Carlota de limón icebox cake?

[Darienne]

Well, it was tasty but it wasn't a complete success by any means.  I realize that I didn't use as many cookies as Kerry did...a mistake.  And it didn't solidify as much as I think it should have.  Would whipping the evaporated milk have anything to do with that?  And hard to believe, one cup of lime juice was really too much.  But what the heck.  Family will eat anything if it tastes good.  The chocolate topping was a good idea.

In the end, I have put it into the kitchen fridge freezer, which is not all THAT cold...too soft for ice cream...and it works very nicely as a semi-freddo.

[Tri2Cook]

I won't be getting into mine until tomorrow. It definitely solidified. I just checked it by tilting the pan on edge (risky, I know) and it didn't move at all. I didn't get precise with the measurements. I dumped a can of sweetened condensed milk and a can of evaporated milk (both the regular not low fat versions) in a bowl, whisked it, juiced 4 of the 5 limes I had and got 3/4 cup of juice so I called that good enough and whisked it in (wanted to save one if I could in case a drink sounds like a good idea this weekend) until it started to thicken. I used a 300 g package of gingersnaps. I bought two because it didn't look like much in the package but one was plenty. Gonna top it with whipped cream tomorrow and see what I end up with.

[Darienne]

Yes, I did use full fat milks also.  Just tried it out of the not as cold as it should be kitchen fridge freezer and it's a lovely semi-freddo.  (The ice cream is kept in the dog freezer.)

[Tri2Cook]

Not bad at all. Could have been better but that was entirely my fault, no blame to the recipe. My cream to cookie ratio was off, needed less cookies or more cream. Tasty enough to do it again so I'll remedy that next time.

[MelissaH]

@Kerry Beal: getting ready to make your lime pie with the jello, recipe upthread. Does the pie get stored in the fridge or the freezer, after you make it but before you eat it? Does the whipped milk topping go on before the chilling, or right before you eat it?

[Kerry Beal]

14 minutes ago, MelissaH said:

@Kerry Beal: getting ready to make your lime pie with the jello, recipe upthread. Does the pie get stored in the fridge or the freezer, after you make it but before you eat it? Does the whipped milk topping go on before the chilling, or right before you eat it?

It goes in the fridge. The whipped milk gets folded together with the starting to solidify Jell-O

[MelissaH]

I made Kerry's pie, for a family dinner last night. Here are some photos.

Crumb crust, made from Maria cookies that I crunched with the bottom of a saucepan in a plastic bag and lubricated with butter, then baked briefly and let cool. I was prepared to do the crunching by hand until my MIL, who we are visiting, said, "I have a food processor. I got it cheap from Amazon." Whoopie! And then she dug it out of the cabinet where it lives (she doesn't have much counter space, and she has always had a strong aversion to leaving anything out, which drives me BONKERS when I cook in her kitchen) and I saw that it was Cuisinart brand. I took a closer look at the blade, and my heart sank: it looked like one of the recalled riveted models. So we checked the serial number and sure enough, it was included. We took care of submitting her recall, but I wasn't about to use the Cuisinart to make cookie crumbs at that point, especially after I looked more closely at the blade and discovered that it had already started to crack at one of the rivet points. So, saucepan and bag it was.

 

I based my crumb crust off of the general idea here. I didn't have a scale, but I knew that each sleeve of Maria cookies contained 200 grams, so to get the last 50 grams, I'd need a quarter of a sleeve, or 8 cookies. I crunched them in 3 batches, put them into a bowl, and added about 5 Tbsp of melted butter and a three-finger pinch of salt. It looked really dry, so I melted another Tbsp of butter. It still wasn't holding together well, so I did the rest of the stick. I wasn't totally happy with the results, but hey, the whole thing was experimental, and I figured that if it didn't hold together, I'd call it crumble rather than pie, right?

 

After I pressed the crust in, I put it in a 375 °F oven for about 5 minutes, just enough time to let it get a bit browner. I like the taste better that way. So there. The crust rested overnight, unmolested.

 

Then, yesterday morning, on to the filling.

 

The dry: a box of lime jello, a little less than a quarter cup of sugar (because I was worried that it would get overly sweet if I used the full amount), and the zest from two limes. You can see where the lime oil from the zest is starting to darken the color in the jello.

 

Lime juice, lime carcasses, and a skinned victim that got a temporary reprieve. (The remaining lime and a half that didn't get juiced for the pie got juiced into my MIL's supply of lime juice, which she keeps in a bottle for cocktails.)

