Tag: dessert

baking

Main character baking energy

wittychild

Around Valentine’s Day, my Baking Buddy and I decided to re-watch the To All the Boys trilogy on Netflix. (Was this my idea? Yes. But was he into it? Also yes.) We were partway through the first one when I realized, with a funny pang, that no matter how cute the two leads might be, the book was so much better. The book is always better than its filmic adaptation. And naturally, that (re)discovery meant that I needed to (re)read the books, stat.

One thing they do show in the movies in a mostly faithful adaptation of the novels is Lara Jean’s baking. There’s something so relaxing about watching her very neatly go through the process of making, say, cherry turnovers or frosting a batch of cupcakes perfectly. In the third book, Always and Forever, Lara Jean, she’s on a quest to bake the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

(Can I just say here that that book stresses me the heck out? First of all, it’s the final book in the series, so there’s the anticipation of “goodbye” which is inherently a little stressful in itself. Then, there’s the agony of waiting for university acceptances to be announced, and I am so glad that social media wasn’t a thing when I was waiting. There’s the fact that she doesn’t get in to her first choice school and the idea that her happily-ever-after might be derailed because of it. Her friends ambush her with a surprise birthday party, and her dad ambushes her with a trip to Korea without even asking if she wanted to go or had other plans for the summer. Oh, yeah, and her boyfriend’s mother is a manipulative cow. Ugh.)

When she’s not being pressured five ways from Sunday, she’s baking batch after batch of chocolate chip cookies, and encounters Jacques Torres’ take on it during a trip to New York. I was pleasantly surprised to see that his recipe is readily available online, and decided I had to try it. These are supposedly the ne plus ultra of cookies, and perhaps that’s why the recipe thinks it can get away with its extreme fussiness. In no particular order:

  1. It uses two kinds of flour: cake flour and bread flour. For some of us, this means a trip to the grocery store for five-pound bags only to use ~2 cups of each. What happened to all-purpose flour?
  2. The dough must be made 24 – 72 hours in advance, and allowed to rest in the fridge before baking. While I have made dough the night before in the past just to expedite the baking process the next day, there’s a big difference between deciding to do it as a gift to your future self and being told you have to do it, thereby necessitating even more planning. (Hope you’ve got the flours!)
  3. It calls for chocolate discs instead of chocolate chips, and then (annoyingly) provides a weight rather than a volume measurement. Luckily I found some lovely dark chocolate discs at Bulk Barn; less luckily, a modestly sized bag of them cost $15. I will admit that they were good, though – I don’t even like dark chocolate, but couldn’t tell that’s what these were.
  4. A petty complaint, but, per the last step in the recipe: “Best eaten warm.” Do they think I’m baking for a party, here?
  5. Step 3 of the recipe urges us not to overmix, but to mix only until the dry ingredients are incorporated, 5 to 10 seconds. My guess is that they don’t want to overdevelop the gluten (then why use bread flour, seriously?), but that is not enough time to work four cups of flour in.

Despite the misgivings brought on by the above, I gamely bought my ingredients and planned ahead so it had about 40 hours of resting time before baking, which is pretty good, I thought.

We tried to use a cookie scoop for maximum uniformity but the dough was so stiff from its time in the fridge that we quickly dispensed with that and grabbed two spoons instead.

They still wound up uniform-ish.

The recipe advises pushing in any discs that stick out of the dough for a better aesthetic once baked. Does it sound silly? Yes, but we dutifully did it anyway.

I was surprised by how much these spread, considering how long the dough had been chilled and that it didn’t really get a chance to warm up that much – I guess that’s what using butter will do for you.

We didn’t use flaked salt as recommended, but sprinkled a few grains of kosher salt on top to contrast against the sweetness of the cookie.

Overall? These weren’t bad, but I don’t know that they were worth the hassle, either. They were a perfectly OK cookie, but the flours, chilling, and pricey chocolate didn’t necessarily elevate them to superstar status. One interesting thing the discs did is melt and streak throughout the cookie, giving the inside a really neat appearance. And just like the recipe says, they truly do taste better warm. My test audience liked these well enough, so these may be a “sometimes” bake. (Or perhaps a more frequent bake until I use up the rest of the special flours I bought.)

