Ginger Beer, Rum, Lime and Coconut Sorbet: Frou-Frou?

Serious Eats' ice cream guy, Max Falkowitz, called this the ice cream version of a frou-frou cocktail drink. And frou-frou it is indeed, in the sense that it is fancy and overly ornate maybe. If you're thinking of the association of frou-frou cocktails with wimpy drinkers and girly drinks, then congrats! You've just unnecessarily genderized something!

But don't worry, I did the exact same thing in draft one of this, going on a tangent about how absurd it is that we have "male" and "female" drinks based on how much your drink tastes of bark and leather belts. Alas, I made the mistake of assuming that a frou-frou drink must be girly, which is part of the internalized societal biases that harm myself and others. So you know, just because you don't blatantly say things like "girls are distractingly sexy in science!" or advise other female scientists to "take it with humor" when your supervisor keeps looking down your shirt, doesn't mean there aren't unconscious biases that we all need to actively remind ourselves to check. The word frou-frou doesn't even mean girly-it just means excessively fancy. And I know plenty of males and females who are frou-frou. And of course, if you choose to identify with any other gender identity, you too have the freedom to be as frou-frou or not frou-frou as you want to be.

So cheers to everyone enjoying bark-like alcohol when they want on a Tuesday, and then having a frou-frou drink (umbrella included) on a Thursday. Because it would be such a sad, flavorless world if we were confined to drinks and food based on random identifiers that are frankly probably most useful when playing "Where's Waldo" or on an episode of "Criminal Minds."

Societal sexism aside, despite its fancy name, this sorbet is really really easy to make. Sorbet, is a non-dairy frozen dessert. Unlike a sherbet, which contains about 1-2% of milk fat. Unlike an ice cream, which I guess contains more than 10%. And unlike the 3-9% milk fat desserts which get the really creative name of "frozen dairy dessert." Did they just get bored haphazardly going through naming frozen desserts by milk fat content? This sorbet technically contains coconut milk, which is a form of fat, so I'm not sure if the milk fat content scale is in reference to only animal dairy, or all types of fat?

The coconut is the most prominent flavor, though the ginger does come up quickly afterwards, and the lime/rum as more of an afterthought. If you want to add more rum, I would add it afterwards as a topping rather than into the sorbet, as adding too much might cause problems with freezing.
Quick note, if you for whatever reason don't read it on Serious Eats, ginger beer is a much stronger (in flavor) version of ginger ale, and 100% more delicious.

Recipe via Serious Eats

Lavender Lemon Hippocampus Cookies: aka Seahorses

For those of us who are less nerdy and who spend less time looking at brains, or who maybe don't bother memorizing the names of aquatic animals in Latin, hippocampus is 1) the latin term for seahorse, and 2) the name we give the structure of the brain that is deeply involved in learning, memory, and navigation. Given that these functions are involved in almost anything and everything we do, the hippocampus is also pretty frequently affected by diseases (ie Alzheimer's, temporal lobe epilepsy, etc).

It's also one of the most distinctively structured part of the brain, with a mass of well organized cells and layers as you can see below in probably one of the widely distributed pictures of a hippocampus ever where each adjacent neuron (the dots) is labeled a distinct color.

via J Litchman Lab 

The combined quirk of its name, its hugely important role in major functions, and its pretty structure all make the hippocampus the pet favorite of a lot of neuroscientists/neurologists/neurosurgeons/etc. For example, my former (tears) lab has a picture of a seahorse hanging out in our lab, and one of the neurosurgeons our lab works with has hippocampi/seahorses decorating a large portion of his wardrobe in addition to his entire office (supposedly). And here I am drinking in the hippocampus kool-aid, making seahorse shaped cookies for my lab as an adieu. Well rather, made, since I've officially left as of last week. Big life changes make leaving sad, but on the other hand, there are new exciting Californian things to look forward to as well.

Of course, there are probably a lot of neuroscientists who may think the hippocampus is overrated, because there are a lot of other interesting/weird brain structures also hugely important since in this day and age, we know that no singular area of the brain is solely responsible for a task/behavior, but rather dependent on a network of regions and how they communicate. That aside, other brain structures have weird names too. Take the amygdala, hugely important in emotions, decisions, and memory, named after the drought pariah almond. Then there's the zona incerta, which is literally called "the uncertain zone," because no one really knows what its role is.

