UnRecipe: Chasing Summer's Shadow

Our scale is broken, or needing a battery replacement, and it's probably just as well because I've been on a serious baking/dessert kick, no thanks to the fleeting days of summer. I feel like a bear fattening up for winter, I just need to find a cozy cave to crawl into for the next few months. The balmy sunny season seemed to have made a hasty exit, stage left, but in its wake were some fleeting handfuls of blackberries, which I put to good use. Exit summer, enter Blackberry Clafoutis and Buttermilk Blackberry Ice Cream Float in Lavender Soda.

Clafoutis... Clafoutis Kline... (really bad "Overboard" botched quote) - Photo by Wasabi Prime

I've never made a clafoutis before, but it sounded fancy and I had a recipe lying around from a magazine. It's like a big, fruity souffle you make in a pan, dotted with fresh summer fruit. I should have had more blackberries and a smaller pan, as my clafoutis turned into a skinny, puffy pancake. It was still delicious, don't get me wrong, but it was stretched too thin and more crepe than cake. Dusted with confectioner's sugar, I honestly didn't care, and its thin-ness only served to provide my brain with the unhealthy logic that it's totally okay to eat half of it in one sitting. I will revisit this dessert and improve on technique to make a proper clafoutis, so consider the dessert gauntlet thrown.

The last of the summer berry haul resulted in me and the ice cream machine, yet again. I love homemade ice cream, what can I say? This latest creation had a buttermilk custard churned with cooked down, sweetened blackberries. It all kind of came together tasting of a berry cheesecake, which is never a bad thing. You know what else isn't a bad thing? A big scoop of that ice cream sitting in seltzer water flavored with lavender simple syrup. If that doesn't taste like pure summer I don't know what does! While the last of the blackberries are gone, it's a nice flavor memory to keep around and a nice reminder of what to look forward to next year.

Blackberry mania at Wasabi Kitchen - Photos by Wasabi Prime

OMG a Recipe: the Fast, the Furious and the Frozen

When the Prime has a food-related bee in her bonnet, she goes Wasabi-Wild. I had made ice cream before, but a somewhat faulty ice cream churner paddle had prevented me from making more homemade delights. Finding out the paddle's defective crack wasn't enough to keep us from making frozen dessert goodness was the green light for my Fast and Furious Ice Cream Madness.

Peanut buttery vegan goodness with critter-friendly ice cream! - Photo by Wasabi Prime

I know making ice cream isn't difficult. It's downright easy, it just requires a bit of time and patience in between steps. But once you get into the groove and get used to the time needed to make frozen delights, it easily becomes an obsession towabds trying new flavorc and combinations every week. It started out with beer ice cream for me. I was developing a beer-flavored ice cream recipe, and I had a basic frozen custard recipe, which consists of: 3 cups half and half or cream, 1 cup of sugar and three eggs. That's pretty much it. Vanilla extract is optional, depending on the flavoring, and the sky's the limit for adding new ingredients to modify it. You have to heat up the custard to about 170 degrees to make sure the eggs are cooked but not scrambled, and you strain the mixture to get rid of any eggy bits, but once you add whatever extra flavoring or fruit of your choice and let it cool, it goes straight into the ice cream maker and then into a container to finish off in the freezer.

Coffee you can eat with a spoon - Photo by Wasabi Prime

I started out with a reduction of a Scotch Ale for the beer ice cream, then made a coffee-flavored ice cream with leftover coffee. I moved into frozen yogurt territory, mixing frozen berries with yogurt and milk -- that actually froze up so hard, the paddle couldn't turn, so it took some elbow grease to scrape it out. An excess of buttermilk and fresh blueberries led me to try a blueberry/buttermilk combination which ended up being like a berry cheesecake ice cream (yes, please!), and I even dared to tread into the vegan domain of soy ice cream for some visiting friends who are lactose intolerant. I was happy to say that the soy milk set up just fine, no weird separations or especially large ice crystals. I made a peanut butter soy ice cream, using the peanut butter as the fat content that the eggs would have normally supplied for the custard. For the base vegan custard, I went with the basic recipe from Post Punk Kitchen. The resulting dessert ended up being a favorite, as scoops of the peanut butter ice cream, drizzled with a bit of chocolate sauce and plain peanuts, with a dash of salt to kick up the savory, was a home-run dessert hit.

Like a berry cheesecake, but frozen - Photo by Wasabi Prime

I'm enjoying how flexible the base recipe is, whether it's dairy or vegan-ized. I'm already thinking of new flavor combinations to try with different ingredients like lavender, ginger, honey, mint, and maybe... just maybe... I'll creep into the realm of savory ice creams. Blame it on Iron Chef, but like I said, when this Wasabi has a bee in her bonnet -- look out!

Weapons of Brain Freeze destruction! - Photos by Wasabi Prime

UnRecipe: Carb-o-tronic

I don't have a wheat intolerance, but I'm fairly sure I gave my system the shock of its life a while back when I went on a baking spree. This was actually a while back when the weather was a lot cooler and it actually felt good to keep the oven going, to keep the house feeling cozy. The result were baked goods that include Buttermilk Orange Marmalade Scones and Buttermilk Cinnamon Buns. *Burp* So delicious.

Sconed Love - Photo by Wasabi Prime

The scones had a good, legitimate reason for coming to be on this planet. It was a friend's birthday and I thought it would be nice to give something homemade. It's also the gracious gift-giving solution when one is broke-as-a-joke, but can at least offer useful skills like making baked treats. I included a little jar of butter whipped with the marmalade, to make it that much more citrusy and to guarantee that scurvy will never affect this Birthday Girl. For the scones, I used this Dried Cherry Buttermilk Scones recipe from Gourmet, by way of Epicurious -- minus the dried cherries, and with a few spoonfuls of the orange marmalade. Admittedly, I was the bad baker and just eyeballed the marmalade addition, and then threw in an extra tablespoon of flour or two, to offset the additional liquid. Terrible, terrible, I know. But they came out fine, as I did several taste-tests before giving away the tin of buttery scone goodness to my friend.

You can never buy just the amount of buttermilk you need. You always wind up with extra. There's some Cardinal rule that this will happen, no matter what -- deal with it. So what do you do? Make buttermilk cinnamon rolls, of course. Duh, right?! Aside from one baking shenanigan enabling yet another carby misadventure, it's worth the calories as the house smells amazing when you bake cinnamon rolls. I'm sure using the tee-hee-cannibalistic Pillsbury Doughboy's cylinder of premade dough will make your house smell just as cinnamony-good, but the proof is in the resulting baked treat as you get a more flavorful dough and that made-from-scratch warm fuzzy feeling after doing all the work yourself. I pulled this recipe from my old web-pal AllRecipes.com, using this basic Buttermilk Cinnamon Roll Recipe.

Eat this, Pillsbury Doughboy! - Photo by Wasabi Prime

Sure, these Wasabi-made rolls didn't have the bakery-perfect roundish-squarish shape of a proper cinnamon bun. But damn it all if they didn't taste rootin'-tootin' good. I had an excess of marmalade butter, so used that in place of plain butter for the filling, so it made for a more citrusy-flavored center. For the glaze, I used the last bit of buttermilk, making it more tart, like a sweetened goat cheese. That may sound a little gross, but it was quite nice, like a cinnamon, citrus, doughy cheesecake. Overall it was a cinnamon roll that was more flavorful without that overwhelming sugar-sweetness, as most store-bought pastries tend to be. I look forward to cooler temperatures returning later in the year, so that I can revisit this recipe and indulge once again!