Thanks for looking!

baking

Saying it with chocolate and peanut butter…

wittychild

Have you ever had one of those days when you wanted to bake something for the special people in your life, but also didn’t want to spend all day messing around with rolling and cutting dough, decorating to the nines, and all that other stuff?

Relax, because I’ve got you.

In the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, I saw (and Pinned!) all manner of cutesy cookies and other sweet treats, a fair number of which were heart-shaped and bedecked with red and pink sprinkles and/or frosting. They were cute, but the prospect of having to actually find the time to make them was a daunting one. Eventually, it hit me: why not make something I already know is quick and tasty, but dress it up? A few weeks back, the newspaper had run an article in its Arts & Life section about how to add a swirl to brownies, and that sounded like a darned good idea.

I started with Quick and Easy Brownies (because they are quick and easy!), but you could use your favourite recipe.

They’re not naturally lumpy; I stirred in half a bag of semi-sweet chips and chunks (about 1 cup, give or take) for a little extra chocolatey goodness.

If the title of this post hasn’t completely given it away, I decided to try a peanut butter swirl. I spooned about half a cup of peanut butter – this is a visual estimate only – into a standard zip-top bag, snipped one corner, and went to town.

A quick word on this: I found it really hard to squeeze the peanut butter out! I have no idea if melting the peanut butter first or even just having held the filled bag in my hot little hands for a minute or two would have helped. Because of this, the peanut butter was a bit hard to control and didn’t always pipe on where I wanted it to. Notice the nearly-naked perimeter that goes 3/4 of the way around.

Next, the fun part! Take a butter knife or other implement of mass swirling, and start dragging it through the peanut butter.

Every single tip I read about this cautions against over-swirling. You still want some contrast between the base and the swirl, and don’t want it to all homogenize into one chocolateandpeanutbutter layer on top. I might have swirled more than necessary, but I was also trying to work my peanut butter into all those missed edges and corners. Overall, I think I managed it. Once I was satisfied, I baked as usual.

Apparently I gave the pan a quarter-turn clockwise when I took it out of the oven! But look at how nicely that swirl stayed in place. I half-expected it to sink to the bottom during baking, and the fact that it stayed on top gives me an inflated sense of my own culinary genius.

The only thing I would have done differently is to have cut the pieces larger. No pictures, but I did a 4 x 6 cut to get 24 pieces out of an 8″ square pan. They were the perfect size for popping into your mouth, but really didn’t show off the swirl to its best advantage. (They still tasted great, though!)

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

So red, Joseph McCarthy is rolling over in his grave

wittychild

I’ve written in the past about trying to find a red velvet cupcake recipe that’s both tasty and fire-engine red (oh, and moist! But that’s a cousin of “tasty”). Since the last time I wrote about it, my red velvet escapades have primarily consisted of hitting up a local restaurant famous for its version and/or trying my recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World with the addition of red velvet baking emulsion and red velvet cocoa from Bulk Barn. Somehow, the inclusion of these ingredients seemed to only make the finished product dryer than usual, so I quickly abandoned that. But hey, that’s OK – there’s always the restaurant cake.

And then, a special request for mini Baileys cheesecakes came my way. Cheesecakes, I can handle. When I nonchalantly found my way over to Life, Love, and Sugar to double-check the ingredients, whammo! There was a recipe for red velvet cupcakes staring me in the face. ”No harm in at least reading it through,” I thought, followed by, “Hey, this looks pretty straightforward.” At the very least, I had all of the ingredients in the house, and – bonus! – this would be a great way to use up the little bit of buttermilk left in the carton from a different recipe. I tried to temper my expectations, and got my supplies together.

There are only two teaspoons of cocoa in the whole recipe, and yet – and yet! – they still managed to have little cocoa-y clumps that I tried my darnedest to break down with my mixing spoon.

