kitchenknickers

[kitchenknickers]

[kitchenknickers]

[kitchenknickers]

pumpkin pie ice cream

so I went ahead and paid a fortune for imported canned pumpkin this year because I wanted to try to make some pumpkin pie ice cream, and this was very much worth it

when I make pumpkin pie it’s always a little less smooth than I would prefer and soooo much work because I have to make the pumpkin puree by hand.

I got these tins on slight sale from the importer for black friday and it made a massive difference to the workload

making an ice cream was a bit of a gamble but I didn’t want to be making two kinds of desserts and taking over the whole dessert table, and also like…running the oven :(

I was just going to make a custard from the pie recipe and throw extra cream into it but this recipe had way more eggs so I decided to go with their advice and I’m glad I did

Ingredients

6 egg yolks

3/4 cup dark brown sugar

1 cup pumpkin purée, canned

2 cups cream

1 cup whole milk

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon ground clove, 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg, 2 star anise petals (or 1/8 teaspoon ground) (I actually made my own pumpkin spice incl mace and ground ginger, and I used a solid two tablespoons of the mix because what the hell, 1/2 tsp of cinnamon????)

1 tablespoon bourbon, rye, or Scotch (no alcohol this time, as I didn’t have any and I felt like it wasn’t necessary…though it may have helped which I will talk about later)

1 teaspoon kosher salt

3/4 cup chopped gingersnap cookies, store-bought or homemade, chilled in freezer

1/4 cup candied ginger, finely chopped, chilled in freezer (though I made some blood orange candy peel for the chips (which I forgot to add 😭) and made a biscoff crumb crust instead of putting cookies in the ice cream.

I put them in little tart tins, and the left over in a large silicone ice tray, so we will see how it plays out.

so the big thing I noticed this time was that I took it out after 30 mins and it was…not quite ideal. I should have put the candy peel in at that point and let it roll a while longer but I forgor.

the biggest thing was that between the brown sugar instead of caster sugar and the earlier removal time, it was quite uneven in frozen-to-soft, with a whole bunch of the ice cream freezing hard as a sort of shell on the walls of the bowl.

I actually had to waste a good serve of the stuff because it was too hard to get out without scraping and I didn’t want to wait for it to thaw, I have too much to do today.

so yeah. the alcohol may help with that?

we’ll see how it freezes in the freezer, but even if it goes quite hard I’m not scooping this i’m cutting, so it will be fine.

also it will be 40C so hard is probably better lmao.

but flavour and texture wise it’s awesome.

I will also say that logistically, the time it took to get ice cream into the pie tins was a bit arduous so the ice cream softened a lot. but it wasn’t overall an extreme disaster.

I had the aircon cranked and made it at like 4 in the morning so like…even with the room that cool I was struggling.

[kitchenknickers]

because i love y’all, i’m sharing my family’s recipe for apple tea (traditional fall/winter drink in west asia, turkey, and many areas of the balkans)

it’s like a more delicate version of apple cider and i basically live off of this stuff when the weather starts to cool!

Apple Tea (for two)

1 large apple or 2 small, shredded (you can use a cheese grater)

3 cups water

1-2 cinnamon sticks

2-3 pc clove (optional)

honey to taste

1 tsp of lemon juice (add at end)

green tea (optional! the lebanese version usually calls for green tea but i actually prefer it without. up to you!)

throw it all in a pot and let it simmer on a low temperature for an hour or so. while it’s simmering, it will also make your home smell delicious! (if you make it with green tea, add the tea at the end, about five minutes before taking it off the heat so the flavor doesn’t become bitter from oversteeping). strain into your cups and enjoy hot.

end result:

[kitchenknickers]

ok the small shells i put in on impulse at 2am have become less small, and soaked up a good amount of liquid and that is breakfast rn lmao

it’s gonna be so rich and it’s 6am so heartburn may kill me but I have to get to the shops super early so I don’t want to fuck around with cooking when there is food right here

it’s like sort of pasta sauce sort of a stew rn.

when your slow cooked pasta sauce is gonna be on for 12 hours because you keep not having the spoons to take it off the heat and cool it down safely 🤌

this is eight hours in, but I gotta go back to bed so it’ll just have to keep cooking and developing flavours ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[kitchenknickers]

when your slow cooked pasta sauce is gonna be on for 12 hours because you keep not having the spoons to take it off the heat and cool it down safely 🤌

this is eight hours in, but I gotta go back to bed so it’ll just have to keep cooking and developing flavours ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[kitchenknickers]

pls pray for me, trying the strawberry icecream again.

