Currently cooking out of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams at Home by Jeni Britton Bauer

When I crave citrus to eat, it is usually grapefruit that I’m wanting. Oranges are too sweet (usually) and lemons and limes too sour. The lowly grapefruit gets it just right.

I’ve been thinking about a grapefruit frozen yogurt for some time, wondering if you could capture the sweet/tart flavor without having to cook it down to a syrup so the juice wouldn’t make the frozen yogurt icy. Well, this frozen yogurt comes close to what I had in mind, but it’s not quite there. In the book, this is a grapefruit hibiscus frozen yogurt, but I didn’t want to track down dried hibiscus flowers, so I simply left them out (you could probably use hibiscus tea, if you didn’t mind the tea flavor). The frozen yogurt uses both the grapefruit juice and the grapefruit peel.

You start out by bringing grapefruit juice and sugar (and the dried hibiscus if you are using it) to a boil to dissolve the sugar. That gets set aside while the frozen yogurt base is made. The base is simply milk, cream corn syrup and the grapefruit peel boiled together and thickened with a cornstarch slurry. The base is then whisked into cream cheese, drained low-fat yogurt and the grapefruit/sugar solution. The liquid is cooled, strained to remove the peel and churned.

The frozen yogurt is slightly bitter from the grapefruit peel, but has a pretty nice grapefruit flavor, although it isn’t as strong as I would have liked it. You can definitely taste the yogurt, and that yogurty tang almost overwhelms the grapefruit. This might be an instance where ice cream might showcase the grapefruit flavor better than yogurt (of course, a grapefruit granita would give you the cleanest, freshest grapefruit flavor, but darn it, I want dairy).

Or, I could simply do what I did after I took that picture up there. After the camera was put away, I added the rest of the grapefruit supremes and juice to the bowl with the frozen yogurt, stirred it all together and ate it. It was amazing. Tart but sweet, creamy from the melting frozen yogurt and intensely refreshing. I pretty much licked the bowl clean.

Currently cooking out of Slow Cooker Revolution by America’s Test Kitchen

One of my favorite desserts is Cook’s Illustrated chocolate pudding cake. It’s cake, it’s pudding, it’s both! Oh, and it is just a little bit chocolatey. Served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, this dessert is heaven.

Enter Cook’s Illustrated slow cooker chocolate pudding cake. It isn’t quite as good as the original version, but during the summer when you don’t want to heat up the house, this will do, quite adequately. Especially with that scoop of vanilla ice cream melting along side of it.

Chocolate cake in a slow cooker. Who knew?

This recipe is really simple. You mix the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda and salt) with the wet ingredients (milk, butter, egg yolk and vanilla) and then stir in some chocolate chips. The thick batter is spread in the bottom of the slow cooker and sprinkled with a mixture of sugar and cocoa powder. Finally, boiling water is poured over the whole thing and left to cook for about 90 minutes on high.

As the cake cooks, the boiling water mixes with the sugar and cocoa powder and moves through the batter to form a pudding on the bottom. The cake cooks up dark, dense and moist. With two kinds of chocolate (cocoa powder and chocolate chips), this dessert is not for the faint of heart. It is comfort food of the highest order. And it came out of the slow cooker! This was a nice change from stews and chilis.

Currently cooking out of The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovit

It’s awfully hard to go wrong with a chocolate sauce. Anything that has chocolate and cream as the main ingredients are bound to be good. This is a pretty standard hot fudge sauce. You start by boiling cream, brown sugar, cocoa powder and corn syrup. Off heat, you add chopped bittersweet chocolate, vanilla extract and a bit of butter. Stir until the sauce is smooth, then pour over ice cream. Eat. Lick bowl clean. Repeat.

Currently cooking out of The Perfect Scoop by David Lebovitz

Ever since I started this blog, I’ve been meaning to feature an ice cream book during the summer, and every summer I forget that. Well, not this summer. This is going to be the summer of ice cream. Bryan is very happy.

So, David Lebovitz.Dessert God. Blogging God. Ice Cream God. If you aren’t familiar with this guy, head over to his blog and take some time to read up on him. He is darn funny and a great baking resource.

I’ve had The Perfect Scoop for a couple of years (it was published in 2007), but I’ve only made a handful of ice creams out of it. Many other bloggers have sampled the book over the years, and they’ve all raved about it. The book has your standard vanilla, chocolate, strawberry recipes, but it also has a nice selection of granitas and fresh fruit ice creams and sorbets. However, I thought I’d stay in familiar territory for my first try and stick with a basic chocolate ice cream.