It got interesting in the wet ingredients. The recipe calls for two teaspoons of red food colouring. I found a powdered colour by LorAnn and tried it on a whim, thinking it might be more concentrated than a liquid colour. Dang, did it ever make my wet ingredients red!

The colour was muted only a hair when I added my wet ingredients into my dry. The method surprised me: normally, I’d add dry to wet, but I dutifully followed the instructions. The oddest part was after the two sets of ingredients are mixed, a half-cup of hot water gets slowly incorporated. It makes the batter incredibly thin, and I admit I was a bit skeptical at first.

The thin, thin batter made filling my cups a bit of a messy prospect, but they baked up like a charm and (bonus!) retained that nice red colour.

I cheated a bit and used a can of store-bought frosting, for a couple of reasons: 1) There had been a can kicking around the pantry from a bake a while ago that didn’t happen and I wanted to use it up instead of tossing it, and 2) I don’t have the clairvoyance required to have taken out cream cheese to start softening before I even realized I was going to bake, so a homemade cream cheese frosting was out. For the record, it wasn’t awful. It definitely tasted less sweet on the cupcakes than it did off the knife, and it served that all-important purpose of keeping the tops moist.

Look how red they stayed! That was one point for them, but how did they taste?

Like red velvet should, that’s how. These are moist (there’s that word again…) with a tender crumb and just the slightest hint of cocoa to compliment the notes of vanilla from the extract. The next time I make these, I’m pulling out all the stops and making a homemade frosting for them. A cream cheese frosting would really pop on these, although I’m also having thoughts of the cream cheese whipped cream topping I use for almost everything.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

Safer than a leg snare…

wittychild

Today’s musical inspiration is courtesy of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs:

Years ago, I found a recipe for the charmingly-named Man Catcher Brownies in a magazine. Brownies are good, but brownies with a layer of caramel in the centre? Yes, please. I’ve made them several times and even shared them with coworkers, and somehow don’t have a harem of husbands, so perhaps the name is a bit of an exaggeration. Ahem.

Recently, I was leafing through one of my mom’s cookbooks. When I hit a recipe for saucily-named brownies, I glanced at it briefly before realizing that this was exactly the same recipe. There were a couple of minor tweaks; for example, how the second brownie layer was added, and a heck of a lot more caramel, but otherwise this was it. And despite having had the recipe in my collection for ages, I was suddenly craving them again. Luckily for me, my Baking Buddy was all in.

(You can find the recipe for Man Catcher Brownies here. The recipe comments include a step-by-step video from the girl who originally submitted the recipe to the magazine, so these are the originals, folks!)

First, we gathered our ingredients:

I have a question for my American friends, if anyone wants to chime in down below in the comments. Are you guys experiencing an ever-shrinking selection at the grocery store, too, or is that just happening here? Every single version of the recipe I’ve seen calls for a German chocolate cake mix, and if I had to wait to find one, these babies would never get made. It feels like over the last…ooh, decade or more, for sure, and probably much longer, all the grocery chains have been supplanting their previously wide array of certain products with their own store brand, leaving us with only a few token flavours/varieties. There is no orange cake mix, or German chocolate cake mix, or strawberry cake mix. We’re lucky to have a choice between devil’s food and regular chocolate. Meanwhile, President’s Choice, Compliments, and Co-op Gold all pop up like so many weeds. I’m pretty sure the same thing is happening with Jello flavours too (remember Berry Black?), and possibly canned soup. And yes, we bought a store brand mix for this because it’s not being used for an actual cake, but I’m sure the holy spirit of Huncan Dines (apologies to V.N.) is furious.

The most tedious part of this is unwrapping all the caramels…

I promise it’s worth it, though! With a little evaporated milk, these form a beautiful soft centre for our brownies.

Meanwhile, the cake mix, melted butter, and more evaporated milk get mixed together. The dough turns out really stiff, which makes this parting-of-the-Red-Sea trick really easy.

