Scoop of Nutella Bacon Swirl?

After the resounding success of the bacon cake, I knew we had to try bacon ice cream as an encore.

One of the best (or maybe I should say, most dangerous) kitchen gadgets an ice cream freak can have is, of course, an ice cream maker. It's like setting a meth junkie up with a home lab. I own the attachment kit for my KitchenAid mixer, and I use it. (More often than I should, honestly.)



But how else would I answer important questions like, "What's tastier: Peanut Butter Bacon Crunch or Nutella Bacon Swirl?" And what would the Mellow Maple Bacon blend taste like?

My go-to guide for homespun ice cream happiness has always been Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream and Dessert Book. Chock-full of goofy cartoons and ice cream anecdotes, I've found it to be simple, playful and inspiring, and it's well-fingerprinted from many episodes of hands-on enjoyment.

I'm going to do three bacon ice cream recipes herein, and you'll note that they're largely the same. As it turns out, once you get the hang of ice cream, it's pretty simple to whip up your own crazy variations. Frankly, I'm convinced that experimentation is half the fun.



For my ice cream adventures, I usually start off with the B&J sweet cream base #1, which is a simple 4-ingredient blend that you don't have to cook. I trust the eggs I get (they're organic, free-range eggs) but if you don't know where yours come from, you might want to think about using a base recipe that involves some cooking.

1. Peanut Butter Bacon Crunch Ice Cream(Makes 1+ quart)
Base
2 free-range eggs
3/4 cup sugar
2 cups heavy cream
1 cup milk
Add-ins
1/3 cup peanut butter
1/3 cup peanuts, chopped
4-5 bacon strips, fried crisp and minced

1. Whisk the eggs 1-2 minutes.
2. Whisk in the sugar.
3. When blended, pour in the cream and milk. Blend well.
4. Add peanut butter and whisk out any lumps.
5. Pour blend into your ice cream machine and prepare as directed.
6. When the ice cream is very thick and nearly ready, five to ten minutes before completion, blend in the chopped peanuts and bacon.
7. Continue freezing to desired texture.

2. Nutella-Bacon Swirl Ice Cream(Makes 1+ quart)
Base
2 free-range eggs
3/4 cup sugar
2 cups heavy cream
1 cup milk
Add-ins
1/3 cup Nutella (or another chocolate-hazelnut sauce)
4-5 bacon strips, fried crisp and minced

1. Whisk the eggs 1-2 minutes.
2. Whisk in the sugar.
3. When blended, pour in the cream and milk. Blend well.
4. Pour blend into your ice cream machine and prepare as directed. Meanwhile, mix the bacon bits into the Nutella.
5. When the ice cream is very thick and nearly ready, five to ten minutes before completion, fold in the bacon-y Nutella.
6. Continue freezing to desired texture.

2. Mellow Maple Bacon Ice Cream(Makes 1+ quart)
Base
2 free-range eggs
3/4 cup sugar
2 cups heavy cream
1 cup milk
Add-ins
1/4 cup pure maple syrup
4-5 bacon strips, fried crisp and minced

1. Whisk the eggs 1-2 minutes.
2. Whisk in the sugar.
3. When blended, pour in the cream, milk and maple syrup. Blend well.
4. Pour blend into your ice cream machine and prepare as directed.
5. When the ice cream is very thick and nearly ready, five to ten minutes before completion, blend in the bacon.
6. Continue freezing to desired texture.

Around the office there was enormous love for the Peanut Butter Bacon Crunch, although one of my supervisors was partial to the Nutella-Bacon Swirl.

Once you bring bacon bits into your ice cream, the possibilities seem endless. Maybe Bacon-Pecan Buttercrunch? A sundae of Roasted Apple Ice Cream with bacon and caramel bits? What about Bacon, Peanut Butter & Banana? (The Presley Special, perhaps?)

J was sweet enough to gift me with an enormous box of pint-sized ice cream cartons scored from a restaurant supply store on Bowery. You can use other containers, but trust me: if you really get into ice cream making, you'll want to make sure you can push off gift pints on friends. If you're not a New York local, never fear... any place that has restaurants is going to have a restaurant supply store nearby.

