Thursday, August 19, 2021

Coffee Ice Cream Bundtlettes #BundtBakers

With just four ingredients you can turn coffee ice cream into these delicious Coffee Ice Cream Bundtlettes. Or use your favorite flavor.

Food Lust People Love: With just four ingredients you can turn coffee ice cream into these delicious Coffee Ice Cream Bundtlettes. Or use your favorite flavor.

Since it’s so dang hot outside, it’s a challenge to serve ice cream firm so for this month’s Bundt Bakers, we are making the best of melted ice cream and turning it into cake!

I’ve made homemade ice cream in the past so I know it often starts with a custard, which means it’s made with eggs and milk and butter. But before our Bundt Bakers host proposed this theme, I had never really considered that those ingredients are a shortcut to cake batter. 

A little googling revealed a plethora of cake recipes made with melted ice cream! Who knew? Most of them called for two ingredients: ice cream and cake mix. Not that I have anything against cake mix but we all know that when one of your ingredients is cake mix, that’s kind of cheating on the whole two ingredient thing since cake mix is just paying someone else to measure out flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, etc. 

Fortunately there were also quite a few recipes made from scratch! Seriously google it. So many melted ice cream cakes! Now you know what to do next time the freezer quits on you. Or it's just summertime.

Coffee Ice Cream Bundlettes

This cake can be made with any flavor of ice cream you have on hand, as long as it is full cream and not low fat or non-fat. This is cake, after all! This recipe is adapted from one on Hebbar’s Kitchen

Ingredients
2 cups or 370g full cream coffee ice cream
1 1/2 cups or 190g flour, plus a little extra for the pan
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

Butter, to grease the pan

Optional for decoration and extra coffee flavor:  
1/2 cup or 90g espresso chips

Optional to serve: 6 scoops of coffee ice cream 

Method
Set your oven to preheat at 350°F or 180°C and prepare your Bundtlette pan by buttering and flouring it. Set it aside. (As you will see in photos to come, I used my mini 6 1/2 cup Nordic Ware Classic Bundtlette pan that makes six small Bundt cakes.)

In a large mixing bowl, use your stand mixer or electric beaters to beat the ice cream briefly. Sift in the flour, baking powder and salt. 


Beat until thoroughly mixed to form a thick batter without any little lumps. 


Spoon the batter into your prepared pan and smooth out the top. 


Bake the bundtlettes in your preheated oven for 20 to 25 minutes or until a wooden skewer comes out clean. (If you use one larger capacity Bundt pan, your cake could take a bit longer to bake.) 


Leave to cool in the pan for about five minutes, then loosen the sides of the little bundtlettes with your wooden skewer and turn them out onto a wire rack to cool completely. 

Food Lust People Love: With just four ingredients you can turn coffee ice cream into these delicious Coffee Ice Cream Bundtlettes. Or use your favorite flavor.

When the little cakes are cool, melt the espresso chips in a microwave-safe vessel with a couple of quick zaps in the microwave. I do 10 seconds, then stir. Another 10 seconds, then stir. Depending on your microwave you may need a few seconds more.

Drizzle the melted chips or use a piping bag to decorate the cooled cakes. 

Food Lust People Love: With just four ingredients you can turn coffee ice cream into these delicious Coffee Ice Cream Bundtlettes. Or use your favorite flavor.

I served these with a scoop of coffee ice cream on top! You might want to do the same. No pictures of that because it was late and dark after dinner. Sorry!

Food Lust People Love: With just four ingredients you can turn coffee ice cream into these delicious Coffee Ice Cream Bundtlettes. Or use your favorite flavor.

Enjoy! 

It’s the third Thursday of the month and that means it’s time for Bundt Bakers. Check out the delicious melted ice cream cakes we are sharing below! Many thanks to our host, Sue of Palatable Pastime for this fun theme! 

BundtBakers


#BundtBakers is a group of Bundt loving bakers who get together once a month to bake Bundts with a common ingredient or theme. You can see all of our lovely Bundts by following our Pinterest board. We take turns hosting each month and choosing the theme/ingredient.

Updated links for all of our past events and more information about BundtBakers, can be found on our home page.

Pin these Coffee Ice Cream Bundtlettes! 

 .

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

Wild Pear Lemon Preserves

Juicy pears cooked down with a Meyer lemon and just the right amount of sugar make the best Wild Pear Lemon Preserves! They are a wonderful topping for buttered toast, stir them into yogurt, or warm and spoon them over vanilla ice cream. 

Food Lust People Love: Juicy pears cooked down with a Meyer lemon and just the right amount of sugar make the best Wild Pear Lemon Preserves! They are a wonderful topping for buttered toast, stir them into yogurt, or warm and spoon them over vanilla ice cream.