This is a deep, dark chocolately recipe. It uses a custard base (cream and eggs), and flavors the base with bittersweet chocolate and cocoa powder. The result is a rich, dense, almost chewy ice cream with a serious hit of chocolate. Not a bad thing, in my book. This is an ice cream that stands on its own; you don’t need any sort of sauce to go with it.

Currently cooking out of Baked Explorations by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

Let me introduce you to Mr. Chocolate, Chocolate and More Chocolate. That dessert up there? Hoo boy, can you say over the top chocolatey richness? Don’t get me wrong, it was really good. But even for this chocoholic, a small slice went a long way.

Baked Explorations includes two Mississippi Mud Pie recipes. The first is a pie made with a chocolate cookie crust, filled with fudge and coffee ice cream and topped with a fudge sauce. This one starts with a chocolate cookie crust, followed by a flourless chocolate cake layer, then a layer of chocolate pudding and a topping of whipped cream. Why did I pick this one to test? The picture is awesome. You can almost smell the chocolate coming off the page.

Unfortunately, my pie didn’t look so awesome (but I’ll bet it tasted just as good). My pie slice was a little floppy. As soon as I cut into it, the pudding and the whipped cream layers started sliding off together, kinda like they were trying to elope. I had a few other small problems, but nothing that affected the taste.

As I said above, this pie starts out with a pretty standard chocolate cookie crust (cookie crumbs mixed with butter and pressed into the pan). Here was my first problem. I couldn’t get the cookie crumb mixture to go up the side of the pan very far. I did my best and went ahead and baked it.

Once the crust has baked for about 10 minutes and cooled, you make a flourless chocolate cake, spiked with coffee, and bake it in the cookie crust. My next problem was that there was too much flourless chocolate cake batter to fit into my pan. I used about 2/3 of the batter for the pie; the rest I baked in a smaller baking dish. While the flourless chocolate cake baked up fine, as it cooled it fell pretty dramatically (which the authors said would happen), but as it fell, it pulled my cookie crust with it. Again, it didn’t hurt the taste of the pie, it just made it look a little sloppy.

The last major component of this pie is a layer of rich chocolate pudding. Nothing special here, just a cornstarch-thickened pudding full of chocolate. Okay, maybe it is a little special. To top everything off (and to cut the chocolatey-ness of this pie), a simple topping of whipped cream is piled on.

I made this pie over two days. On day one, I made the crust and the flourless chocolate cake layers. On day two, I made the chocolate pudding. Both the flourless chocolate cake layer and the pudding need to hang out in the fridge before the next layer is added, so breaking it up made a lot of sense. It also made this recipe much less intimidating.

Was it worth the work? Yes, if you are looking to bury yourself in chocolate. There are a lot of different textures going on here, from the slightly crunchy crust, to the almost dry, dense cake to the rich, soft pudding, that keeps each bite interesting. If you are looking to impress somebody, this is the dessert that will do it.

I stumbled across this recipe here. While I don’t usually crave rice pudding, there was something about this recipe that refused to let me forget it. So I made it. And then I made it again. And again. Each time I made it, I changed the recipe just a little, and in the process, made a few discoveries.

First, I like this rice pudding made with almond milk instead of soy or regular milk. The almond milk gives the rice more flavor (I think) and a thicker consistency.

Second, I like cinnamon and vanilla bean (if you don’t have a vanilla bean, just use vanilla extract, stirring it in when the rice is finished) here and nothing else. No raisins, no pistachios, nothing.

Third, I use a bulk short-grain brown rice. I have no idea if it is arborio rice or not. And my pudding cooks for more than an hour, usually about an hour and fifteen minutes. I just cook it until the rice is as tender as I want it, adding more almond milk if it starts to look dry.

Sometimes I find lemon curds to be either too eggy or really rich. This lemon curd only uses 3 whole eggs and no butter (hence the “light” part of the recipe). The lemon flavor is bright and tart. The only drawback to this recipe is that the curd doesn’t set up enough to use as a filling in a cake. But it’s perfect over ice cream or strawberries and as a filling for lemon tarts. Heck, it’s perfect straight out of the bowl, on its own.

Recipe after the jump.

Light Lemon Curd
Adapted from Alice Medrich’s Chocolate and the Art of Low Fat Desserts
Makes about 1 1/2 cups

9 oz (1 cup) fresh lemon juice, strained
5 tsp lemon zest
7 oz (1 cup) sugar
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1 tsp vanilla extract

Combine sugar, lemon juice and lemon zest in a sauce pan over medium heat. Stir until sugar is dissolved, and mixture is starting to steam.

