The ice cream man is off to Venice for a boost to the soul and a bit of work on the book! The flight is to Bergamo, where I’m spending a night in an agritourismo (farmhouse accommodation) near-by. Then on to the Veneto and that loveliest of cities. I’ll post when I get a chance…
A Few Links
I haven’t put up any new links for a while, but here are a few sites I’ve been visiting:
Irish (why aren’t there more?!): Eat me Drink me – Good mix. No post since September, so hopefully won’t go away! ~ Fabulous Food Trails – Name says it all! ~ Well Done Filet – Musings of a Belfast waiter & his partner ~ Humble Housewife – Keeps getting better
Other: Ice Cream Man – Band/events and free ice cream ~ Baking and Books – Beautiful site ~ Kitchen Pantry – Tasty photos and recipes from an Italian PhD ~ 101 Cookbooks – One of the best… ~ Bong Mom’s Cookbook – Sophisticated recipes and lovely photos
Brown Bread Ice Cream
Here’s the ice cream recipe that Sean and I presented at the cooking demonstration during the food festival. We also made the chocolate whiskey sauce to go with it.
I know I have already posted a Brown Bread and Guinness ice cream recipe, but this has a new improved method for caramalising the brown bread – i.e. simply melting the brown sugar and adding the bread crumbs. It’s so much easier and tastes just as good!!!
BROWN BREAD ICE CREAM
Ingredients:
- 130g sugar
- 4 Egg yolks
- 220ml cream
- 200ml milk
- 1/3 vanilla bean
- 250ml volume stale brown bread crumbs
- 75g dark brown sugar
- 1 tablespoon water
What to do:
- Cut the vanilla bean lengthwise and put in a saucepan with the milk.
- Bring the milk to a simmer. Remove from the heat.
- Stir for about a minute. Remove the vanilla bean.
- Beat the sugar and egg yolks together until thick and pale yellow.
- Beat the warm milk into the eggs and sugar in a slow stream (don’t over mix).
- Pour the mixture back into pan, and place over low heat.
Stir until the custard thickens (around 60C).- Allow the custard to cool.
- Stir in the cream.
- Melt brown sugar and water in a saucepan over medium heat until the sugar crystals have dissolved.
- Stir in the bread crumbs and allow to cool.
- Freeze the mix using a domestic ice cream machine, or cover and place in the freezer.
- Add the brown bread once the ice cream is thick.
Notes: 1. Use a very dark brown bread for best results. 2. If it is a fresh loaf, you can crush it into crumbs, spread it on a baking tray, and bake it at low temperature (50C) for a couple of hours to dry it out. 3. A fast way to make (small) bread crumbs is to use a blender or food processor.
Technorati tags: brown bread, ice cream, recipe, Irish
Sixteen Shades of Chocolate, Part 2
I forgot, in writing my previous post, to say how things went with us and our Sixteen shades of chocolate! Both my brother and I were slightly concerned at taking away vanilla, honeycomb, raspberry sorbet, and all of our other popular flavours for the food festival to make way for a scooping cabinet filled only with chocolate ice creams.
How foolish! Customers were transported. It made my chocoholic heart melt to see the ecstasy and beaming faces. We offered a scoop with Valrhona special reserve melted chocolate on top as a festival special. I don’t think we’ve ever witnessed such abundant happiness!
Many thanks to our staff, who staunchly coped with the onslaught and allowed me to run around on festival business…
By the way, Laura, who showed true pioneering spirit in coming down for the first annual festival (along with her “lesser-spotted specius ice-cream fiendius”), has posted a photo of my brother and I doing our cooking demonstration here. I think Laura and Fiendius definitely get the award for customers of the year!
On a final note, I think it would be pretty cool to somehow include food bloggers in the next year’s festival. Maybe we could set up a blogging wifi kitchen. Any ideas?
Technorati tags: chocolate, ice cream, food festival, Dingle
Dingle Food Festival Huge Success
I am happy but exhausted! The Dingle Peninsula Food and Wine Festival was a bigger success than anyone of us could have ever imagined.