I did what felt like the logical thing, and divided it in half – half for the bottom and half for the top, right? Makes sense. The only problem is that half of this will not quite cover the bottom of a 9″ x 13″ pan, and you’ll need to borrow some from the top’s share. I had forgotten this from the last time I made them, and suddenly the fact that the version of the recipe in my mom’s book uses a 9″ square pan makes a lot more sense. After some mild cussing on my part, my Baking Buddy took over to get the dough pressed into the corners of the pan, and then we threw the whole mess in the oven for 7 minutes. The process of baking and puffing-up hides a multitude of sins, and I was already feeling better.

Now it’s time to top it! First, the caramel sauce gets spread over everything:

The partially-cooked bottom layer is quite delicate at this point, and spreading the caramel too vigorously will tear it. Once we were happy with our caramel coverage, we sprinkled some pecan pieces and semi-sweet chocolate chips over it, and then topped with the remaining dough. The problem with using more than half the dough for the bottom is that there won’t be enough to completely cover the top.

By this point, I was ready to pitch the whole thing, because really! But much like the bottom puffed up after baking, so too did the top after we stuck it back in the oven.

I don’t think anybody is going to be fooled into thinking that the top is completely covered (it’s not), but it was an improvement for sure. A little peekaboo caramel never hurt anyone, right?

The recipe is pretty adamant that they cool completely before slicing, so we waited patiently.

They sliced like a dream! And once they were cut into itty-bitty pieces (we got 32 from our pan), the exposed caramel wasn’t nearly as noticeable – it became more of a hint of what was to come than a huge breach in the middle of the pan.

Look at that lovely gooey caramel!

We layered ours between parchment in an airtight container, but these would make a perfect homemade gift for someone presented in a cute little treat box.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

Ich habe einen Hassen…er, ein Kreis

wittychild

I can’t remember when I first encountered them, but every Easter the German bakery near me makes these…well, I’m not quite sure how to classify them. (Oh, this post is off to a great start!) They look like they could be cookies – they’re sized to be held in one’s hand and not so complicated that a fork is required – but they’re thick and puffy and in cross-section almost look like a small, not-very-moist, sturdy cake. And one of the staff members once commented on them using a yeasted dough…does that make these bread? The bakery itself coyly calls them “Bunny Faces”, and they usually get consumed so quickly that no one’s taking the time to reverse-engineer them to put a label on them.

Some careful googling took me down a rabbit hole (ha!) to this recipe. Sure, the ones in the picture had clearly used a different bunny-shaped cookie cutter, but these were them! Finally, I could make these, and…uh, what’s quark? I had never heard of it (much less seen it in a grocery store), but every person I spoke to who was of German or quasi-German descent knew immediately what I was talking about and pronounced it differently than I had been. (Because I know you’re curious: I had been saying the last part of the word like “orc”, but it’s really like “arc”, or “ark”, depending on whether you’re doing geometry or building a boat of epic proportions.)

That all changed this year, when a chance detour down the dairy aisle yielded this:

“Quark makes you strong!”

I twisted my Baking Buddy’s rubber arm to help me with these. We took our task very seriously and even broke out his kitchen scale to follow the recipe as accurately as possible. Yes, you can search online to discover that 150 g of sugar is approximately 3/4 of a cup, but that’s not a very precise approach.

Even after mixing the wet ingredients together, the batter looked like no other cookie dough I’ve seen.

Once the flour and baking powder have been added, it needs to rest for half an hour or so before kneading it briefly and rolling it out. It might not be a yeasted dough, but it sure behaves like one.

It’s already puffy before being baked! I didn’t have a bunny cutter, so we started out making little cats before deciding circles were easier.

I was a little skeptical about brushing them with melted butter before baking, but they didn’t appear greasy in the slightest after coming out of the oven.

The bottoms got a beautiful golden colour, though!

We opted to skip the step of brushing them with more melted butter before turning them into the sugar, but still got plenty to stick because they were still hot when we did this.

