Ice Cream Brownie Cake

Happy VERY belated birthday, Elyse! Haha, oh man. So I wish I had the opportunity to take a picture of the inside of the cake, however I was the cake cutter at the party and felt it was a little too--weird-- if I stopped everything to do that. So this is what you get. :)

Yes, I know, it's SUPERBLY uneven, the frosting is terrible, the writing is crooked, but man oh man, was it good. I bought a Ghiradelli's Dark Chocolate brownie mix from the store as well as some frosting and went at it.

I say this is a budget dessert because this in comparison to buying an actual ice cream cake---well, those can run you $30-40 depending on where you get it and it wouldn't be this large. I was lucky enough to get my ice cream (Breyer's Vanilla) on sale for $2.88 per container. Can I just take a moment to say how things keep shrinking in size?? It used to be a half gallon container, now its a slim 1.2 L container selling for an original price of almost $5! Are they joking? Too bad the brownie mix wasn't on sale, but $3 for a bit of heaven without making my own brownies from scratch on the same day that I was making lemon bars--well, I'm willing to deal. Since I'm seriously unemployed, cheaper (for the most part because I can't say the same thing for cheap napkins from Target) is better. This was my birthday present to Elyse--a homemade ice cream brownie cake.

Recipe:

1 prepackaged cake or brownie mix
3 quarts of ice cream
1 13 x 9 x 2in baking dish
1 can of frosting
1/4c sprinkles
Foil or parchment paper

1. Line your baking dish with foil or parchment paper for ice cream. Scoop softened ice cream onto lined baking dish and try to smooth or even out as best as you can. Making it even is always the hard part. After you've made a layer a little under 1" high freeze baking dish with ice cream covered with foil until hardened.

2. After a few hours, remove ice cream from baking dish. This should be easy because of your foil underneath. Replace ice cream in freezer. I used a larger baking dish and put the ice cream in it with the foil on it still.

3. Prepare brownie mix and bake as directed in the same baking dish you originally used for the ice cream. It will be a thinner layer of brownie than the directions call for, so keep an eye on it to cook faster and not burn. Luckily because you'll be freezing it later, if your brownie comes out a little more done or underdone than normal, it will be fine because it firms up.

4. After your brownie is done baking, cool it down to still a little warm and place layer of ice cream on top. This way, hopefully your ice cream will melt just a little into the brownie to help the brownie and ice cream stick together when you cut it. (I had a little bit of a problem with this.)

5. Top ice cream layer with frosting, filling in any cracks. Of course if you had ice cream cracks, you can always add in more ice cream.

6. Sprinkles, flowers, etc. As you can see, I had some leftover beautiful baby blue sprinkles from my sister's baby shower and proceeded to carefully draw out Elyse on the top, cuz I wasn't crazy enough to write out Happy Birthday.

There are other ways to do this too. You could always take a page from Baskin Robbins and use a wire or string and after removing the carton from the ice cream, proceed to cut the ice cream in horizontal slices and place them on top. This didn't work well with the size of my dish so I ditched this option.

Obviously all of these things can be tweaked to your own specifications. I used the Dark chocolate brownie mix, but feel free to use a vanilla cake, a funfetti cake, a lemon cake, etc. The possibilities are endless. Same goes for the ice cream, maybe try a sorbetto instead which could be light and fun. You could also use a cream cheese frosting or a funfetti frosting. (Can you tell I like the funfetti? It's so pretty.) You could also get crazy and use a sheet cake and cut that in half horizontally and then have a layer of cake followed by a layer of ice cream followed by a layer of cake again and then frosting. That looks so much prettier than my ugly second cousin cake. :)

Needless to say, it was an absolute hit. The dark chocolate brownie complimented so well with just plain ol' vanilla ice cream by balancing out the sweetness. It was very well received and most of it was gone. Just have fun and enjoy!

5 of 5 stars! YUMMY.