Every event was packed, especially the cookery demonstrations in the church. For the last charity cook-off on Sunday, festival-goers even filled the balcony.
The only real problem the festival had was that everyone sold more food than expected, and many in the market and on the taste trail sold out either late on Saturday or early on Sunday. Still, one could have worse problems!
The wine tastings worked well, and there were many in Dingle with high spirits indeed! The highlight defintely was the Sheridan’s Cheese and wine tasting in the Dingle Framer’s Gallery. Talk about decadent!
The local support was tremendous and really ensured the success of the festival. We also raised a bundle for the festival’s charity – Hope Guatemala.
I think that there is little doubt in anyone’s mind that this will be an annual event. Clodagh McKenna’s TV program on Dingle should go out in March.
Technorati tags: Dingle, food, festival, wine, feile, gourmet
Cups vs. Litres
It’s funny – as I’ve been working through recipes for the cookbook and for our demonstrations, I’ve come up against the problems we had in our early days with using cups as measures. We only use litres and grams for production here, and now I remember why!
The “imperial” or UK pint is 20 ounces. A US pint is 16 ounces. A UK cup is 10 ounces, and a US cup is 8 ounces. The problem is that here in Ireland, depending on the manufacturer of the measuring cup, it might be US or UK. That’s a 20% difference in volume!
We had so many recipes come out wrong in the early days. We knew the standard here was imperial, so we did our calculations. What we didn’t expect was that we were sometimes using US measuring cups. We couldn’t understand how recipes could come out so differently, until we finally figured it out.
I wonder how many people out there have been disappointed with the results of recipes that might be US measures and they have a UK measuring cup, or vice versa.
So… I’m going metric only in the cookbook, with a conversion page. Believe me, what ever you might think of metric, it’s far safer!
Technorati tags: measure, recipe, Imperial, metric, conversion
Chocolate Whiskey Sauce
 As part of the food festival, my brother and I will do a cooking demonstration in St. James’ Church in Dingle (Saturday, 3:30). We’ve decided to do brown bread ice cream with a chocolate whiskey sauce. I’ve been tinkering away with the sauce, and here’s what I’ve come up with…
Chocolate Whiskey Sauce
Ingredients:
- 150g good quality dark chocolate (I used 2 bars of Valrhona Gran Couva)
- 100ml milk
- 20g sugar (around 1.5 tablespoon)
- 45ml cream (about 3 tablespoon)
- 30ml whiskey (about 2 tablespoons)
What to do:
- Melt the chocolate in a double boiler.
Heat the milk and sugar in a very small saucepan over low heat to a low simmer, stirring until the sugar is dissolved.- Add the milk in small parts to the melted chocolate, stirring all the time until you have a smooth, glossy emulsion.
- Stir in the cream.
- Allow to cool completely.
- Stir in the whiskey.
Note: you can freeze this sauce if you won’t use it all soon. Otherwise, it will last in the fridge about 3 days.
Technorati tags: chocolate sauce, whiskey, chocolate, ice cream, recipeÂ
Sixteen Shades of Chocolate
My chocoholic streak has triumphed over all sense, I think, as we’ve decided to take all our other ice creams out of our shop‘s scooping cabinet for the Dingle food festival and serve up only chocolate ice cream. Sixteen flavours of chocolate! My brother is as excited as me (he shares a common chocolate gene). Here’s the line-up:
- Valrhona Tanariva (milk chocolate)
- Chocolate Hazelnut Praline
- Chocolate Sorbet with organic ingredients
- Chocolate with Baileys
- Chocolate Love (with raspberry and chocolate shavings)
- White Chocolate
- Valrhona Single Estate: Palmira
- Mixed Belgian and French Chocolate
- Black Chocolate Sorbet (using cocoa and 100% Lindt Chocolate)
- Chocolate Whiskey
- Skelligs (strawberry and champagne) truffle
- Stracciatella (for the faint at heart)
- Aztec Chocolate with chilli peppers and other spices
- Chocolate Crunch (with caramalised nuts)
- Chocolate and Honeycomb Swirl
- Mocha
Technorati tags: chocolate, ice cream, food festival, Dingle