Cheers!

Day 14: Brittle charms

This post marks Day 14 of Miss Ginsu's 2007 Advent Calendar. To click into other days and other projects, use the calendar page to navigate.

Back in the dark days of '01 after the dot-com bubble burst, Miss Ginsu was left out on the street (not that there was much space out there with all the other dazed and ruined coders, systems engineers and venture capitalists).

Luckily, your tiny, pig-tailed heroine was kicked to the curb just in time for the Christmas season (ho-ho-ho) and was able to find temp work as a See's Candy girl at the mall.


"Oops! These ones expired yesterday! Darn. Guess I'll have to work my way through another tasty box of Nuts & Chews..."

Yes, the ensemble was silly and standing around on concrete floors is murder on the feet, but the pay wasn't bad, and the job offered all the expired chocolates I could eat. And gosh, they're actually really good. Grandma See didn't use any preservatives, and neither do the current See's Candy elves. Thus, we white-garbed choco-chicks spent a lot of time checking expiration dates and rotating stock.

Did I gain some weight? Yeah, most likely. But I also gained an appreciation for fresh chocolates that aren't filled with weird waxes, colors and fillers. I also learned about the wonders of buttery-crisp peanut brittle.

I'd always considered nut brittle one of the candies of a bygone age. I assumed it was something my grandmother and dad appreciated. I'd probably never understand its charms. But boy howdy! See's peanut brittle changed my tune. That stuff is addictively tasty.



Since I live on the East Coast now, and See's is a decidedly West Coast thing, the only cheap, reliable way to make my tastebuds dance is DIY brittle. The recipe below is based on one I found in a sweet (ha!) little cookbook by Robbin Gourley called Sugar Pie & Jelly Roll.

I used pecans in this one, but you can use whichever nut speaks to you. (After all, talking nuts deserve to be boiled in hot sugar, right?)

It's not quite as awesome as See's (I'm still working on that...), but it's pretty darn great. My coworkers all said so, and because I know they can be cold, cruel beasts when presented with inferior sweets, that positive commentary stands for something.

Almost as Awesome Nut Brittle (Makes a full cookie sheet)
Make sure you have an operational candy thermometer before you make this recipe. "Close enough" counts for a lot of things, but you really do want accuracy for activities like structural engineering, brain surgery and candy making.

1/2 cup water
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup light corn syrup
2 cups sugar
3 cups pecans, cashews, walnuts or peanuts
1/2 Tbsp baking soda
2 Tbsp butter
1 tsp vanilla extract

1. Pour water, syrup, sugar and salt into a large saucepan* and bring to a boil.

2. Add nuts, stirring occasionally and scraping down the pan edges.

3. Cook to 296°F on a candy thermometer.

4. Remove from the heat and add baking soda, butter and vanilla all at once. Stir thoroughly.

5. Pour onto a greased greased baking pan. Use a heat-proof spatula or spoon to spread quickly to 1/4-inch thickness.

6. When cooled, break into small pieces.

I recommend a large saucepan for this recipe because the hot sugar-nut mix froths a good bit when you add the baking soda. Trust me... you don't want boiling sugar frothing up and burning a hole in your hand.

For the love of Chocolate-Almond Daim Cakes

The Chocolate-Almond Daim Cake

Long, long, ago (well, in 2005, actually...), I wrote up a little review on that most refreshing shopping oasis: the IKEA snack bar. Since then, hundreds of interested souls have traveled to this very website in search of a recipe for the Daim Cake I mentioned. Although that wasn't the intention of the original article, who am I to turn away a gang of hungry travelers?

To that end, I bring you: the homemade Daim Cake.

And now for a quick disclaimer.... IKEA's official website propaganda describes their Daim Cake as: "An original cake made out of Daim candy and almond cake."

For my Daim Cake (well, cakelets, really), I make almond cakes with crushed Daim bars and a simple chocolate ganache. If you've eaten the IKEA original, you can't help but notice that my version is less a thin, flat torte and more an individual snack cake. In fact, I think my version is more like what snack cakes should be... small, cute and made without industrial preservatives.

