Coffee lovers will immediately be inspired by Love and Olive Oil‘s Mud Pie with Homemade Decaf Coffee Ice Cream because of the creamy coffee filling of the pie. You can’t buy decaf coffee ice cream in the freezer case at your grocery store, but you can make it at home. It’s as easy as infusing an ice cream base with lots of decaf coffee beans. Flavor-wise, you won’t know the difference when the ice cream comes out of the freezer, and while it’s likely that not a whole lot of caffeine occurs in your average coffee ice cream, it’s nice to know that you can get that great coffee taste without with dessert worrying about whether you’re going to be kept up all night.
Nothing is better than strawberries at their peak, except perhaps putting them to good use in a dessert that really shows them off. Seven Spoons does that with a Strawberry Icebox Cake. This no bake cake towers just like a classic layer cake, but only takes minutes to put together. It is made with layers of fluffy whipped cream, graham crackers and a sweet strawberry sauce made with fresh berries. It’s a perfect summertime dessert.
Rhubarb is a bit of an unusual vegetable, as it so often ends up in desserts. Not only that, but for how popular it is (and there are some die hard rhubarb fans out there), it often only shows up paired with strawberries in various dishes. Zen Can Cook takes rhubarb in a totally different direction by pairing it with white chocolate in Rhubarb and White Chocolate Souffles. The rhubarb is poached in the bottom of a ramekin, providing a sweet surprise underneath the light souffle and adding a great contrasting flavor to the chocolate.
Cook’s Illustrated is always looking for the best recipe, so when they offer up a recipe for Ultimate Chocolate Cupcakes , surely it should be put to the test. Pink Parsley did just this by testing out the decadent recipe, with its moist cake, ganache filling and rich frosting. Is it really the ultimate chocolate cupcake? For some, it just might be worth trying to see if it meets your standards as well as those of the test kitchen.
Eton mess is an English dessert that is reminiscent of trifle, made using crumbled up meringue cookies, fresh berries and plenty of cream. My Worldwide Culinary Adventure‘s most recent variation is for Eton Mess with Vanilla Meringue. You need to invest a little bit of time making the meringues, but this is an easy and light dessert to prepare, with only a few ingredients, and is another great way to show off perfectly ripe and in-season berries.
I love pie, so when I had the opportunity to become a judge at the Crisco 2010 National Pie Championships at the American Pie Council‘s Great American Pie Festival, I jumped at it. This is the biggest pie contest in the country, with categories for commercial pies – such as those you find at grocery store bakeries and in restaurant bakeries, like Kroger and Baker’s Square – amateur pies made by home bakers, junior pies made by kids and professional pies made by bakers. So, I flew out to Kissimee, Florida this past weekend to try some pie.
I ended up being one of about 100 judges judging the amateur pie division on Saturday. This is a popular division, with about 400 entries of just about any flavor you can imagine. It was broken up into 15 categories, ranging from Peanut Butter to Apple to Cherry to Chocolate Cream. There were 6 or 7 judges for each category, all seated around a circular table. The judging was fun, but there were a lot of points that we had to hit as we looked at each pie. We judged overall appearance, sliced appearance, overall flavor, filling, crust and creativity. The scores were tallied up by officials in another room, so while we did discuss the pies we liked best at our tables, we didn’t have to come to a consensus about a winner ourselves.
There are all kind of ways to save space in the kitchen. The most common is to use nesting cups and bowls, minimizing the space required for a set by allowing them to nestle inside one another. Wilton Twist’n Measure takes this concept a step further by eliminating the stack and getting you down to just one cup for most of your measuring needs. The Twist’n Measure is a measuring cup with an adjustable base that can go from 1/8th of a cup all the way up to a whole cup, simply by twisting the base. The sliding base locks into place for each measurement, and can easily be reset when the cup is empty so that you can start again for the next ingredient. It is definitely a space saver, and it can also be a time saver since you won’t need to scout around for a missing 1/3 cup measure the next time you realize you need one. The scoop is plastic and disassembles easily to that it can be washed, and it’s machine washable, too.
I happen to think that tiramisu is a great summertime dessert because it require any cooking and it is served cold. It is also great for entertaining because it can – and should -be made well in advance of when you want to serve it. The only drawback to a tiramisu as a summertime dessert is that it doesn’t make use of any of the luscious berries that are at their peak in the summer. You could say why not save the berries for another day? Today, however, I decided to simply incorporate berries into a tiramisu.
Strawberry Cheesecake Tiramisu is not a typical tiramisu. It does use coffee-dipped ladyfingers, but instead of a mascarpone cream, it uses a cream cheese-based cream to glue everything together. Since cream cheese is heavier than mascarpone, this makes the whole dessert a little bit more dense. That may sound like a bad thing, but in this case it serves to hold everything together and also makes the dessert taste a bit like strawberry cheesecake!
As a little experiment, I’ve posted a video of me making this dessert on YouTube so you all can see me prepare it. I tried to be brief, so the recipe below is actually a little bit more specific than the recipe as presented in the video. Still, it was fun to make and if you all like it, I’m planning to do some more (side note: I’ll be using a different camera in the future).
This dish tastes great, particularly after it has been in the fridge overnight and everything has really come together. I used berries from my local farmer’s market and they were super sweet, so the dessert didn’t need any added sweetened. If your berries aren’t, consider adding about a 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar to the cheesecake cream. Also, you’ll notice that I only dipped the ladyfingers in the coffee mixture for a second or two in the video. Mine were very absorbent, but if yours are drier, give them an extra couple of seconds to soak up the flavor, but be sure to get them out before they get too soft. +Continue Reading
I couldn’t resist giving The Baking Bites Cookbook one more plug before Mother’s Day, which is less than two weeks away. It’s a great gift for any baker – whether you are the mother who is trying to give out subtle gift suggestions to kids and dads, or if you are the one looking for the perfect gift for mom or grandma. Even better, my cookbook comes with a special bonus for the holiday: a handmade Mother’s Day card! These fantastic cards – which I couldn’t resist showing off now that I have some photos of them – are a custom design from a local artist and were produced in a small, limited run just for my readers! These are a neat addition to your gift, and a little bit more personal than running out to Hallmark.
The cookbook is available directly from me via PayPal, with free US shipping (it’s just a few dollars more for priority or international), and there is a discount for orders of two or more. The book can also be found on Amazon.com, but the Amazon books do not include this lovely card.
If you’re curious, the cupcake featured on the card is actually based on a recipe I did not too long ago, for Gingersnap Cupcakes.
