chocolate chocolate chip cookies

I was really craving some soft, chewy chocolate chip cookies. I quickly checked to see if I had ingredients to make something, and of course, I did (would you doubt anything else).

As Paula Deen says, add just a little bit of butta...

I love licking the bowl. Salmonella Palmonella.

I added some dutch cocoa powder to the batter to make these cookies uber chocolatey

About to go in the oven!

The secret ingredient: cocoa powder!

Wow, these are huge!
Please excuse me as I go stuff my face with these huge chocolatey gooey cookies...

The recipe is adapted from here

3 cups all purpose flour

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1 1/2 tsp salt

2 sticks unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly

1 1/2 cups light brown sugar

1 cup granulated sugar

3 large eggs

1 1/2 tsp vanilla

2 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

My addition: 1/4 cup (approximately) of cocoa powder. I really don't know how this "messed up" the chemistry and all that, but the cookies were still gooey and delicious for the next week (yes, they lasted that long).

Strawberry Frozen Yogurt!

I normally hate non-chocolate ice cream, especially fruit based ice creams. But, since I got my ice cream maker, I’ve been trying every recipe under the sun. I’m sure eventually I will even make parsley ice cream.

Fresh, yummy strawberries!

Strawberries and sugar...

Strawberries "marinating" in the bowl over night

Right before whipping up some strawberry puree!

I got up at 8am on a weekday morning to do this...now THAT is dedication (normally I sleep in till 8:30)

Voila!!

Recipe is as follows, adapted from David Lebovitz's book, The Perfect Scoop (makes about 1 quart, or just enough to fill a normal ice cream maker)

1 pound strawberries, rinsed and hulled (just buy one 16 oz. carton)

2/3 cup sugar

1 cup greek yogurt

1 tsp. fresh lemon juice

Slice the strawberries into small pieces. (see photo #1). Toss in a bowl with the sugar until the sugar dissolves. Cover with plastic wrap and let stand at room temperature for 2 hours, stirring occasionally. Or, you can do what I did and leave it in the fridge over night.

Transfer the strawberries + resulting juice to a blender. Add the greek yogurt and the lemon juice. Wheeee! (which means pulse until smooth).

Chill the mixture for an hour (or 8 hours - from the time you blend, go to work, and come back). Throw into your magic ice cream maker and let it do the rest of the work for another 30 minutes!

HOM!

Cheese Fondue

My two favorite things in my kitchen are my heart-shaped fondue pot and of course my ice cream maker. So what do you get when you combine them together? FONDUE ICE CREAM! Ew, just kidding. Wait. That could be good?


I've tried various fondue recipes. Champagne Fondue. Chipotle Cheese Fondue.

This one is good tried and true recipe:


Adapted from here
1 garlic clove, halved crosswise
1 1/2 cups dry white wine
1 tablespoon cornstarch + extra
1/3 pound Emmental Comte cheese, coarsely grated (a little less than 2 cups)
1/3 pound Gruyère, coarsely grated (a little less than 2 cups)


Because I’ve made some variation of the recipe before and always end up with wayyyy to much cheese stuck to the bottom of the fondue pot, I actually reduced the amount of cheese to about 1/3 pound instead of the original ½ pound from the recipe. This adjustment fed four of my girlfriends and me (so 4 + 2. Haha).


The recipe also called for Emmental cheese as you can see I crossed out above. I used that last time I made this, and the result was a solid, traditional fondue. When I substituted the Comte, the result was DELECTABLE. My friends raved about the flavor. So try it both ways and see which one you like best. But don’t forget to invite me to be a taste tester!

As my cheese was melting, I noticed it still wasn’t thick enough with just the 1 tablespoon of corn starch. So I threw in maybe 2-3 more tablespoons.


As for the white wine, I didn’t use anything special. Just some kind of chardonnay from Trader Joe’s, for probably $6 or less.

The spread:

James Beard Media Award Winners

http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2010/05/who_won_at_the_james_beard_fou.html

And from this, I found serious eats! Now a link on my blog :)

Dark Chocolate Ice Cream

To complement our breakfast pizza / flatbread pizza extravaganza, I made some dark chocolate ice cream (also because I'm obsessed with my ice cream maker). This recipe was from my new page-turner, Ice Cream: 52 Easy Recipes For Year-Round Frozen Treats by Sally Sampson.

whisking the cream!

We don't have a mesh strainer, so, "creative" me decided to use our sifter. The mesh strainer is on my to buy list.

I may or may not have licked the bowl. For breakfast.

And my lovely ice cream maker is doing all the work!

Ahhhh! Yummmy!

Dark Chocolate Ice Cream

1 1/2 cups whole milk

1 1/2 cups heavy cream

8 ounces semi-sweet chocolate

3 large egg yolks, at room temperature

2 tablespoons white sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

pinch kosher salt

I'm a fan!! Is there a "like" button for this?

Pizza for dinner!

Becca and I decided to make dinner together one night, since she's ALWAYS eating out due to work. She was craving bacon and cheese, and I like bacon and cheese....so we found a recipe for breakfast pizza and flatbread pizza.

Eggs! Bacon! FOR DINNER!

The flatbread pizza!!
And...the masterpiece...breakfast pizza...

Becca founds this recipe on Smitten Kitchen. We made some modifications...i.e. we left out the parsley and the shallots, and the crust we bought pre-made at Whole Foods. Also, we only put 2 eggs on the pizza instead of 3.

The Flatbread recipe came from here. Here, the major modification we made was instead of goat cheese, we used this cheese that looked like halumi cheese, but was called "bread cheese" or something like that. Now, this was an AMAZING modification. The cheese melted really well. It was YUM TOWN. We threw some artichokes on top as well. I'm not a major artichokey fan, and it was pretty good.

Minor note: we had the oven at 425 degrees for the flatbread pizza. It NEEDS to be at 500 degrees or else the egg won't cook properly. And then you have to cook it for longer. And then the cheese looks weird. But it was still mmmm mmmm good.

Vanilla Bean Ice Cream

Lavina was hosting a dinner with some friends, and asked me to bring dessert. Naturally – it’s my favorite thing to make/eat/lick the bowl. I was thinking of making cupcakes…but cupcakes are so 2009.

I decided to make vanilla ice cream with bittersweet chocolate sauce. The recipe is from Recipe of the Week Ice Cream: 52 Easy Recipes for Year-Round Frozen Treats by Sally Sampson. Yes, I bought a cook book that has an ice cream recipe for every week of the year. Something wrong with that?

Ice Cream Recipe:

1 ½ cups whole milk

½ cup white sugar

One 4-inch vanilla bean, split and and scraped

1 ½ cups heavy cream

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

pinch kosher salt

Chocolate Sauce:

¼ unsweetened cocoa powder

1 cup heavy cream

1 to 2 tablespoons white sugar (I opted for 2 of course)

Tahitian Vanilla Bean. Once you go pure vanilla bean, you can't go back (to extract). While it smells delicious, it tastes weird by itself (yes, I tried it, are you really that surprised?)

The contestants:

Saucy....

Remember that Bryer's commercial with the 6 year olds reading the ingredients in the ice cream? This reminded me of that for some reason.

I could add more pictures of my red ice cream maker, but figure you can also refer to prior posts.

Despite the fact that no eggs were in the recipe, this ice cream turned out airy, fluffy and DELICIOUS. For some reason, the sauce was not as thick as I had expected, but it was still yummy. Well, what isn’t tasty when there is a cup of heavy cream in it?

Note: If you are going to lick your ice cream maker bowl clean, make sure it is not frozen, or else your tongue will get stuck to it.