Tag Archives: Erica

Bourbon Cherry Ice Cream

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Hey guys! So remember my awesome sister Erica? (see here, here or here for a refresher, to give a few examples) She’s a mother of two now, and an amazing cook, and she used her free time to grace us with this amazing ice cream recipe. Enjoy!

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This ice cream is the perfect late-summer treat. Although, come to think of it, with frozen cherries available year-round, it’s a perfect anytime treat!

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You can use the recipe for your favorite vanilla ice cream if you have it, with the addition of bourbon for flavor, or you can use the simple custard recipe I’m including here.

It’s a bit time consuming because of waiting for things to freeze at different stages, but overall it’s quite a simple recipe. So, strap on your favorite little helper, and get crackalackin’!

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Bourbon Cherry Ice cream

Ingredients

For the custard

4 cups half and half
1⁄2 cup sugar
6 egg yolks
2 tsps vanilla extract
1 TBS bourbon

For the cherry syrup

12 oz bag frozen sweet dark cherries
1⁄2 c sugar
1 TBSP bourbon

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For the custard:

Heat half and half over med heat in a medium heavy bottomed pot. Stir occasionally.

Meanwhile, whisk egg yolks with sugar and vanilla in a large bowl until frothy and light yellow.

When the half and half is almost boiling, pour in a thin stream into yolk mixture while whisking to temper the egg yolks. Return to the pot over med- med/low heat, whisking frequently.

073Bring the heat of the custard up to almost boiling point and keep it there until the custard begins to thicken nicely. Remove from heat and strain through a fine-mesh sieve to remove any clumps of cooked egg. Stir in the bourbon (or your choice of liquor). **

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Refrigerate for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight.

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**Adding a small amount of alcohol will actually help your ice cream have a more velvety texture since it slows down the freezing process somewhat. Be careful, though! If you are feeling free-handed with the booze, your custard may not freeze as well as you want it to! A good rule of thumb is 1-1.5 TBSP per 4 c of cream or half and half.

For the cherries:

Place frozen cherries in a medium saucepan and pour sugar and bourbon over them. Stir occasionally over medium heat, letting the cherries simmer in their juices for 25-35 minutes or till you get a fairly thick syrup. You can test the thickness of the syrup by drizzling a tiny amount onto a frozen plate, or you can wing it and return the sauce to the stove later if it’s not thick enough. It will thicken considerably when cooled, so don’t let it turn into a hard candy!

080Once it reaches your desired thickness . . .

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. . . strain out the cherries and reserve both cherries and syrup. Refrigerate till thoroughly chilled.

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For the ice cream:

Once the custard and cherries are nice and cold, follow your ice cream maker’s instructions to turn that lovely custard into soft-serve ice cream. At this point, you have some decisions to make: you can combine the cherry syrup with the custard before putting it into the ice cream maker to have an overall cherry-flavored ice cream, or you can begin to freeze the vanilla custard and incorporate the syrup later on to form cherry ribbons inside the vanilla ice cream. That’s the option I want- bursts of cherry flavor cushioned by a deep velvety-bourbon vanilla.

It’s very important to not add the syrup and cherries too soon, because if the ice cream isn’t firm enough, they will just sink to the bottom of the container. Anticlimactic. We want the syrup and cherries to be suspended in the ice cream, so freeze the ice cream for a good hour or two (depending on how cold you keep your freezer) or until it looks like this:

100The consistency should be slightly firmer than soft-serve but not quite hard enough to where you would need to use a lot of muscle and an ice cream scoop to handle it.

Now comes the fun part. Dump in the chilled cherries, and “fold” (or just mush) them in.

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Use a spoon to make slashes through the ice cream, and drizzle the syrup on top.

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Make a few more slashes to incorporate it into the ice cream, but be careful to not stir it too much or you will end up with pink ice cream rather than those lovely ribbons of cherry goodness we’re going for. Pop it back in the freezer for a couple of hours and you are ready to enjoy!!