Lemon Bars

I don't know about you, but I love lemon bars. However, they always seemed so difficult to make. These ones were actually easy. The only thing I found difficult was making sure the filling was done and set because none of the recipes I looked at really described when that or the crust was done. I just did it off time and kinda jiggling it to see if it was set or not. I like the look of the lemon zest in the first picture, tho you don't see it anymore after you douse it with powdered sugar. Yay, sugar!

I gotta admit, there's a LOT of butter that goes into that crust, I'm going to see if I can't find another recipe with less in it. This is definitely NOT a diet/low cal/low fat recipe.

Overall, it turned out great. I think I prefer my lemon bars a little more on the zesty side and not as sweet as this recipe does turn out pretty sweet. Also, I melted the butter prior to mixing it into the crust and it was too melted so the crust was a little too crumbly. Gotta watch that next time--I knew it was going to happen too! I also mixed the crust by hand, which I think is much better than by mixer. I could really feel the texture and it was nice to just get my hands in there and work the dough. I'm not usually a get my hands dirty kind of person, but it was a nice change.



Boo, I forgot to take a picture of the just baked crust, so you'll have to forgive me for that, but here everything is after I just took it out of the oven before I put on the powdered sugar. I waited a bit before I dusted it. Can you see the browned edges on the sides of the baking pan? This is what happens when you're not careful moving the whole thing to the oven. Because the filling mixture is so watery, it moved around a lot and that's what happened. Good thing I planned on cutting it up and serving it in another pan.


So you'll notice that mostly the lemon bars are covered pretty well and pretty evenly, however there are some interesting places (note the upper right hand corner) where its more like bouldered sugar instead of powdered sugar...lol. Well, let's just say I had a little mishap. So instead of using a sifter or whatever, I used a tea leaf holder. It looks sorta like this:



Filled that with powdered sugar and that took care of most of my lumps. However, a few times I bumped it too hard or whatever and the darn thing opened up and out came a boulder. Regardless, I thought it was a pretty cool idea, just takes a little bit more time cuz the darn thing is so small. Anyway...the finished product turned out wonderfully!


Yummy!!

4.5 stars out of 5!! Delicious and delicate. Wonderful! If you asked my dad, he would have given them like a 6/5. Made me happy!

Extra tip: try using key limes to make key lime bars! What a fun twist.
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Below from here.

• FOR THE CRUST:
• 2 cups Flour, Sifted
• ½ cups Powdered Sugar
• 1 cup Butter, Softened
• _____
• FOR THE FILLING:
• 4 whole Eggs Beaten
• 2 cups White Sugar
• ½ cups Lemon Juice
• 1 Tablespoon Lemon Zest, Grated
• ¼ cups Flour
• ½ teaspoons Baking Powder

Preparation Instructions

For the crust, mix the softened butter into the flour and powdered sugar with your hands (or a pastry blender) until it clings together. Press the mixture into a 13×9″ greased pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 – 25 minutes or until lightly golden. For the filling, beat the eggs with a hand mixer for about 5 minutes until frothy. Add the sugar, lemon zest and lemon juice. In another bowl, sift together flour and baking powder. Stir into the egg mixture. Pour over the baked, warm crust. Bake at 350 degrees for 25 minutes. Cool and sprinkle with powdered sugar. Done!

Healthy Apple Cobbler

Alright, yet another recipe I made awhile ago...sorry for the delay. I wanted to try this because there's no butter and no sugar and it still turned out really quite good. The recipe below uses berries, but I used apple instead, and it still turned out quite good.

