Samoas are my favorite flavor of Girl Scout cookie, so the limited edition Dreyers (Edy’s, on the East Coast) Samoas Ice Cream immediately caught my attention when I walked by the freezer case at the grocery store. The ice cream – which is available in regular and in Slow Churned Light – is a limited edition flavor that Dreyer’s releases annually from January to April, paralleling the real Girl Scout cookie season.
The flavor consists of a caramel vanilla ice cream with chunks of chopped up Samoas cookie in it. The regular Grand version also has swirls of chocolate fudge, while the Light variety leaves that extra out. The ice cream is smooth and creamy (even the Light), and has a relatively subtle caramel flavor. It is a great contrast for the cookie chunks. I’ve had batches the of ice cream that were a little bit lacking in the cookie department, but most batches have lots of cookie chunks. The only thing that would make it even better is if there were a little toasted coconut in the ice cream, too.
For thin mint lovers, there is a Thin Mint Ice Cream from Dreyers, too
For those who celebrate Lent, Shrove Tuesday is a pretty important day because it is the last day before Lent, traditionally a period of fasting. The day is also known as Pancake day, because foods like milk, eggs and butter needed to be used up before Lent began and pancakes were a great way to do just that. And a day celebrating pancakes is something that everyone can get behind, regardless of religion. IHOP is even giving away free pancakes this morning in acknowledgment of the day!
But even if pancakes elsewhere are free, I still like to make my own. The pancakes pictured above are my Brown Sugar Pancakes with Brown Sugar Maple Syrup. Other good pancake options include:
Don’t forget that maple syrup is a must-have ingredient for enjoying pancakes and nothing can compare to the real thing. And if you want to spice up plain pancakes, you can always add in some fruit to take advantage of whatever you might have in the kitchen.
King Cake is a traditional pastry served for the celebration of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It is made with a rich bread dough that is filled with a cinnamon mixture and braided into a ring. It is typically frosted, and adorned with purple, yellow and green (purple to represent justice, green to represent faith, and gold to represent power). These days, there are a lot of variations out there and you can find King Cakes that are also filled with cream cheese, praline and jam – a lot like danishes. Traditional king cake is not all that simple to make, just because it involves a lot of active time working with the dough. I wanted to streamline the process a little and made a non-traditional King Cake that involves no kneading of the dough.
My king cake starts off as a challah-like bread, enriched with vegetable oil and eggs. I added some sugar into my bread to sweeten it, and a bit of vanilla to give it a little more flavor. This bread only has one rise, so once it is mixed up, it can go directly into the baking pan. Again, I simplified the step of producing a ring-shaped cake by using a bundt pan. The dough rises right in the pan and goes into the oven without ever having to get flour on your hands. The cream cheese filling is one that I modified from a filling Cookie Madness used to make a cream cheese filling for a bundt cake. The filling is mixed up and spread into the unrisen dough. The cake rises and bakes right around it!
The bread/cake of the king cake is soft and sweet, with a tight crumb that looks almost like that of a pound cake, although it is much more like a sweet bread than your typical cake. The flavor of the filling is wonderful; the white chocolate and cream cheese combine to taste just like a little bit of cheesecake. It matches really well with the bread and keeps everything moist. The colored icing on top of the cake is an ultra-simple mixture of confectioners’ sugar, water and food coloring. It does add a bit of sweetness to the outside of the bread, which is nice, and gives the cake its unmistakable King Cake look.
Mardi Gras starts on Fat Tuesday (tomorrow!) and, if you’ve never had or baked a King Cake before, there is no time like the present to start. Traditionalists will note that I left the baby out of my king cake. Feel free to stick it in when you’re done baking.
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It’s entirely possible that just about everything you need to know about baking is in Advanced Bread and Pastry, and if it’s not, then the book comes darn close to providing you with at least as much information as you could get on the subject at culinary school. It was actually designed to be a real resource for culinary students and baking professionals. The impressive book is over 1000 pages and covers everything from food safety to bread making to cake mixing to advanced plating techniques.
The book is aimed at professional bakers or experienced bakers who are looking to gain more insight on particular baking techniques and take their skills to the next level. Each chapter starts with a very detailed overview of its topic – Fermentation, Quick Breads, Pies and Tarts, Mousse, etc – and is loaded with photos of the processes and techniques it describes, as well as charts, tables and discussions that detail the advantages, disadvantages, and effects of various ingredients, methods and techniques. The information is well presented and, though technical, provides a good overall understanding of the topic at hand. In short, it is comprehensive.
After the discussion, formulas (a.k.a. recipes) using bakers %, in addition to weights, are given. The formulas are scaled for a bakery-sized production (so, you might get 10 loaves of bread or 5 pound cake from one recipe), but there are measurements given for test-size batches that, while certainly useful to the pros who don’t want to waste product while working on new recipes, that will suit the experienced home baker looking for just one cake. That said, the recipes are planned for commercial convection ovens, so you might have to adjust the baking time if you only have a regular oven at home.
So, while this book might not be for everyone (especially very casual or occasional bakers), it is a great book and has tons of very useful information that will undoubtedly help improve your pastry and bread skills if you take the time to read through it.
