Darienne

Jane: Thanks for pointing out that the recipe was there. Got it! Andie: As usual, you have such good information to pass on!!! A Brix metre is $75.00 at Lee Valley and it's out of my snack bracket right now, but I'll read all the downloads before carrying on. Sethro: I have no idea of what it means to 'cryovac the pitted cherries' and I guess that the cvap is a convection oven? Thanks all.

David Lebovitz, The Perfect Scoop, gives a recipe for candied cherries. It's pretty darned quick, the cooking and candying part taking less than an hour. The problem is that the candied cherries are good only for up to two weeks in the fridge. I did Kumquats by the slower method and they were good for a few months in the fridge. They all ended up in ice cream. Would it be useful to use Andie's technique of putting the pitted cherries into a simple syrup using the crock pot method similar to candying ginger? Or perhaps the microwave method? It appears that Lindacakes never reported back how her cherries turned out in 2007. Has anyone else candied cherries? I am not trying to make maraschino cherries. I think the chopped up cherries will end up in ice cream. (I really need to start a thread called 'Candied Anything which can be Candied'. It would be very useful. ) Whoops. Did not read the subheading. This is MY kind of topic!

I just laughed reading this topic, especially about the Bailey's on cereal. I love to melt some dark chocolate, add a little Grand Marnier or Chambord, dump some homemade granola into it and then just eat it with a spoon, hot or cold. An after supper dessert. DH thinks I'm crazy.

Good work, O fearless leader!

This all sounds very good...but I just might have to make the cheesecake ice cream very soon. In fact, I have some cream cheese on hand for something I didn't make last week and it might just go into some ice cream immediately. This book is just wonderful. David Lebovitz: I think I love you.

I'm almost always making ice creams and other frozen desserts, just not from the book this thread relates to (which I don't happen to own). I enjoy reading what everybody else is doing with it though. ← I was not chastising anyone...I just wanted someone else to play with. As for passion fruit puree. Boiron makes it and you can order it from their distributor. In Canada I would buy it from Qzina .

Is there no one else out there making ice cream in this ice cream time of year? Because I am making the rounds of the chiro and massage therapist almost daily...don't ask...I take Mr. Lebovitz with me to read in the waiting rooms. Found a recipe for Lemon-Buttermilk Sherbet. Remembering that there was almost a full litre of buttermilk sitting in the fridge from a sour cream event from a couple of weeks ago, I decided that the Lemon Sherbet was my next project. Now, I don't like the taste of buttermilk, and I didn't like the resulting sherbet all that much because for me the buttermilk taste came shining through. DH liked it which stunned me because he doesn't like sherbet or buttermilk. Who knew? Then I added some toasted walnuts to the sherbet. Aha! Now even I liked it. I can't think of a suitable word to describe the taste of walnuts, toasted or not,...a sort of non-sweet taste, mealy?, earthy?...someone help me...but the contrast made the sherbet perfectly delicious...IMHO. Next projects: the Fleur de Lait and the Leche Merengada.

After my heady success with a modified Orange-Szechwan Pepper ice cream, I am ready to go for the Fleur de Lait, mostly because it is so unusual, made with cornstarch. I see that mukki announced that s/he had Fleur de Lait cooling in the fridge, 9 April 2008, but s/he never reported back. Has anyone else tried this ice cream and if so, how was it? And do you suppose that one might feel free to add some extra bits to it? Well, I am going to make it straight the first time...and then add 'stuff'.

Sorry, guys, but I just can't find 'C.C.' anywhere in the last two pages of this thread. Please, for the uninitiated amongst us...

You're right. I've never tried bacon in chocolate. I might just love it. I had never tried pepper in ice cream either and that was delicious. Thank you all for so many interesting answers. There stretches out before me a long list of things to try. This has truly been a wonderful year, culinarily speaking.

No worries. I have never had anything 'mojito' except by my own hand and so have no sense of what exactly it should taste like. The information on the subject of the mojito on the web is so varied...wildly...that I decided to go at it more conservatively first. David Lebovitz has a mojito flavored ice. Maybe I'll try that next instead. Thanks. I'll get back to the mojito flavored ganache later.

Hmmmm....alright. I'll wait until I can buy some white chocolate to do the mojito ganache. And thanks so much for all the good information. There are other things I can do in the interim...

DH came home and we tried the ice cream together. I think I could have been more heavy handed on the orange zest even and am not sure about using that 3rd TBSP of pepper. The pepper creeps up on you and stays a l-o-n-g time. I should admit...it could make a big difference...that I used a Philadelphia base for the ice cream instead of the DL custard one. I usually do in my ice creams. We find them rich enough and one of our sons cannot tolerate eggs at all. All in all, it was incredible and like nothing I have ever tasted before in a cold dessert.

