Mango Cheesecake Ice Cream

Hello, Summer...

I've been missing from this space for months. It seems that writing dissertations takes up a lot of time. Even when there is lots of procrastination involved. In an ideal world I'd be telling you about the many, many new recipes I tested during this time. But not today. 

Looking through my archives I came across this photo from the end of summer last year. It was meant to make its' way into a post but somehow never did. How lucky to have found it now since it gave me a chance to do some more digging and come up with the recipe for this luscious ice cream. 

I first came across it when I was searching for ways to use up a large tub of Labneh (yogurt cheese) in my fridge. I had halved the recipe since I was skeptical and was in no way prepared for how delicious it was going to be. The addition of yogurt adds a smooth, rich flavor similar to cream cheese but contains far less fat making this a less guilty summery treat. I adapted the original recipe only in that I used  pureéd mangoes instead of strawberries. But having made it with both mangoes & strawberries and then just plain, without fruit pureé, we love all three versions equally well chez moi. 

I've got a batch already chilling in my fridge, ready to be churned. Meanwhile here's the recipe because I know you'll want to try it: 

Mango Cheesecake Ice Cream 

adapted from the recipe here

7.5 ounces (about 1 cup) Labneh or yogurt cheese (recipe here)

1/2 cup sugar

3/4 whole milk

1/2 cup whipping cream

1/4 tsp lemon juice

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup mango pureé

In a stand mixer, beat the cheese and sugar till smooth (around 2 minutes).

Add in the milk and cream and continue beating on medium till smooth. Mix in lemon juice and salt. Refrigerate for 4 hours or overnight. Churn in ice-cream maker, freeze at least 2 hours. 

Mango Pureé  :

1.5 Lb chopped, fresh mango

1/4 cup sugar (use more if your mangoes are not sweet)

Pureé the fruit and sugar together. Chill in fridge till ready to use. 

To assemble:

Add a thin layer of pureé on the bottom of your ice-cream container. Top with a third of your ice cream and gently swirl with a spoon. Repeat layers and swirl, ending with a layer of ice cream. 

Lemon Yogurt Cake

It's mid-March already. How did that happen? 

I've had a serious case of the lazies. This post has been sitting incomplete in my drafts folder for over a month. Aside from updating my blog I should be working on my thesis but instead I've been giving myself 'a break' spending my mornings in a pensive trance as I moved around my kitchen measuring, whisking, stirring, dreaming. 

I'd taken to sitting out for hours on my sunny patio observing my daughter and her friends do this:

and this 

and more of this 

When I began writing this post weeks and weeks ago the sunny lemon cheeriness of this cake was meant to be a reflection of the cool but sunny days we had been enjoying here. But we've been experiencing a lot of sand storms this past week. An unfortunate but recurring theme for this time of the year forcing us to remain stuck indoors. 

This gives me time to catch up on some projects, and reading. So there are books and my google reader, and copious amounts of Rooibos Tea. Which brings me to this lemon cake. I have been searching for the perfect lemon pound cake recipe for ages. And while that doesn't sound like a huge challenge, it was. Cakes I have tried in the past have been usually too dense with just a bare hint of lemoness. What I really wanted out of a lemon cake was an intense, zingy lemon flavor. I wanted it to be moist and light, zesty without being either too tart or cloyingly sweet. 

So let me just say I love this version by Ina Garten - demonstrated by the fact that I've made it three times in the previous month. Twice as a loaf cake, once as cupcakes. The second and third time I made it, I threw in extra lemon zest into the batter and once it was baked I lightly pricked the top of the loaf/cupcakes with a fork while it was still warm so that the lemon syrup would soak a little better instead of pooling at the bottom of the cake. The recipe calls for extra-large eggs, which I didn't have, so I just threw in an extra egg because mine were on the smaller side. 

This cake is all about the lemons - moist and tangy with just the right amount of sweetness. It actually tastes better the day after it is baked. If it lasts that long. 