 

Just add boiling water. In retrospect, it might have been better to wait to add the zest until after the solids were completely dissolved, just because that way it would have been easy to tell. At this point, I stuck the bowl in the fridge for 5 minute intervals ("Siri, set a timer for 5 minutes, please.") until it was cooled and starting to thicken, a total of about 20 minutes. I also thought that the color was a bit violently green for anything I'd want to eat.

 

Then it was time to whip a chilled can of evaporated 2% milk, a new adventure for me.

It grew and grew and grew. Following the directions, I tried to fold the thickened jello mixture into the whipped milk, and got nowhere. (Should this maybe happen in the other direction, folding the whipped milk into the jello?) My MIL, who is far more expert in all things jello than I, suggested that I just use the mixer to beat it all together, and that's what I did. It combined everything well although the volume collapsed a little bit. Worse, by the time I got everything homogeneous, the luridly green color was faded to the point where it was barely green at all. I wound up beating in three drops of <gasp> green food coloring to enhance the curb appeal.

 

Et voilà: one pie, with slightly demented crumb crust.

The amount of filling I got was about perfect to fill a 9-inch deep-dish crust. (I was all ready to run to the grocery store and grab a thing of Cool Whip to go on top, if there wasn't quite enough to make it look bountiful.) And everyone enjoyed it, even those who were a bit taken aback at the initial tartness upon their first bite. I did feel like I should be wearing my high heels, frilly bib apron, and pearls while I mixed up something so charmingly retro, but it was exactly right for this crowd—the menu included a loaf of Great Grandma's graham bread. I think I might even do it again, should the right opportunity present itself.

[MelissaH]

And I finally tried a carlota de limon, more or less.

 

My limey victims. It took 8 of these to get a scant cup of juice. I zested about half of them before squeezing.

And the cans of milk, one each evaporated and sweetened condensed. I used the mixer with the whisk attachment to mix them together, which wasn't quite as easy as it sounded because of the thickness of the SCM. But eventually they combined, and I slowly poured the lime juice in while the mixer was still running. About a third or halfway through the addition, the contents of the mixer had noticeably thickened, but as I kept pouring, it thinned out. I let it keep going, hoping that it would maybe hold a bit of air and whip up, but instead it just splashed little droplets of filling everywhere. So I poured the contents into a glass measuring cup, stirred in the zest, covered it with plastic wrap, labeled it so I wouldn't confuse it with the corn soup that was in an identical glass measuring cup covered with plastic wrap, and stuck it in the fridge for several hours. My thinking was that maybe it needed a little time for the acid to better work on the milk...or maybe the chill would solidify the fat enough that I could beat it later.

 

When I came back, it had, in fact, solidified enough that I felt comfortable using it. So I opened my maria cookies, and assessed their size. I wanted to make individual carlotas, since they were destined to travel to some friends' house the next day. The cookies were a tad too large to fit into a regular muffin tin, but seemed to work OK in a jumbo muffin tin. So I put a paper liner into each cup (tactical error; I should have first pushed plastic wrap into the cups to help me pop the liners out later) and then distributed a cookie into the bottom of each. I added a couple of spoonfuls of glop, then another cookie, another couple of spoonfuls, etc. I think in all, each cup held four cookies with glop, plus one last cookie to top it off. The pan then got a plastic wrap topping, and a long cold rest in the freezer. I had enough glop left over to also make two custard cups, layered the same way without the plastic liner. They, too, got a plastic wrap lid and an overnight freeze.

 

The next day, just before we left home, I tried just flipping the whole muffin pan over with the plastic wrap still on top. Nothing budged. I wound up needing to use a plastic knife (it's a pan with a nonstick coating) to cut around each paper liner and then to lever it up and out. This part would have been much easier if I'd pushed plastic wrap down into the cup. Four of the cups then got packed into a lidded container for transport, with more plastic wrap between the layers, and the container went into a cooler of ice for the trip (an hour and a half drive, plus about another hour and a half while we ran various errands near to our friends' house). They went into the fridge while we ate lunch, and then came out.

 

Here's what one of the custard cup versions looks like (because nobody photographed the muffin cup version). This was about half an hour out of the freezer.

The flavor was quite bright and limey, although I think adding the microplaned zest to the goop was probably not the best way to use it, because I didn't care for the chunky texture. I also think that when I was making the goop, if I'd stopped pouring in lime juice when it visibly thickened, the goop would have been unbearably sweet. (Although a judicious addition of powdered citric acid might have helped with that.) It was certainly easy, although it needs a good bit of hands-off resting time. I don't think it would work as a roll, like the traditional chocolate water/whipped cream icebox cake is usually assembled. The idea is definitely worth playing with a bit more. Maybe chilling the evaporated milk so it would whip better would also help with the thickening?