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Nutella and Coconut Ice Cream: With or Without an Ice Cream Maker

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Nutella and Coconut Ice Cream: With or Without an Ice Cream Maker

Stout Floats

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Stout, or a particularly creamy porter, pairs so naturally with vanilla (or chocolate if you are feeling daring) ice cream so well that this treat should be on the regular rotation for grownup’s summer dessert. Sure, it is a bit strange to wrap your head around an unusual combination like beer and sweets but consider instead that they are ingredients and this is just a new pairing.

Let me digress and share briefly why I love dark beers, stouts and porters in particular. There’s a time and place for light beers and you’ll never catch me criticizing the quenching Corona & lime beach standby but I really, really enjoy a dark beer. Dark beer has a much more complex flavor profile in a way similar to that of white bread versus whole wheat (or other whole grain, for that matter). Dark beer can have notes of chocolate, smoke, vanilla, and other flavors that clearly compliment sweets like ice cream. The particular variety that you should seek out for this recipe is up to you, but I’d encourage an oatmeal stout for the same reasons oatmeal cookies are the standby in an ice cream sandwich. See? You don’t need a food science degree or be a foodie to see that it is a combination worth trying. The higher alcohol content of most dark beers takes this small serving of sweets from really good to positively divine.

As for the ice cream, I typically choose a good quality vanilla bean or chocolate. The chocolate and stout can be pretty rich but sometimes you really want something rich. This would also be a good occasion to make your own ice cream. I’m a big fan of using fewer ingredients of higher quality with fewer steps and this is one of the many examples of how I do that in my little kitchen.

Here’s the how-to:

Scoop 2 scoops of ice cream into a jar. I like the wide mouth pint in this application, but use what you have that is more like a glass and less like  a bowl. You’ll want to drink what remains when the ice cream is melted, I promise.

Slowly pour the beer over the ice cream, being wary of a slow and steady eruption of foam that may occur. I consume about a third of a bottle of beer (so small a quantity, I know) with a scoop of ice cream. Get crazy and use a whole half a bottle, Wildflowers; I won’t tell anyone. I use a super handy beer bottle cap designed to keep it from going flat so I can have fresh beer for the next night. If you are hung up on the ice cream to beer ratio, go with whatever you’d do for a root beer float.

Some like to leave the ice cream in beautiful ice cream-bergs to slowly melt at their own pace but I like to break the ice cream up with my spoon so there’s ice cream and stout in every bite.

Cheers, Wildflowers! What ways will you enjoy beer and ice cream, together or separate, this summer?

How to Make Easy Cheesecake Spread

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How to Make Easy Cheesecake Spread

This is another near-recipe that is fast, simple, and delicious. I use this sweetened cream cheese spread on graham crackers or apple slices for dessert. My kids love it and I love that it fills them up before bedtime and isn’t full of sugar. I usually make this in the evening after supper, then store the leftover in a wide-mouth canning jar (a pint is a plenty) in the refrigerator to be enjoyed the following day. I also have used this recipe spread on crescent rolls with jam for a fast and entirely inauthentic but husband-pleasing Danish. That recipe will be in another post, Wildflowers.

Ingredients:

One 8 ounce block of cream cheese, close to room temperature

⅓ to ½ cup powdered sugar (I find that a scant ½ cup is sufficiently sweet but I’m always trying to do a bit less)

1- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

about 1 tablespoon milk

Mix:

Add softened cream cheese to the mixer and begin mixing to soften. Of course, I rarely have thought ahead far enough for the cream cheese to actually be up to room temperature and this step makes the cheese much softer and helps it to incorporate the sugar.

Add the powdered sugar, and bring the mixer up to medium speed after the sugar has begun to be incorporated and the danger of powdered sugar cloud poof has passed.

Add the tablespoon of extract, mix, and scrape sides of the bowl with a spatula. At this point, the spread probably needs a tablespoon (give or take, depending on the desired consistency) of milk. Mix for a minute longer and serve.

How to Make Easy Cheesecake Spread

I Funny Story about Dulce de Leche OR 1 Important Difference Between Sweetened Condensed Milk & Evaporated Milk

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So Dear Readers, I have many character flaws and this post directly relates to the particular flaw of haste. Yes, I know haste makes waste but I can’t seem to keep that lesson in mind for very long. During my latest trip to Costco (a terrific warehouse-type store where I shop only every other month or so because it is an hour and a half drive from my home), I snagged a flat of what I thought was sweetened condensed milk. I saw cans, some familiar text, loaded it into the giant cart, and on I went zooming down the aisles in search of a giant jug of olive oil. I gave the flat zero thought after that. A week later, I ran out of my dulce de leche and quickly set up my crockpot (as described in this post here), ripped the label off of one of the cans, and plunked it in the water. Here was the first red flag that I ignored in haste. The can of evaporated milk is about half an inch taller than the sweetened condensed and I thought, “huh, that’s strange” and set the can on its side so it would be completely submerged. Six hours later, I shut the crockpot off, and when it was cool I pulled the can from the water and heard a distinctive slosh. One detail I failed to mention explicitly in my post about dulce de leche was that once it is cooked, it is really thick and there is no sloshing about inside the can. I of course then realized my error. This error led me to a laugh at myself and led to a few important discoveries that I will share with you now.

Evaporated milk has no added sugar, thus heating it in a crock pot will NOT result in a caramel of any kind. Sweetened condensed milk is exactly that- sugar is added and it is cooked down, leaving less water and more milk and sugar, which is why it is so delicious in coffee. Evaporated milk cannot be interchanged with sweetened condensed milk unless sugar is added to the recipe. The type and quantity depend on the recipe at hand. Once you get into Ingredient Replacement 2.0, I feel like the risk of failure is a bit greater, so proceed with such replacements at your own risk and not on an important cooking day like Thanksgiving. I wouldn’t wish that kind of stress upon anyone, least of all my dear readers.

My second discovery is that there are MANY recipes that call for evaporated milk and you can bet your boots that once I come upon a great one, you dear readers will get to see how I use up all 12 cans of evaporated milk that I bought in haste.

Surely, I could have guessed that these ingredients (marketed in very similar cans, dang it) are not interchangeable but once I took to an internet search it was clear that I wasn’t the only hasty shopper to make such a mistake.

How can I use up 12 cans of evaporated milk, my wise wildflowers? Leave your pearls of milk wisdom in the comments below and happy cooking!

I Funny Story about Dulce de Leche OR 1 Important Difference Between Sweetened Condensed Milk & Evaporated Milk