Lemon Yogurt Cake

barely adapted from Barefoot Contessa at Home, Pages 168-9 (recipe can also be found here)

Yield: I loaf or 12 cupcakes

1.5 cups all-purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp sea salt

grated zest of 3-4 lemons

1 cup whole-milk yogurt

1 1/3 cups sugar, divided

4 eggs

1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1/3 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice

For the glaze: 

1 cup confectioners sugar

2 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350F. Grease an 8.5" x 2.5" loaf pan or line muffin tin with 12 cupcake liners. If  using loaf pan, line bottom with parchment paper. Grease and flour the pan. 

Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt into a bowl. In another bowl, whisk together the yogurt, 1 cup of sugar, eggs, lemon zest and vanilla. Slowly whisk the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. With a rubber spatula, fold in the oil. 

Pour the batter into prepared loaf pan and bake for 50 minutes. Or 30 mins if making cupcakes. 

Meanwhile cook the 1/3 cup lemon juice and remaining sugar over low heat in a small pan until the sugar dissolves and the mixture is clear. Set aside. 

When the cake is done, let it cool in the pan for 10 minutes. Remove and place on a cooling rack placed over a sheet pan. While the cake is still warm, pour the lemon-sugar syrup over the cake and allow it to soak in. Cool completely. 

Combine the confectioners sugar and lemon juice and pour glaze over cooled cake. 

Whole Wheat Banana Bread

I know, I know. Another banana bread recipe. 

I'm sorry. It's just that lately I'm a woman obsessed. I wake up dreaming about fresh pineapples and banana bread.  And not necessarily in that order. I've tried to appease my cravings for the latter but so far it hadn't worked as far as finding a whole-wheat version was concerned. So I've been compiling a list of recipes to try out and, needless to say, we are going through plenty of loaves of banana bread at my house. Isn't there something so comforting about waking up to the homey fragrance of baked bananas on a winter morning? 

I think I have finally found a one-bowl recipe that is moist & delicious enough that you might want to leave your bananas to blacken on the kitchen counter just so you can try it out. I've made a couple of minor adjustments to this  recipe that I stumbled across on the King Arthur Flour website. Also, I baked mine as muffins instead of a loaf quite simply because its a less crumbly option for the kids' lunch boxes. The chopped dates are a last-minute addition because I wanted to sneak in some extra iron and fiber and also because I have at least a few kilos on hand and quite simply have no idea what to do with them. Any suggestions?

(Note: I've made this recipe several times over with great success substituting both canola oil and coconut oil for the butter. It works very well with both & I no longer make it with butter).

Whole Wheat Banana Bread

(adapted from King Arthur Flour)

Serves 18

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter

1/2 cup packed light brown sugar

3/4 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp cinnamon, ground

a pinch of nutmeg

1 tsp vanilla extract

1.5 cups mashed, very ripe bananas (I used 3 large)

1/4 cup honey

2 large eggs

2 cups whole wheat flour

1/2 cup roughly chopped toasted almonds

1/2 cup chopped dates

Preheat the oven to 350F. Line a muffin tin with 2.5" baking cups. 

Beat together the butter and sugar till smooth. Add in the vanilla, baking soda, salt, nutmeg, cinnamon and bananas. Beat till smooth. 

Beat in the honey and eggs. Stir in the flour, nuts and dates (I dusted my dates with half a tsp of flour so they wouldn't clump together). Spoon into lined muffin tray and let rest at room temperature, uncovered, for 10 minutes. Bake 30 minutes. 

Remove from oven and allow to cool for 5 minutes before turning muffins on to a rack to cool completely before serving. 

Nutella Hot Chocolate

Something warm and toasty for your winter mornings. In honor of World Nutella Day.


I've eliminated such things from my diet but that's no reason to stop inflicting my cravings upon my kids. So, if you don't mind, we're going to curl up here in our little corner of the world with some Nutella Hot Chocolate. 

Nutella Hot Chocolate

1 cup milk

2 tbsp Nutella

1 heaped teaspoon unsweetened cocoa powder

a good pinch of sea salt

Combine everything together in a saucepan over medium-low heat & stir until combined and warmed through. How easy is that!