I just realized I am confused a tad by your answer. You say '(and keep the lime)' in the Dark & Stormies. There is no lime in Greweling's recipe. Do mean to add lime while substituting the mint and lighter rum or to leave the lime out? I don't have any white chocolate. I hardly ever use it at all so I am going to use 54% dark I guess and see what happens. Please let me know your idea about the lime juice. Thanks.

I certainly cannot compete with that incredible cake made by dystopiandreamgirl, but I did make traditional Chinese almond cookies, a chocolate layer cake with raspberry jam filling and raspberry-flavored chocolate icing for a friends' barbecue tomorrow and David Lebovitz' Orange-Szechwan Pepper Ice Cream. Tomorrow I am going to make Alton Brown's Moo-less Chocolate pie again, this time with Frangelico, for the year end Pot Luck Lunch of the No Name group (a fiber group of guild refugees which has no name, no executive, no constitution, no fees, no rules, no schedule which to our collective amazement has been running for over 5 years now.)

Ah...c'mon...tell us one... but nothing with bacon in it, please.

Thanks for the information. I just ate one of the Aussie pieces. You are right! It is stem ginger. The biggest pieces are almost 1 1/2" in diameter. That's a BIG ginger stem. Could there be an eGulleter out there in Australia who might be persuaded to go and look at some growing ginger plants somewhere??? I have yet to plant some ginger in Canada. Now might just be the time to start. I would really like to find a calamansi tree also. However, my thumb is far from green... If I can learn to candy fruits, I can learn to take care of a few plants properly.

Someone should tell Andrew Goldsworthy about this incredible cake!!!

The joys of living in the middle of nowhere. I have to order the book and it can take weeks. Finally made the Orange-Szechwan Pepper Ice Cream. Wimped out and used only 2 TBSP of crushed Szechwan pepper instead of 3. It is incredible. Delicious. Amazing. :

Brilliant! Will do it! Thanks. ps. It just occurred to me that I could take the flavoring from David Lebovitz' Orange-Szechwan Pepper Ice Cream and put that into a ganache. I am just about to perform the last step in making that ice cream and was just wowed! by the flavor.

It seems that no one has ever posted about making a ganache using a mojito flavoring. And I can find nothing in the major chocolate sources like Greweling, Recchuiti and Shotts. Plus I don't own Wybauw. I have this current obsession with mojito and wonder if someone does have an idea of how to use it in a ganache. On the other hand, perhaps there are no mojito ganache recipe for a good reason. Thanks.

More ginger questions... Last night I rinsed both the Australian and the Thai ginger under hot water because they were both so heavily sugared and I want to dip them in chocolate. (I hope I didn't ruin them by doing this.) I laid them on the shelves of my little dehydrator...thanks Andie...and then it hit me. The Thai ginger was all different shapes and sizes, the way all the ginger I have cut and candied has been. However, the Australian ginger was all complete and regularly round pieces, like apricot halves would be. Is Australian ginger so large that this can be done? Or was this ginger so expensive in fact because it was cut from the largest part of the rhizome, with perhaps the irregular pieces going to some other purpose? Who knew? It's an incredibly fascinating world of food out there!

Sad as it was to throw out my last batch of not-very-good Chinese candied ginger, it was not a total heartbreak. My DH always does the slicing for me and this time he sliced it with the grain on so many of the pieces. He remembered to get them as large as possible...but he forgot to slice them across the grain. He is such a huge help to me that I could not possibly chastise him. Besides, what good would it do? I'll just stand over him the next time.

How is to be sliced? With or against the fiber? Or on a slant. I have had much success with the Ginger Lady's (aka Andie) recipe but there is always room for another recipe. As for my current ginger obsession: Yesterday I went to our local organic health food store to see their organic Hawaiian ginger. It was as thin as a pencil. Not too useful. No cigar. However, they did carry bags of candied ginger from Australia ($9.85/lb CDN) and from Thailand $3.90lb CDN) BIG price difference!!! The Australian was a darker color, much tangier, deeper flavor, bigger bite than the Thai. No comparison. (That's not to say that all Australian or Thai ginger tastes like these two.) My next step is to buy and then candy some Chinese ginger from the local small Asian market where I have been assured by the owner, and a couple of interested customers who were listening to our discussion, that HIS Chinese ginger was excellent. The earlier Chinese ginger from the supermarket finally hit the trash this morning. All gingery comment is welcome.

Today I asked the owner of our local small Asian market (Peterborough) where his ginger came from. He replied 'China' and that I would be unable to buy any other kind of ginger from anywhere else in the area, including Toronto, which has a gigantic Asian population, from anywhere else but China. Perhaps he is correct; perhaps mistaken. Is there anyone out there from any part of Ontario who can get ginger from Thailand? Or any other place? The owner said he used to get ginger from Hawaii, but that the Chinese ginger is the best. ...or maybe I should start a separate thread... Thanks