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Note: I didn’t use all my cherry syrup- there wasn’t enough frozen custard to warrant using it all. (though… that may have been in part due to the fact that a certain handsome man in my life kept  sneaking bites of the semi-frozen custard…)

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I think next time I will double the custard recipe and then the quantity of syrup will be perfect. This time I’m saving my extra syrup to make cherry margaritas later on…

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Click here for printer-friendly version: Bourbon Cherry Ice Cream

Perfect Pizza Dough

The quest for perfect homemade pizza dough–I thought–was over. Through a great recipe my sister Erica found on a food blog, I was under the impression that we had arrived. I posted the recipe here and called it a day. And then, Christmas happened . . . and I discovered that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

With all three of us girls staying at my parents’ house, spouses and children included, the burden of cooking couldn’t fall only on Mom and Dad. So just like we’ve done in family vacations past, we distributed days and each couple took a few turns at the stove. Erica and Dave announced that they were making pizza using a new recipe that Erica had discovered here, and folks, this pizza crust blew the other one far, far away. This pizza crust is hereby declared the Winner of Winners.

Erica and Dave are also declared the Winners of Winners.

The crust is chewy and bubbly and perfect. Here it is uncooked . . .

. . . and here it is after about 12 minutes on the pizza stone.

It has to be prepped the day before because it hangs out and rises for 18 hours. But don’t be intimidated by that! It rises all by its lonesome with no effort from you, and the results are so spectacular that even if it did require babysitting during its lengthy rising time, it would still be worth it.

(Speaking of babysitting, time to insert a random picture of me and Alice.)

Top that there with pepperoni if you have a pepperoni-obsessed husband like I do . . .

. . . or spread a thin layer of Boursin over the dough instead of tomato sauce, and toss on some ham and asparagus for a pizza that sends me to the moon.

I will now show you the lore of this genius who crafted the recipe. Jim Lahey, I owe you big time for sharing this with the world.

Ingredients

(Makes 6 pizzas)

7 ½ cups all-purpose flour
4 tsp salt
½ tsp active dry yeast
3 cups water

Making the dough

  1. Whisk together flour, salt and yeast. Stir with a wooden spoon and add 3 cups of water little by little.
  2. Mix dough with your hands and shape it into a rough ball. If the dough isn’t coming together, add 1 TBS of water at a time until it comes together.
  3. Put the ball of dough into a large clean bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough rise for 18 hours at room temperature (about 72 F) in a draft free area. The dough should double in size and form tiny bubbles on the surface during this time.
  4. Lightly flour your work surface and dump the dough onto it. Shape it into a rough rectangle and divide it into 6 equal portions.
  5. Taking the portions one at a time, gather the 4 corners towards the center, creating a ball. Let the ball rest on your work surface seam-side down, dust the top with flour, and cover with a damp towel. Let all the portions rest in this way for 1 hour. (To make ahead: you can make the dough up to this point 3 days ahead. Wrap each portion of dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate. When ready to bake, unwrap the dough and let it rest at room temperature for 2-3 hours on a floured surface, covered with a damp towel.)

Making the pizzas

  1. When the dough has 1 hour of rest remaining, preheat a pizza stone in the oven at 450 F in the upper third of the oven. (If you’re using a baking sheet, keep the rack in the middle of the oven and don’t preheat the sheet).
  2. Taking the first portion of dough, lift the dough off the work surface and gently stretch it with your fingers into a 10-12’’ disk, moving the dough through your hands in a circular fashion and letting gravity help stretch it. Take care not to squash the air bubbles inside.

Here’s how I do it, gently pushing the air bubbles towards the edge of the circle:

 

    3. Place the dough on a sheet of parchment paper and gently stretch it a little further. Add desired toppings. (Note: don’t load it down too heavily—light on the toppings makes for a much better pizza.

    4. Slide the pizza still on the parchment paper onto the pizza stone or baking sheet and cook for 10-12 minutes, until dough is thoroughly baked and the cheese is bubbly. Remove from the oven, cut and serve!
    5. Let the pizza stone reheat for a few minutes between pizzas, and repeat with remaining portions of dough.

    Guys, if pizza even remotely appeals to you, you’ve got to try this one! Seriously. Jimmy-boy done did good.

Click here for printer-friendly version: Perfect Pizza Dough