But yes... this Daim Cake is different. If you need thin tortes, go to IKEA. If you want something that ranks high in the "tasty" category, is simple to whip up and fun to assemble and eat (not to mention something that will probably impress the hell out of your neighborhood coffee klatch), give this recipe a whirl.


Daim bars in their natural habitat... my kitchen.

Now then: The first step (and this may be the hardest part of the process) is locating the Daim bars. I found mine at The Sweet Life on the Lower East Side, but if you're not a Manhattanite, you can probably search for them at your local IKEA food shop or a neighborhood candy store that cares. Barring that, substitute the Skor bar, which is awfully similar to the Daim and much, much easier to find here in the states.

You'll need one Daim bar to accommodate three mini-cakes. Making the full recipe (six cakes)? Get two bars. Get three if you're snacky. Put them in the freezer when you get them home.


Unadorned mini almond cakes

For the almond cakes, you'll need a standard-size muffin tin and:
Flour and butter (to grease and flour the muffin tin)
8oz sweetened almond paste (often sold in a can or tube)
3 fresh eggs, separated
2 Tbsp cream
3 Tbsp pastry flour/cake flour
1 tsp powdered sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour six cups in a standard-size muffin tin.
2. Blend together the almond paste, egg yolks and cream until they form a smooth, thick, almond-scented mixture. Incorporate the flour.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg whites with the teaspoon of powdered sugar until you achieve firm, white peaks.
4. Scoop about half of the whipped egg whites into the almond mixture and fold it in until all the white is incorporated.
5. Scoop the remaining half of the whipped whites into the almond mixture and fold it in. Don't overwork the mixture at this point.
6. Fill six cups in the muffin tin with the batter. (In a 12-cup tin, I usually alternate filled cups with empty cups so it's balanced.)
7. Cook for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of one of the cakes comes out without batter stuck to it.
8. Cool 5-10 minutes in the tin, then run a butter knife around the edge of each cake to help release them from the pan. Be free, little cakes!

Assembling the Chocolate-Almond Daim Cakes

Once you have cooled cakes, use a serrated knife to cut the rounded tops off. These are tasty. Eat one now, and save the rest for later snacking... maybe with berries and whipped cream. Yum.

Bisect each cake so you have two equally-sized tiers to work with.

Take the Daim bars out of the freezer. Don't unwrap them. Immediately throw them down onto the kitchen floor as hard as you can. Pick them up and throw them again. Do this again if it makes you feel good. You're trying to shatter them as much as possible without sending chunks of chocolate flying across your kitchen. Once those bars are appropriately pummeled, open up the packages and pour out the pieces onto your cutting board. Chop up any large hunks so you have a nicely uniform "crumb."

Make the chocolate ganache in a small saucepan with:

2 cups chocolate pieces (I believe IKEA uses milk chocolate, but I prefer semi-sweet or dark, myself)
1/3 cup cream
1 Tbsp butter

Combine the chocolate, cream and butter in a saucepan over very, very low heat. Whisk all the lumpy chocolate bits until the sauce is smooth and shiny. Don't let it burble. Burbling is bad in this case.

Take apart the bisected cakes and lay them out on across a sheet pan you've covered in a protective layer of parchment, wax paper or plastic.

Use a small rubber spatula or a butter knife to spread a thin layer of chocolate ganache over the tops of the lower layers and the bottoms of the uppper layers. Evenly sprinkle about a half-teaspoon of the Daim bar crumbs on each ganache-coated bottom layer (like the middle cake in the photo above), then put the tops on 'em (like the cake in the foreground).

Cover each cake with a smooth layer of ganache, sprinkle another half-teaspoon or so of crumbs on the tops, and finish the cakes by spreading another teaspoon or so of ganache across the Daim-crumb-topped cakes.

You should be able to smooth out most irregularities in the ganache with a butter knife that you've warmed in a glass of hot water... but don't get crazy about it. They should look a little irregular. It's better that way.

See? Tasty, simple and fun to make.

Cool the cakes at room temperature until the chocolate firms up, and serve 'em with hot coffee. Spare yourself the mad IKEA crowds, and dream of furniture-assembly instructions that make sense.