Look at that inside! Is it a cake? Is it a cookie? Who cares – it’s tasty as all get-out!

They don’t have as much colour on the tops as the bakery version does, and we think if we make them again we might try an egg wash to combat that. The prepackaged vanilla sugar we used didn’t seem to have a lot of kick, either, so this may require homemade vanilla sugar.

All in all, though, I’m pretty happy with how they came out for a first attempt. It’s nice to have an at-home version for when they’re out of season at the bakery.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

Just kidding, pumpkin spice…we love you!

wittychild

I had to go at least a little pumpkin-y while the season still permits, didn’t I? Don’t get me wrong, the apple bread is still firmly in my repertoire, but it’s nestled in there right beside pumpkin as an autumn-y bake.

I’ll keep it short and sweet, because Christmas crafting time is ticking away, and you’ve got better things to do than listen to me wax poetic about pumpkin, don’t you? Besides, this baking adventure wasn’t born out of sentimentality, but of pragmatism: I had a container of pumpkin in the fridge as well as half a brick of cream cheese, and I wanted to use them both up.

Over the years, I’ve mish-mashed a few pumpkin cupcake recipes together and honed the finished result until it was perfect. So without further ado, I present…pumpkin spice cupcakes with cinnamon-cream cheese frosting.

For the cupcakes:

  • 1 cup canned pumpkin
  • 1/3 cup canola oil
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/4 cup milk* (see note)
  • 1 tsp. vanilla extract
  • 1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
  • 1/2 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon (or more, if you’re a fan – I used a heaping teaspoon)
  • 1/4 tsp. salt
  • a pinch of ground nutmeg
  • a pinch of ground cloves
  • *NOTE: if you want these to be pumpkin spice latte cupcakes, you can dissolve 4 1/2 tsp. instant coffee in your milk. And if you want these extra-coffee flavoured, keep about 1/4 cup from your morning pot of joe set aside to brush on the tops of the cupcakes before frosting them.
  1. Preheat oven to 350°F, and line a 12-cavity cupcake pan with cupcake liners.
  2. In a medium-to-large bowl, stir together pumpkin, oil, sugar, milk, and vanilla. Sift in the dry ingredients and stir until combined.
  3. Fill liners 2/3 full and bake for 20 – 24 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool completely on a cooling rack before frosting. If you’re going the coffee route, it’s easier to brush the tops with it while they’re still warm-ish.

For the frosting:

  • 4 oz. cream cheese, softened
  • 1 tsp. cinnamon (attention, cinnamon lovers: my teaspoon was heaping to the point of being nearly 2 tsp.)
  • 2 to 3 cups powdered sugar, depending on desired consistency
  • 1 tsp. vanilla extract
  1. In a medium-sized bowl, beat the cream cheese and cinnamon on medium-high speed until smooth and well combined, about 2 minutes.
  2. Sift in the powdered sugar and beat until combined, adding more as needed to achieve the consistency you want.
  3. Add the vanilla and beat on high speed until well combined and creamy. Frost your cupcakes, and marvel at the flavour explosion.

If cinnamon isn’t your thing, these are also great topped with a whipped cream topping like I did here.

And now, back to holiday crafting. Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

Take that, pumpkin spice!

wittychild

As soon as the calendar flipped over to October and I could start thinking autumn-y thoughts without feeling like a total weirdo (says the girl who had her first pumpkin spice latte of the year sometime in August), I decamped to my baking buddy’s kitchen to try out a recipe from Ree Drummond for cinnamon apple bread. It wasn’t going to take much more effort to double the recipe so we each got a loaf out of the deal.

The best part? When I first floated the idea by him, he came back with, “I’ll chop the apples!”

No way was I going to pass up that offer. While he diced, I prepared the pans and got the dry ingredients together, and we finished at almost the exact same time. Teamwork makes the dream work!

The recipe name is a little bit of a misnomer: the only cinnamon in it is used to coat the apples.