Last summer I got a text from a friend asking me if I had any interest in some wild pears that were growing on her property in the country. Free fruit? Yes, PLEASE! If there is one thing I absolutely love, it’s making jam or preserves out of fruit that might otherwise go to waste. 

The best part was that I didn’t even have to pick the pears! We were all social distancing, like everyone worldwide last summer so my friend dropped the basket of pears on another friend’s porch for me. I duly collected them with much appreciation. 

I brought the basket of pears home and got busy peeling and slicing and cooking them down with sugar. If you’ve never tried a wild pear, I’m here to tell you that they are quite sour with a thicker skin than normal eating pears. But they are fabulous in preserves and, like quince, they turn the most wonderful shade of pink. 

Bonus advice: If you do not yet have a digital scale, please buy one. They are so useful! Using cups to measure sliced fruit is such a challenge because of air pockets. That said, I tried my best to measure the sliced pears so you don’t have to. Each cup of sliced pears is about 150g, in case you need to convert from the amounts below. It’s just a ballpark figure so you’ll see that the sugar doesn’t work out exactly in cups. If you'd just get a scale, you could save us all a lot of grief. 

Wild Pear Lemon Preserves 

I followed the guidance on a post from Digging Food to figure out the ratio of pears to sugar. One batch of my pears (1880g whole) weighed 1252g after being peeled, cored and sliced so I put 626g of sugar. If you don’t have wild pears, use firm green ones instead. These quantities of pear and sugar require one whole lemon. Adjust accordingly if you are cooking more or less pears.

Ingredients
For peeling the pears:
2 tablespoons lemon or lime juice or 2 teaspoons citric acid

For the preserves (my second batch! Those two trees just kept on giving!):
4 lbs 2 1/3 oz or 1880g wild pears
3 1/8 cups or 626g sugar
1 Meyer lemon (or sub a regular lemon) 

Method
Fill a large bowl about to about halfway with cool water. Add the juice or citric acid and stir well. Peel all the pears.


As you peel them, put them in your bowl with the acidic water.  This will stop the oxidation so they don’t turn brown. 


Cut all of the pears in half and use a the paring knife to remove the stem and bottom of each half, dropping them back into the acidic water as you do. Finally use a melon scoop to remove the core, again putting the pear halves back in the water.


Initially I tried performing each action on one pear at a time but it was tedious to continually switch tools and went much faster when I halved them all, then took the stem and bottom out of each, then cored them. It does mean you have to fish around in the acidic water to get them to do the next step but that’s quickly accomplished.

Peel and slice the pears 1/8 in or 3 1/2mm thick, again, popping them back in the water. 


When they are all sliced, drain off the acidic water and weigh the pears. Add in 1 part sugar for 2 parts pears. Cover the bowl and leave them to macerate overnight. 


Sitting around overnight in the sugar, the pears will create their own syrup and be ready to cook into preserves by morning. 


Just before cooking thinly slice your lemon (peel and all) but remove any seeds. 


Add the lemons to the pear pot. 


Bring the mixture to a high simmer or low boil over medium heat. Stir often! If the simmer is too low, it will take you 4 hours to cook them. A large batch usually takes at least 2 1/2 hours.


Start checking for desired consistency after 1 1/2 hours. Stir and check them every 15-20 minutes. The preserves are finished when the pears have turned rose, then to light garnet colored and the slices are transparent. 

Juicy pears cooked down with a Meyer lemon and just the right amount of sugar make the best Wild Pear Lemon Preserves! They make a wonderful topping for buttered toast, stir them into yogurt or warm and spoon them over vanilla ice cream.

The amount of cooking time varies depending on the size of your batch, diameter of your pot, the heat retention of your pot (Le Creuset are great for this) and the thickness of your pear slices.  

Wash canning jars and have them ready and hot. I put teaspoons in each jar and then fill them with boiling water. Pour a little boiling water over the lids while you are at it. Use a pair of canning tongs to tip the water out of the jars when the preserves are ready. 

When the preserves are done, use a wide mouth funnel and ladle the hot pears and syrup into the hot jars. Try not to get any on you as the pears and their syrup will burn you. 

Remove the spoons from the canning jars and fit the lids on as tightly as you can. Turn the jars upside down and leave to cool. Occasionally, as you randomly pass by, tighten the lids a little more.

Once the jars are cool, turn them right side up. The lids should pop down firmly. If any jar lids don’t suck down, store them in the refrigerator and use them first. 

