliced almonds, toasted and roughly crushed/processed

250g plain sweet cookie crumbs, crushed

100g dark chocolate, melted

Beat egg whites until stiff, gradually incorporate sugar as you would making meringue. Beat until the mixture is glossy. Gently fold in the crushed cookie crumbs and almonds. Pour in the melted chocolate and gently swirl into the mixture. Pour into a cake tin lined with baking paper. Bake at 170c for 30 minutes or so. This is also lovely topped with softly whipped cream and seasonal fruit and served in wedges like a pavlova.

cobbler vs crumble

TWD for this week was nice and easy (as much as I love the excuse to try the more elaborate recipes...quick and healthy-ish is good too!) as Beth of Our sweet life chose Mixed Berry Cobbler.

I have yet to fall in love with the cobbler. I love the idea of them - scones, jam and cream work so well and a cobbler is a bit like a pudding version of this. I guess I would just rather have my fruit topped with a crunchy crumble of oats and nuts, and cobblers can be a wee bit much on the doughy side for my liking.

I have never made a cobbler by rolling out the dough the way Dorie suggests, this makes a nice finish a little more like a pie crust, which was interesting to try for a change. The 'cobbled' rustic look is probably more up my alley though. Mine didn't rise particularly well, I did chill the cobbler dough while I made dinner so it went into the oven cold, which Dorie says is okay but I think must inhibit a bit of rising action?!

I added a teaspoon of cinnamon to Dorie's recipe and used granny smith apples and frozen boysenberries. It was a little tart, as the dough wasn't too sweet either. I probably should have added a little more sugar to my fruit, and cream or ice cream would have been a better friend to it than natural yoghurt which was what we had in the fridge last night.

However for all my complaints the leftover cobbler after being warmed ever so slightly and tossed about with a slosh of yoghurt and a squirt of apple syrup proved to be an serviceable after work pre gym pep up!

Postscript- I just read everyone elses pre-posting comments here and am glad I don't seem to be the only one disappointed with the results here - maybe I do like cobbler but just haven't found the perfect recipe yet!!

tartless

No TWD for me this week...the recipe chosen by Marie from A Year at Oak Tree Cottage was La Palette's Strawberry Tart, a sweet pastry crust filled with strawberry jam and fresh strawberries. I am bowing out of this round by token of the 'but strawberries out of season in the Southern Hemisphere' excuse. Dorie suggested that other fruit could be used but a pear or apple tart just didn't feel quite right, so I am looking forward to trying this one next summer once berryfruit are back. Check out everyone else's strawberry tarts here.

Pudding tonight was made for nostalgic reasons rather than culinary merit...chocolate self saucing pudding, pictured above in all its glory (is there a less photogenic pudding?!) Tarted up with some vanilla bean ice cream, homemade even.

a variation on a theme...

This weeks TWD recipe is for madeleines, the little shell shaped cakes...but as these need a special mould to be baked in (and specialist bakeware stores are a little thin on the ground in this part of the country - that is, non existent!) there was the option to choose a recipe already baked by other members of the group.

The most appealing recipe of those baked before I joined TWD would have to be Snickery squares - they look like, as the name suggests, a homemade and far superior version of a snickers bar, or a deluxe caramel square. Both of which I am partial to. However with only two mouths to feed this week (mine included) a batch of Snickery squares simply seemed too excessive.

Instead I made a more modest choice, the Pecan sour cream biscuits (scones in NZ speak) and decided to use the dough to make a cobbler topping, and serve it as a pudding. Possessing no pecans but several kilograms of sliced almonds, I substituted a handful of the latter. The fruit base was sliced braeburn apples and some boysenberries I had frozen in summer.

I had read good things about this recipe on other TWDer's blogs, however my cobbler version of this recipe failed to impress. This is probably due to the variations I made (such as cooking it over a base of hot fruit!) and a bit of heavy handedness with the mixing, and possibly undercooking it slightly, but I found the dough to be quite dense and a little stodgy. Too rib sticking for my liking. The crunchy part on top was quite nice though, especially with whipped cream and the fruit.

I ended up picking the topping off the leftovers and feeding it to the compost, the fruit at the bottom was salvaged and made a pleasant addition to my muesli this morning.

Bring on the Snickery Squares!! Should have followed my instincts. Check out the rest of the recipes made this week here.

banoffee ice cream

Mum came over to Hokitika on Thursday and pudding was called for. With the fruit bowl being full of ripe bananas, banana ice cream seemed a good choice. I used a recipe from Stephanie Alexander's Cook's Companion - a simple cream rather than custard based ice cream mix. There was some toffee sauce in the fridge which was perfect with it...

simple banana ice cream

350g ripe bananas
juice of half a lemon
300 ml cream
100ml light sugar syrup (1 part sugar boiled with 2 parts water until dissolved)

Blend the banana and lemon juice in the food processer until smooth. Mix in the sugar syrup then the cream, pulsing to combine, and pour into an ice cream machine. Churn only until the mixture is creamy not frozen solid, as the cream can curdle using this recipe. Especially good drizzled with warmed toffee sauce and served with sliced fresh banana.