Once he finished up with his A+ dicing, we got the wet ingredients together, added them to my carefully assembled dry ingredients, and folded in the apples and pecans before divvying it up between the pans.

It’s not super inspiring-looking here, but it gets better. Promise.

Told you!

The recipe recommends baking for an hour-ish, and after half an hour the house smelled like warm apple goodness. It’s hard not to get your hopes up when something smells that good, and luckily, this didn’t disappoint.

He even had a little jar of apricot jam at the ready to be warmed up in the microwave and brushed over the tops of the loaves. I wasn’t convinced that step was necessary – I just figured it would make things sticky, and I don’t like sticky fingers (apologies to the Rolling Stones). But I’m glad he talked me into it! Look at the difference between the glazed loaf (on the right) and the to-be glazed loaf:

They came out perfectly!

This recipe is definitely going in our “make again” pile. It’s moist and flavourful, although we agreed we’d add some cinnamon to the batter the next time (or maybe nutmeg). I’m also told the leftovers make great French toast, and can’t wait to try that the next time.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

cooking

I am not a…salad?

wittychild

Earlier this summer when the temperatures were high and my motivation to do much of anything was low, I spent a few consecutive evenings camped out on the couch and watching DVD’s from my collection. One night’s feature presentation was Dick, which is a fictional take on the Watergate scandal. High cinema? Hardly. But it had a recognizable cast and a good soundtrack, and there are worse ways to spend an hour and a half.

Some time after that, I was leafing through my mom’s copy of Retro Recipes from the ’50s and ’60s: 103 Vintage Appetizers, Dinners, and Drinks Everyone Will Love (this was a Mother’s Day gift from me, and 100% worth it just for the photos, even if you don’t ever plan on making liver and onions or beef Wellington), when I came across Watergate Salad in the “Side Dishes” section. Reading through the ingredients, I thought that calling it a side dish might be stretching it a bit…but also, I really wanted to make it!

I assembled my ingredients…

Kraft created this recipe to showcase their new-at-the-time pistachio pudding mix, and originally called it “Pistachio Pineapple Delight” before a newspaper columnist gave it its more infamous name. I call it a misnamed dessert.

The pineapple, pudding mix, and pecans get thrown into a mixing bowl along with the marshmallows.

It’s still not a salad, but at least it’s still fairly benign-looking at this point.

Not for long, though…

What the heck, Kraft? This looks like one of those queasy-making dishes you see at Halloween. (“Zombie Brains”!) Folding in the Cool Whip helped a bit.

By the time I was spreading it in the pan, it looked like the picture in the book.

The recipe called for an 8″ baking dish; I went larger than that after looking at how much was in the bowl. (I think my problem might have been a larger container of Cool Whip than the recipe called for, but in my defense it was not labelled as being 8 oz and was also the only size available at the store, so…)

Also of interest: the recipe said it could either be scooped or sliced for serving, and I had my doubts at first. Until…

I’ll be darned! That stuff really held its shape, and I’m not sure if that’s a selling point or not.

By the way, if you’re wanting to try this for yourself, here’s a very similar recipe to the one in the book.

I’m not sure what it is, but it’s definitely not a salad. Even Ambrosia salad feels more salad-like, somehow. Perhaps it’s best enjoyed with shlocky 70s-by-way-of-the-90s nostalgia. It’s cool and light, though, and my mom loved it – so I guess the book was a good investment.

Thanks for looking! 🙂

baking

Cherry, cherry, where you goin’ to?

wittychild

If you’ve been following my crafty exploits for a while, you’ll know that every summer the cherry tree in the yard produces far more cherries than I care to deal with. To top it off, they’re sour cherries so they don’t make a great snacking fruit. I’ve made jam and cherry crisp in the past, and tried throwing them into muffins with great success, but surely there had to be something else to do with them.

As it turned out, I had a pack of ladyfingers in the pantry from a month or two ago when I had visions of making this icebox cake during strawberry season. It didn’t happen, for a few different reasons, and I knew I wasn’t just going to open the package and eat them like cookies. Would the recipe work with cherries instead of strawberries?