Meanwhile, in a separate bowl, lightly beat the eggs. When lemon syrup is ready, slowly stream the hot syrup into the eggs, whisking constantly. Continue to whisk for 2 minutes.

Pour mixture back into the sauce pan and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, just until it boils. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla extract. Strain mixture into another bowl to remove zest and any bits of cooked eggs. Press plastic wrap onto the surface of the curd and refrigerate.

Currently baking out of Baked by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

I have to confess, I’ve never made biscotti. I don’t like crunchy cookies, and I abhor soggy things, so a crunchy cookie that you dip in coffee . . . well, ugh. But I needed one more recipe out of Baked, and I wanted something that was simple to make and wouldn’t require a trip to the grocery store. I had everything needed for these biscotti, so biscotti it was.

Another confession. I really liked these. Yes, they are very crunchy, and no, I didn’t dunk them in anything (ugh). Even Bryan, who doesn’t normally like hazelnuts, really liked these. It might have had something to do with the chocolate chips.

The cinnamon flavor is very pronounced, with the hazelnuts and chocolate chips adding their own background notes. I liked biting into the biscotti and getting different combinations of flavors each time.

The dough for these cookies is really simple. Eggs are beaten with sugar, baking powder, salt and cinnamon until thick. Then vanilla, flour, toasted hazelnuts and chocolate chips are added. The dough is spread out on a baking sheet and baked until firm, but not brown. Once the initial baking is done, the cookie log is cooled slightly and then sliced into the familiar biscotti shape. The cookies are then baked again until dry and toasty.

This is the last recipe out of Baked. My overall impression of the book is favorable. I didn’t run into any real flops, although a couple of the cakes worked better after I tweaked the ingredients (leavenings, mostly). I’m still thinking about the lemon drop cake and what a wonderfully bright flavor it had. That peanut butter pie was one of the quickest and easiest desserts I’ve made in quite a while, but looks (and tastes) fit for company. I think this book has definitely earned a spot on my bookshelf.

Up next, I’m going to get close and personal with my slow cooker.

For me, lemon cakes are either great or gross. There doesn’t seem to be much in between. Fortunately, this cake lands firmly on the great side. In fact, this might just be my favorite recipe out of Baked.

The cake part of this creation is a white cake flavored with lemon zest. I cut the recipe by 1/3 (because I only have two cake pans and the original recipe calls for three 8-inch pans) and toned down the leavening. I had no problems with the cake rising and then falling or being underbaked. My only concern was the tunneling that occurred in the cake (if you look closely at the slice of cake, you can see the holes in the cake). I might have over beaten the batter, but even then, the cake was light and moist with a really nice lemon flavor.

As the cakes were baking and cooling, I made the lemon curd part of the recipe. This is a standard lemon curd, lots of egg yolks, lemon juice and butter. Some lemon curds can taste really eggy, but not this one. It was the perfect balance between tart and sweet.

The last component of the cake was the frosting. Instead of calling for a standard buttercream, you cook a mixture of flour, sugar, milk and cream on the stovetop until it boils and thickens. This mixture is then whipped until cool at which point alot of butter is added. After more whipping, you end up with a light, satiny smooth buttercream. To make it lemony, some of the curd is stirred into the frosting. I’ve never made frosting like this, but I liked it. Alot.

To assemble the cake, you spread lemon curd between the cake layers and then frost the whole shebang. I had some concerns that the weight of the cake layers would force the curd out from the cake, but the curd was thick enough to stay put.

I’m already planning on making this cake again soon. I only ate a couple of pieces before I sent the rest to Bryan’s office. Now I’m thinking that was a mistake; I should have eaten the whole thing myself.

Currently baking out of Baked by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

I was feeling pretty lazy on the day I made these, so instead of making the tart part of this recipe, I stopped after the butterscotch pudding part. And I don’t think I missed much (except maybe lots of extra work and dishes).

I don’t eat much butterscotch stuff, but every time I do, I’m reminded of how much I like it. This pudding is no exception. It combines a dark caramel sauce with a pudding made of brown sugar, egg yolks, vanilla and milk. The end result is a thick, extremely rich pudding full of caramelly, buttery, brown sugary flavor.

My only problem with the recipe was that I ended up having to strain the pudding to get rid of lumps.