World Nutella Day started in 2007 as the Brainchild of Sara of Ms. Adventures in Italy and Michelle of Bleeding Espresso. Don't forget to check out the Nutella Day Flickr Pool or the Nutella Day Facebook Page for lots of inspiring posts by bloggers from around the world. Happy Drooling!

http://nutelladay.com/

Banana Bread with Chocolate and Cinnamon Sugar

Well, it's been a while. A very long while. Another year has gone by and here we are already well into the new one. What does this year hold for you? 

I'm in the middle of completing my dissertation, enjoying the relative freedom from the strict study regime the past years and appreciating the new balance that allows time to enjoy my family, cook, bake and get back to blogging. 

These days I wake to a tiny cold nose pressed to my cheek between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m. and my daughters' little voice whispering, 'Wake up. I'm so, so hungry'. Hoisting myself out of bed and taking her chubby hand in mine, I stagger into the kitchen to fix her breakfast after which we snuggle together on the couch and watch Mickey Mouse Club House before the others wake up and it's time for all of them to start getting ready for school and work respectively. 

Which brings me to my daughters' lunch box. Each night since she started preschool a week ago, before going to sleep, she lists all of the 'so, so, many things' she wants me to pack in there. I think she thinks 'the lunch box' is a portable buffet and must contain infinite choices. When I pick her up from school in the afternoons I'm told how well she eats and how she really seems to enjoy her food. All of this is baffling for me when I consider that the same child has previously never wanted to sit down for a formal meal and would just eat sporadically out of the fridge when hungry. Think 10 mini-meals a day. A trail of half-eaten fruit and small bowls of nuts were left behind in every room of the house. Food always consumed while either bouncing on the chair, running around the dining table in circles, dancing to the tune of Higglytown Heroes, or sitting on the kitchen counter after 'helping' me with whatever I was making. 

Sandwich fillings were licked clean, the bread discarded. Pasta & Veggies consumed, chicken ignored or vice-versa. Curries either devoured or hated. And always a stronger preference for sweet treats. It wasn't possible to predict what she would or wouldn't eat. But as long as she was willing to try new things, I never pushed her. 

So this transition is pleasantly incomprehensible. Maybe it's the fact that she recently turned four. Big enough to be happy to go to school, assert her independence and enjoy things on her own, totally in her element, without me. I miss her boundless energy, her non-ending stream of stories, incessant chatter, our 'tea parties', her 'cooking' experiments in the kitchen and the silly singing. 

Last week my son had a day off from school so we made this banana bread before we picked his sister up. It's an interesting recipe from Orangette that uses no butter or oil and yet resulted in a banana bread that stayed moist for a couple of days and added a delicious sweet element to their lunch boxes. I urge you to try it. 

Banana Bread with Chocolate and Cinnamon Sugar

3 medium to large ripe bananas

2 large eggs

1.5 cups all purpose flour

1 cup granulated sugar

1 tsp baking soda

2 tsp cinnamon, ground

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

Topping:

2 tbsp granulated sugar

1/8 tsp ground cinnamon

Preheat oven to 375F. Butter or spray an 8" square pan. 

In a medium bow, mash bananas. Add eggs and stir to combine. Stir in the flour, sugar, baking soda, cinnamon and vanilla. Add 3/4 of the chocolate chips, stir, and reserve remaining chocolate chips. Pour batter into pan. 

Mix together topping ingredients in a small bowl and sprinkle them evenly over the batter, topping with remaining chocolate chips. 

Bake 35-40 mins. Cool on a wire rack for 15 mins before serving. 

Baking with Dorie: Peppermint Cream Puff (Ring)

Okay, so technically this isn't the cream puff ring I was supposed to make and it doesn't even contain any peppermint. It's just a solitary little cream puff.

I was unsure about successfully completing this challenge but after I made cream puffs this morning all I can say is that there is nothing to fear but fear itself. I was not intimidated in the least bit and my choux pastry was perfect. The whipped cream let me down because I couldn't get it to be stiff enough to pipe rosettes and so I spooned some into just one cream puff to take the photo for this post.

Thank you for taking us out of our comfort zones and picking this challenge, Tina!

The recipe can be found on pages 290-2 of Baking from my home to yours by Dorie Greenspan. Or you can head over to Tina's post here to get the recipe and view her pretty photos. Please see the blogroll for other participating blogs. 