I managed to make cherry picking a bit less arduous this year by grabbing a bowl and picking for as long as it took to fill it. This was somewhere in the 15-20 minute range; definitely doable.

I have problems with recipes that call for fruit (or what-have-you) to be chopped. I’m meticulous rather than speedy…some of my helpers are the opposite.

I followed the recipe pretty much exactly. It’s a lot harder (skipping right along to about halfway through the recipe) adding cherries to the whipped cream mixture without any of the juices, since they tend to be juicier than strawberries are. I tried, though, and I’m not entirely dissatisfied with the pretty pink colour the whipped cream took on.

If you don’t count the time taken for cleaning and chopping the fruit, this recipe actually comes together really fast. And fun fact: apparently my pan flares a bit toward the top, because I was able to fit extra ladyfingers on the second layer.

The last couple of times I’ve made this recipe (with strawberries), it’s been hot as all get-out and I haven’t felt like turning on the oven to make the crumbly topping…but I got an early jump on it and was able to not heat up the house too badly. This is after I crumbled it up; pre-crumbling, it looks a little…gross. So no before picture, sorry.

Et voilà!

I love the dark pops of colour the cherries offer! It looks like a more sophisticated version of the original strawberry take. But…how does it look? How does it taste?

It cut so cleanly, and lifted out of the (ungreased) pan with zero difficulty. As summer desserts go, this is a good one! It’s light and goes down really easy, and because I used the crispy ladyfingers rather than the soft ones, they retained some of their original texture and contrasted nicely with the whipped cream and fruit (and crunchy topping). It’s not too sweet, either, thanks to the sour cherries. I love that I’ve got something I can use them in now, besides jam and more jam. 😉

Thanks for looking! 🙂

P.S. What inspired my post title? Click here!

cooking

*Slightly* less magical than Disney…

wittychild

Last weekend was supposed to have been hot as all get-out and since turning on the oven to bake sounded less-than-appealing, we decided this was our opportunity to try one of those copycat Dole Whip recipes that proliferate on Pinterest. Who needs a passport and a plane ticket when one can recreate all the magic of a Disney park in one’s own kitchen?

If you search out “copycat Dole Whip” online, there are tons of recipes to choose from. I went for this one, which seemed the most true to the recipe released by Disney a couple of years ago and didn’t include any weird add-ins like sugar (the pineapple and ice cream are full of it already, thanks) or lime juice (just…what?).

I had no idea that frozen pineapple even existed until I sought it out for this recipe. We used about half the package (or 2 cups-ish), plus a “big scoop” (~3/4 cup) of vanilla ice cream, and 1/4 cup of pineapple juice.

This view of the blender holds promises of infinite riches, of creamy, tropical bliss. Now, the recipe says that the frozen pineapple chunks should be set out “a few minutes ahead of time”, without really specifying what “a few minutes” is. Diligently photographing my packaged ingredients and then measuring them all out and adding them to the blender surely took “a few minutes”; what the recipe did not tell us is that that was not nearly enough time, and that trying to blend everything now would result in a solid, seized-up frozen chunk that would need to be poked with a stick like some sort of dead body in the woods in order to start moving around the blender.

I feel like if the four kids in Stand by Me had been on a quest to look at frozen pineapple, the movie would never have been a success. Ahem.

After much poking and pulsing, everything more or less came together and looked like the pictures I was seeing online. The recipes almost unanimously agree that to get a classic soft-serve look, this should be spooned into a piping bag and swirled into your cup or bowl.

What they don’t tell you, however, is that any pineapple chunks that escaped the blender’s blades will block the piping tip, resulting in more poking with a stick (a chopstick this time, and not a wooden spoon).

Me: Do you want to just spoon this into the bowls and eat it?

Him: Yup.

It might not have been much to look at, but it was cool and refreshing. Shockingly, the stick-poking didn’t deter us from wanting to try it again – albeit with slightly thawed pineapple next time.

Thanks for looking! 🙂