Food Lust People Love: Juicy pears cooked down with a Meyer lemon and just the right amount of sugar make the best Wild Pear Lemon Preserves! They are a wonderful topping for buttered toast, stir them into yogurt, or warm and spoon them over vanilla ice cream.

Enjoy! 

August is National Canning Month so my Festive Foodie group are all sharing way to preserve Summer's bounty! Check out the links below. Many thanks to our host, Wendy of A Day in the Life on the Farm. 

Pin these Wild Pear Lemon Preserves!

Food Lust People Love: Juicy pears cooked down with a Meyer lemon and just the right amount of sugar make the best Wild Pear Lemon Preserves! They are a wonderful topping for buttered toast, stir them into yogurt, or warm and spoon them over vanilla ice cream.
 .


Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Cheddar Smoked Paprika Soda Bread #BreadBakers

Cheddar Smoked Paprika Soda Bread is cheesy good with a subtle smoky flavor that is great freshly sliced or toasted. Use it for sandwiches or to dip in a sunny side up fried egg yolk. So good! 

Food Lust People Love: Cheddar Smoked Paprika Soda Bread is cheesy good with a subtle smoky flavor that is great freshly sliced or toasted. Use it for sandwiches or to dip in a sunny side up fried egg yolk. So good!

Smoked paprika is one of my favorite spices and I use it a lot when I am cooking vegetarian dishes, for a little extra flavor that I might have otherwise added with smoked bacon in a non-vegetarian recipe. It’s great in tomato sauce and chili for the same reason, even when those do have meat already. 

One of the few things my husband and I disagree on is smoked cheese. I’m a fan. He’s not. In this quick soda bread, the smoked paprika makes a nice background to the cheddar, a hint of smokiness that reminds me of smoked cheese. What’s funny is even the smoked cheese naysayer loves this bread. Go figure.

Cheddar Smoked Paprika Soda Bread

If you don’t have buttermilk but do have white vinegar and regular milk, make a buttermilk substitute by adding 1 1/2 tablespoons vinegar to your measuring jug, then fill up to the volume needed with milk. Stir and set aside for about five minutes and you are ready to start mixing.

Ingredients
3 cups or 375g all-purpose flour, plus extra for kneading
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/4 cup or 57g unsalted butter, cut into pieces
4 oz or 113g extra sharp cheddar, finely grated 
1 1/4 cups or 296ml buttermilk

For glaze:
1 egg white
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika

Method
Preheat your oven to 350°F or 180°C and line a baking pan with baking parchment or a silicone liner.

In a small bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking soda, salt and smoked paprika. 


With a pastry blender or a fork, cut the butter into the dry mixture until it resembles a coarse meal. 

Add the grated cheddar cheese a little at a time and stir well to combine. 


Pour in buttermilk and mix until dough comes together. 


Turn the dough out onto a heavily floured surface.


Knead the dough by folding it over and pressing it down four or five times. 


Shape the dough into a round loaf and place it on your prepared baking sheet. Whisk the smoked paprika into the egg white and brush the top of the loaf with the mixture.  


Use a lame or sharp knife to cut a large X into the top of the dough.  


Bake in your preheated oven for 40-45 minutes or until golden brown. 

Food Lust People Love: Cheddar Smoked Paprika Soda Bread is cheesy good with a subtle smoky flavor that is great freshly sliced or toasted. Use it for sandwiches or to dip in a sunny side up fried egg yolk. So good!

Cool on a wire rack then slice to serve.

Food Lust People Love: Cheddar Smoked Paprika Soda Bread is cheesy good with a subtle smoky flavor that is great freshly sliced or toasted. Use it for sandwiches or to dip in a sunny side up fried egg yolk. So good!

Enjoy!

Food Lust People Love: Cheddar Smoked Paprika Soda Bread is cheesy good with a subtle smoky flavor that is great freshly sliced or toasted. Use it for sandwiches or to dip in a sunny side up fried egg yolk. So good!

It’s the second Tuesday of the month so it’s time for Bread Bakers and our theme is spiced savory recipes! Check out all the bread recipes we are sharing today. Many thanks to our host, Renu of Cook with Renu

BreadBakers
    #BreadBakers is a group of bread loving bakers who get together once a month to bake bread with a common ingredient or theme. Follow our Pinterest board right here. Links are also updated each month on this home page. We take turns hosting each month and choosing the theme/ingredient.

Pin this Cheddar Smoked Paprika Soda Bread! 

Food Lust People Love: Cheddar Smoked Paprika Soda Bread is cheesy good with a subtle smoky flavor that is great freshly sliced or toasted. Use it for sandwiches or to dip in a sunny side up fried egg yolk. So good!
 .