Now that I've spent way too long talking about the brain, I'm sure the real questions for a food blog are 1) did they actually taste good? and 2) how did these decorations work? As you may notice, lavender and lemon are a pretty frequent combination I use, in part thanks to my lifetime supply of lavender that I will probably never finish. But also, lavender and lemon is just a great combination for other fairly boring sugar cookies. That said, I think the lavender and lemon flavors were a bit more muted this time, in part because I had a fear of feeding my lab people flowers, and in part due to the neutral/almond flavored icing on top.

With regard to point 2), these were decorated the standard way- creating an initial border with thick icing, then flooding with thinned icing. The designs on the inside were either made with thick icing lines after the inner flood icing dried, or by adding dots of thinned icing to the still wet flood icing and then running a toothpick through the circle to create the hearts/swirled effect. And the black dot? A food pen because I'm the type of person who owns a decorative, edible food pen.

Sugar Cookie Recipe via The Kitchn, modified to add 1-2 tsp of dried lavender buds, blended separately with the sugar in a food processor before adding.

Royal Icing Recipe via Bake at 350. I find that about 1/2 the batch is usually fine for 1 batch of the above sugar cookie recipe. Doubling is way too much.

Cinnamon Dulce De Leche Ice Cream: The ~Spice~ of Life

Day one of my longest vacation yet starts now. I had the inkling of an idea to be productive-get this blog post done, go for a run, make pizza dough, temporarily unpack my life, find books to check out from the library. But then I ended up on amazon prime instant video and the asoiaf reddit. And its now the afternoon, or early evening EST. If I were in lab as I were last week, this would be ridiculous.

Of course, how typical that as a fairly motivated person, I think that my vacation and free time are wasted unless I'm doing something interesting. Oh, I could go on and on about how the work-life balance of our generation and times has become a 24/7 work lifestyle, or how being busy is the new way we measure social value, or how we're now happiest when we're busy, but we've all seen this article/headline/podcast story plenty of times. We've all thought and nodded "YES THIS IS WHAT IS WRONG," maybe even have written a motivational sticky that says something like "take time," or "no decision you make is ever a mistake," (my personal sticky) and yet we're all still going to continue trying really hard regardless and occasionally reading and nodding to these articles.



So I'm not going to delve into that (or I'm going to try to not), because these kinds of commentaries about how we should live our life kind of remind me of both commencement speeches and horoscopes- nothing new is ever really said and if you make it vague it enough, it will always apply no matter what kind of life you're living (plus, I'm not getting paid to make a click bait article about 10 ways to improve your life here).

To make this semi-relevant to cinnamon ice cream with dulce de leche, there are times when my life can be interesting and varied- like the dash or heaping of spices I like to add to different things. And then there are times when it can be dull-like a creamy white ice cream base that's just waiting for something extra. Which frankly, is what most ice cream is. It's milk, cream, sometimes eggs, infused with something partway through or swirled through at the end. Technique-wise, ice cream is pretty boring and standard, but the ability to mix and add almost anything keeps it an easy way to do interesting things. Maybe thats all I need in my free time, lazy ways to be interesting.

As a not-quite-real-adult, I don't really have a large spice assortment, particularly in the savory department. But cinnamon is that warm, Christmas-time, fuzzy feelings spice that is the Target of spices- ubiquitous enough for fake adults, but with the potential to be fancy when it wants to be. David Lebovitz likes to be fancy obviously, but again, being not a real adult, I don't have 3 types of cinnamon (surprise! there are different types of cinnamon!). So I went with the in-between fancy option of using normal cinnamon sticks to infuse the cream base and hand grated cinnamon rather than the powdered stuff every single other normal person uses. I did initially have a hard time tasting the cinnamon in the base, and consequently shaved about 75% of a cinnamon stick into the base for extra taste at the end, which definitely helped make the churned ice cream taste like cinnamon. I'd probably add more sticks or seep longer next time (in addition to buying fancy cinnamon).

Cinnamon aside, I had an extra can of sweetened condensed milk I never used, so I made dulce de leche out of it via the microwave method to mix in at the end. Within the realms of homemade dulce de leche, people online are seriously divided. I've only tried this microwave method so I can't really comment, but based on the 5-10 tabs I read, I'd say microwave is one of the safer methods, and adding a 1/2 tsp of water every couple of minutes seems to help with the problem of the dulce de leche becoming too brittle before it is done. I was trying to go for more of a swirled effect with the dulce de leche, but fairly thick toffee + cold = lumps rather than streaks. No complaints flavor or texture-wise though as the dulce de leche was still soft in the ice cream, albeit you got it in rather large quantities rather than interspersed.

Cinnamon Ice Cream via David Lebovitz
Dulce De Leche via Cooking for Engineers (multiple methods exist)