So, I kinda cheated because I took a tbsp of butter, cut it into tiny little pieces and then stuck it all over the topping for baking. This worked well, but was completely unnecessary. Also, one thing that I didn't like so much about this recipe is, the topping wasn't enough for the amount of fruit it asks for and it didn't specify which size pan to use. So I used like an 8" x 8"--gosh, I hope that's right. Here I am criticizing them about not including pan size and I'm too lazy to get up off my butt and go look at the size dimensions of the pan in the kitchen. :) I also doubled the amount of topping cuz let's face it, that's the best part. I used little organic fuji apples and they turned out quite well. I imagine the tartness of granny smith would work well too. Overall, I think this is a great healthy, non-chocolate, budget friendly dessert that's super quick and easy! I was lucky enough to be at Fresh 'n Easy earlier in the day and the bag of organic apples was on clearance because a few were bruised and what not. One man's trash...With the apples, it reminded me a little of apple pie---who doesn't like apple pie??

I served this plain, but it would no doubt be awesome served warm with ice cream. Yummy!! It smells delicious when cooking.

4 out of 5 stars! So many attributes--quick, delicious, cheap, and healthy!

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Recipe below from here.
Ingredients

• 3 cups Mixed Berries Or Any Fruit, Fresh Or Frozen
• ¼ cups Plus 1 Tablespoon Whole Wheat Flour
• ½ cups Honey, Divided
• ½ cups Rolled Oats
• ¼ cups Chopped Walnuts
• 1 teaspoon Cinnamon
• ½ teaspoons Ginger
• ¼ teaspoons Nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon Canola Oil

Preparation Instructions

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Spray an 8″ x 8″ baking pan with cooking spray and set aside. In a large bowl, toss fruit and 1 tablespoon flour together. Add 1/4 cup honey (reserve the remaining 1/4 cup of honey for topping) and use your fingers to thoroughly combine ingredients. If using frozen berries, the honey may cause them to bunch together, so you’ll have to pick them apart by hand. Pour fruit mixture into the baking pan.

In a medium bowl, mix remaining flour, oats, walnuts, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg until combined. Add remaining honey and canola oil. Use your fingers to thoroughly combine the ingredients. Sprinkle the flour and oat mixture evenly over the fruit.

Bake for 40 to 45 minutes until fruit is bubbly and the topping is browned and crisp. Let cool for 20 minutes. Serve plain or top each serving with vanilla yogurt.

Coffee Cake Loaf

And we're back! Alright, I finally uploaded some pictures from the past few weeks of baking, so get ready. Yes, miracles do happen.

A recipe with, ironically enough, no coffee in the ingredients. :)

This cake loaf was actually made a few weeks ago so of course now I don't remember what the heck I was listening to when I made it. So the funny thing about this recipe is it's really for cupcakes...jumbo cupcakes. But it didn't work out when I made it. I have these blue silicone muffin-y type "tins" (yea, I know, silicon does not equal tin, hence the quotes), and my mix just didn't go well into them and it started rising and getting too full, so I didn't want to continue baking them. Anyway, the point of that really long sentence was to say that I turned it into a coffee cake loaf. The reviews of this recipe, which can be found on the linked page, were correct---the amount of topping you make for these cupcakes is really an absurdly large amount. In fact, I mixed it a great deal of the topping before even putting it on top of the loaf because there was just too much. But you know what? It turned out great that way. I did a bit actually mixed into the dough and a bit folded into the dough. That way, there were some swirl-ish type of things within the loaf when you cut it as well as a nice overall cinnamon flavor. :D

I used light sour cream, but I have a desire to remake this and use low fat greek yogurt instead. It's better for you, or so they say. If you're down for that experiment, I love Fage Yogurt which can be found at your local Trader Joe's or Fresh 'n Easy. I also completely left out the confectioner's sugar for the dusting. It really didn't need it. The mix produced enough dough to fill my jumbo loaf pan, which is saying a lot. It baked for around 50 minutes on the usual baking setting not the convection oven setting. What came out smelled and tasted quite delicious. This could easily be a breakfast on the go type of thing (not particularly healthy, but who's counting?), or an after dinner snack heated up in the microwave with a scoop of vanilla ice cream...oh, I'm salivating already. Oh, right, and a slice with coffee. Enjoy!