Next up we're making Golden Brioche Loaves, picked by Chaya. If you'd like to be a part of our baking group, please email me at needfulthings at ymail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along with us!

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Sunday Sweets: Almond and Chocolate Chunk Biscotti

There can never be such a thing as too much chocolate. And this choc-almond studded biscotti found no lack of contenders in my house. This was my very first attempt at making biscotti and is also the first recipe I've tried from the newest addition to my collection of cookbooks: Ready for Dessert by David Lebovitz. 

Ryan, a fellow-baker from BWD, suggested we start baking our way through another book and after much deliberation we decided on this new collection of recipes by David Lebovitz. We'll slowly go through each recipe in the book and anyone is welcome to join in. Details can be found here. 

Baking this biscotti turned out to be deceptively simple. I prepared ingredients for half the recipe, shaped the dough into one log and then placed it in the oven to bake for the first twenty minutes. It came out looking perfect. So far so good. But then, given the 90F+ heat, my hot kitchen and the concentration of chocolate in this recipe, I was faced with a gooey mess each time I cut into the log. There was melted chocolate all over the place and it made it completely impossible to get the thinner slices I was aiming for. 

Skeptical, and a little frustrated, I popped the slices in the oven for another 20 minutes and mentally prepared myself for the alternatively titled 'disasters in baking' blog post I was going to write about the whole experience. I needn't have worried because whatever they lacked in appearance was more than compensated by flavor. They were a tad bit sweet for me so I would either cut down the amount of sugar in the recipe or simply use bittersweet chocolate. I never expected my kids to care for biscotti so they surprised me by going through the whole batch pretty quickly and, like DL, taking some along to snack on during our very long flight the next day. 

This first recipe was chosen by Ryan and can be found on Page 216 of Ready for Dessert. Please hop over to Ryans' blog to check out her take on the biscotti. Next up we'll make Orange Cardamom Flan chosen by me. If you'd like to be part of our baking challenges, please drop us an email at sundayssweets at gmail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along!

Curry-Palooza: Eggplant with Crushed Mustard Seeds & Yogurt

This week I had the opportunity to try a brand new curry involving certain techniques that I'm not at all familiar with. Margie of More Please picked this rather unusual recipe by Madhur Jaffrey who, I am convinced, has a knack for taking a few simple ingredients and turning them into something amazing. Every single time. 

This curry uses 'Paanchporan' - a Bengali spice-mix that I have never used before but discovered is the same thing as 'achari masala/spice-mix' which I have indeed used & am very fond of. I made my own 'Paanchporan' since I had all the whole spices on hand (it requires equal parts of cumin, nigella seeds, aniseed, black mustard seeds and fenugreek). I was skeptical about using such a large (seemingly to me) amount of fenugreek because experience has taught me that it has to be used sparingly or it lends a certain bitterness to curries. The recipe also requires the unusual method of crushing the mustard seeds, mixing them with water along with a bare pinch of cayenne pepper and simmering the eggplant in this mixture. Atypical as it was I found that this technique lent a wonderful 'mustardy' aroma to the curry and gave it a deep, yet unsaturated,  note of flavor. 

That said, I had a few minor issues with the execution: I diced my eggplant smaller than indicated, so it cooked faster and  turned out a little mushy. In addition to which the yogurt split when added and I found that the fenugreek did indeed make the curry a teeny bit bitter so it did not go down well with the rest of the family. Maybe it's my/our taste buds, or maybe it's that I need to improve on the technique of cooking with this particular spice, but I intend to reduce the amount of fenugreek seeds significantly when I prepare my Paanchporan mix next time. It's a shame about the bitterness because, otherwise, I really like the flavors in this simple and quick-cooking curry.

I know for a fact that the other Curry-Palooza members had no such issues & really enjoyed this curry. The recipe can be found on Margie's blog. Please check out the participants' posts by following these links:

Croque-Camille

More Please

Sage Trifle

Curry-Palooza is a monthly event. Members take turns picking random recipes each month & next up it's Camille's pick. I'm hoping she will throw a challenge our way!

If you'd like to join in the fun, please email either Rocquie or myself.