I realised that the bowl wasn’t completely frozen yesterday, and today it’s solidly frozen so 🤞🤞

[kitchenknickers]

[kitchenknickers]

Just thought I’d share my favorite easy biscuit recipe. Be gentle with the mixing. These are so nice🧈🍯From America’s Test Kitchen.

[kitchenknickers]

Mozzarella Stuffed Rosemary Parm Pretzels

[kitchenknickers]

Chocolate Caramel Cupcakes

[kitchenknickers]

new cheong batches:

1. strawberry and blood orange from the other day

2. golden delicious apple with a little blood orange that I fucked the maths up with and put too much sugar in, so we will see how that goes. expecting that to be slower than the ones with more acid and pectin and just general juice going on, I may leave it out of the fridge overnight to see how that goes. Insaw that the general rule is 100 days where as I had syrup and used it after like a week with the strawberries because I liked the flavour. less fermented goodness but you know I don’t care too much.

and one with just blood orange. bit worried about how the wooden lid will go but I ran out of jars. need to build up my collection again :(

I also did a tiny amount of blood orange zest to make some oleo saccharum and also some crunchy candy peel for ice cream topping

[kitchenknickers]

[kitchenknickers]

second attempt, this time with my niblings, and it had some interesting curveballs

so this time we tried to do it with butterfly pea tea for colour, and lemon juice for flavour and so the kids could see the colour change.

I did some of the tea with water yesterday and it was blue, and today when it was just tea water and then the lemon juice in the pan the colours did the thing.

but then, we added the agar agar and the sugar, and got the order mixed up, but I didn’t think that would make heaps of difference, but it seems to be less structured.

but also, it turned black!

we added some silver and gold sugar crystals to hopefully help with the rocky texture, but it looks like our candy rocks will be very very rock-like. the kids are calling them ‘space rocks’ which is about right, lmao

and yeah they are setting far slower and more reluctantly this batch. I wonder if I mucked up my maths with the lemon juice and water but I didn’t think so?

so tearing the jelly up was a bit weird, which is a shame because I was sure the kids would like that stage.

so I put the pieces on a wire rack to drain off the liquid, and we’ll see what happens.

I left half in the bowl. maybe overnight in the fridge will help ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I made a whole post about making Kohakutou crystals but…it seems not to exist so I guess I didn’t click post? I swear I did though?!

anyway for the record, this year’s brithday experiment was some rose jam flavoured rocks, and I succeeded

the agar agar I was able t find was from indonesia and only had 7g in the packet, so I halved the recipe that I had

7g agar agar

196g water

340g sugar

I steeped the hot water in dried rose petals before straining to use, and I included some lemon juice in the liquid amount.

then I added some rosewater, orange blossom water and lemon oleo saccharum afterwards, along with the colouring and some metallic coloured sugar to make it a little glittery

the dried flowers floated to the top, and the coloured sugar that didn’t dissolve sunk to the bottom, forming a bit of a crust, which makes it look a bit more rocky when it goes right

it was ready to tear up within an hour or two rather than the four hours I was led to expect. perhaps it was the smaller amount

I did a range of sizes for science

you can see the colour getting darker and the flavour matured beautifully as well

obligatory asmr, for the cronch test on day 4

[kitchenknickers]

so I got a belated start on my christmas cheong, but didn’t get the apple cheong done in time for making kohakutou with the kids tomorrow. not sure I have the energy today, and also it may not even liquify in time. pretty sure it’s too hot to leave them out of the fridge.

other options are ginger flavour? but…hmmm.

most other means of flavouring it will dye the liquid, and I wanted to do butterfly pea to colour it

[kitchenknickers]

sorted the pantry and feeling extremely accomplished

[kitchenknickers]

A useful article from King Arthur Flour (my beloved) on baking while disabled.