Picture of the loaf right after it came out of the oven...oh yes. :)


And another picture after I sliced it up and put it in this nifty plastic container that used to hold Vegetable Pork Buns, lol!! I assure you, I made these, they were not purchased from the local store, despite their suspect container.

4 out of 5 stars!
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Below from here.

• FOR STREUSEL
• 1 cup packed dark-brown sugar
• 1 cup all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled)
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
• FOR MUFFINS
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for pans
• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled), plus more for pans
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 cup sour cream
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs
• confectioners' sugar, for dusting

Directions

1. Prepare streusel: In a medium bowl, stir together brown sugar, flour, cinnamon, and salt. With a pastry blender or two knives, cut in butter until mixture resembles large coarse crumbs; refrigerate until ready to use.
2. Prepare muffins: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter and flour two jumbo 6-cup muffin pans. In a small bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and baking soda; set aside.
3. Using an electric mixer, beat together butter, sour cream, granulated sugar, and vanilla on medium speed until light and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time, until well combined. With mixer on low, beat in flour mixture just until combined.
4. Divide half the batter among muffin cups; top with half the streusel. Cover with remaining batter; top with remaining streusel. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean, 25 to 30 minutes. Cool in pan 5 minutes, then transfer to a rack to cool completely. Dust with confectioners' sugar before serving.

Homemade Hummus Recipe

Good grief, I suck at this posting business. It's the pictures of recipes that I want to post that always slow me down. I would love to show you glossy, beautifully posed picture after picture that I've taken, but since I'm too cheap to get a cardreader, it's always an ordeal to upload pictures. So what happens? I upload pictures like once a month and who suffers? You. The nice people who take time out of their busy lives to visit this ridiculous blog. THANK YOU.

So, since we're talking about homemade lovely tahini recipes from the previous post, I thought I would post a homemade hummus recipe straight from one of my favorite foodie websites TheKitchn. (No, I did not take that picture either...sigh). Enjoy and thanks for your patience!!

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Ingredients

1 15-oz can of chickpeas, drained
1/2 of a fresh lemon, juiced
1 small clove of garlic, minced finely
2 tbsp. olive oil
3 tbsp. tahini. Note: if you don't want to buy premade tahini, here is an easy tutorial on how to make your own tahini.
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon finely ground black pepper
1 teaspoon sumac

Tools
A food processor or blender

Instructions

1. Combine all ingredients except the sumac.

2. Blend until smooth. If it is a little dry, just add a little more lemon juice or olive oil, a teaspoon at a time, until you have the desired consistency. Add more salt and pepper if you like.

3. Scrape out the hummus in a serving bowl and sprinkle the sumac on top.

4. Serve with raw veggies, or spread on some pita bread.

Other Hummus Variations:

• Try drizzling a little pomegranate molasses on top.

• Add two to three tablespoons of harissa for a little kick.

• Blend in 1 cup of roasted vegetables such as eggplant, zucchini, bell peppers, and garlic for a roasted vegetable hummus.

• For olive hummus, fold in 3/4 cup of chopped green or black olives.

• Nutty hummus is good! Try adding some lightly toasted walnuts or pine nuts.

• For a lemony hummus, add 1/4 cup of chopped preserved lemons.

Homemade Tahini Sauce

I love the idea of making my own tahini, especially because that leads to hummus! Enjoy the following recipe and try it for yourself! You could always use it to make your own hummus! Yummy!
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Recipe taken from here.

Tahini

Ingredients

2 cups sesame seeds
1/2 cup olive oil

Procedure

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place sesame seeds on a rimmed baking sheet and toast sesame seeds for 5-10 minutes, shaking the seeds frequently with a spatula. Do not allow to brown. Cool for 20 minutes.

2. Pour sesame seed into the bowl of a food processor and add the olive oil. Blend until smooth, about 2 minutes. The tahini should be thick, yet pourable. Add more oil and blend again if it's too thick. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to a month.