Chai Ice Cream: Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice

I usually have a hard time picking favorites. Maybe its because I'm a sibling, and the idea of favorites seems mean. Or that I have problems making definite decisions. You see, its that whole parallel universe idea from those sci-fi/fantasy books I read as a child. The minute you make a choice, you close the door to another alternate reality. Amber Spyglass anyone? (hint, Golden Compass, hint, Phillip Pullman)

Anyways, even if I did have the ability to travel through different worlds or realities, this Chai Ice Cream would remain the one constant in my exciting and dangerous little life. My totem if you will (if you're into Inception). It's rare for me to have a favorite, as my parallel world's intro rambling just told you, but I'm pretty confident that Chai Ice Cream is by far my favorite homemade ice cream yet. Yes. Even above pumpkin and apple pie and speculoos ice cream. Maybe it was because I took the extra two hours to boil my own chai-spiced custard base. Which I probably would have consumed on its own without freezing if I didn't love ice cream freaking much.

There are Chai Ice Cream recipes out there that probably entail just soaking chai tea bags in hot water to create a concentrate, but please please please please take the extra 2 hours, 1 hour of driving around to grocery stores, and extra $20 bucks to buy whole fragrant spices if you have the freedom of post-graduate life. Because man, while I hate recipes that call for a million things that I would only use for one recipe, this is so worth it if you're a fan of either ice cream or chai or being happy. Well, scratch the last one. I can't tell you what makes you happy, but just thinking about a bowl of this ice cream and my backyard on a stereotypically lovely Californian day certainly makes me happy.

An ice cream recipe this perfect can only come from my favorite food blog itself--Serious Eats. The comments mentioned adding sugar because it wasn't sweet enough, but ignore them. I did not ignore them and added an extra 1/4 cup, but in the end, the extra sugar was quite unnecessary.

Honey Chili Beer Chicken: Try Saying that 5x Fast

Look! A wild savory dish appeared! Yes, contrary to what this blog may suggest, I do not spend most of my meals eating creme brulee and ice cream (though I would love some ice cream now that summer humidity has hit).  Even when I make desserts, rarely do either I or my family consume them. This is either a commentary on my baking skills or on my family's eating habits. You can decide for yourself. Regardless of why, often there's dessert just hanging out in our fridge, leading to wasted food and me forcing teenage brothers to consume cake (I know, its a real struggle to force a skinny teen to eat junk food).



So in an effort to curb food waste (sustainability!), my parents decided that I should establish a 1:1 ratio of dessert:real food baking/cooking while at home. Sadly, as you will see in this blog, I failed to maintain that ratio. However, rather than a ratio of 5:0, I made it a ratio of 5:1 this time around. Progress! Kinda.
Anyways, this Honey Chili Beer Chicken came into existence after extensive research (googling "chicken thigh recipes") and polling (siblings, please pick what you want to eat tonight).

I'm a huge fan of essentially everything in the namesake of this recipe, and I love baking with alcohol, so naturally, cooking with alcohol was the next logical step. Honey (or in this case agave) is a nice complement to the chili sauce and sweet onions, which are all rounded off with a note of beer. We only had some Hawaiian Island Surfer Lager around in our house, but I get the impression that any beer that isn't too dark/bitter will work. Then again, I don't really know much about beer sooooo, ya'll should check out the recipe on The Beeroness instead!

In other news, real food is much harder to take pretty pictures of. Something about the brown color of COOKED chicken is just not the same as the bright green of a green tea cupcake. Though we all kinda know for obvious reasons why you do not want your chicken to be a radioactive green color.

TL;DR

• Working on adding more savory into my cooking/blogging.
• Chicken is fun and easy to make!
• Beer! Onions! Honey! Chili! Yum!
• Savory plating is hard.

Chocolate Creme Brulee: Traditions?

Who needs traditions when you can add chocolate to it? While I will happily make ice cream day in and day out, my sister is not a fan of frozen custard. I know, its embarrassing. A few weeks ago when I tried to ask her for help deciding what type of ice cream to make, she wrinkled her nose in a frown and implored I bake 1) something new, and 2) something either with chocolate or cheesecake. Setting aside my ice cream recipe for a few days, I sought out to find something chocolate or cheesecake like to bake for the family, and in particular my sister.

sorry and not well bruleed. but what can you do? 

Chocolate and cheesecake are probably the two flavors I am most terrified of making. Now, don't get me wrong, I love both chocolate and cheesecake. The problem with both flavors is that its so hard to get perfect. Bad chocolate is a recipe for boring cake, and I don't think I've advanced far enough in my baking experience to deal with cracking cheesecakes in the oven. However, what I am (or was?) ready for is a butane torch. Yup, that single use torch for creme brulee and meringue pie (the box will insist you can also use it to brulee grapefruit, but please, that's so boring).

A traditional go-getter may have tried making you know, normal vanilla bean, custardy creme brulee for his or her first attempt at burnt cream. But, given that the name I have given this blog to define my baking experiences is literally awkward, I figured, what the hell. Chocolate creme brulee is the one true burnt cream for my family and desires to burn things. Oh, and its just so fun to crack that sugar shell. Seriously, just look at these pictures.

Not to mention, I had a huge 1 kg Valrhona chocolate bar that I towed back with me from Belgium last summer that was still sitting around in the cabinet just waiting for me to get over my fears of chocolate. Sadly (or fortunately), this recipe required a laughably small amount of chocolate, so there's still quite a bit of chocolate left in the cabinet at home. Heres to hoping it doesn't dry out/seize or do that funky thing that opened chocolate does when its left sitting for too long....

Creme brulee is actually not too difficult to make. Maybe I've gotten accustomed to custards after all the custard ice creams I've been making, but the most strenuous part was probably just waiting for the custard to set. While the recipe from Williams Sonoma said 30-40 mins, my custard was still fairly jiggly and NOT set around the edges after more than an hour. My oven wasn't pretty happy about me constantly opening the door to check on the custard though, so it tended to hang out at a far lower temperature than the called for 325 F. I eventually just took it out because I really needed to pick up my brother from school, but after sitting overnight + a day, the custard seemed perfectly fine. Not really sure what happened, or how to assess brulees in the future, but there will certainly be brulees in the future. Perhaps normal vanilla bean ones!

TL;DR:

• Burning sugar is really fun. A butane torch is definitely worth the 30 dollars for just making creme brulees.
• Chocolate creme brulee is just as lovely as its vanilla counter part, but requires a surprisingly small amount of chocolate.
• Watching custard set is the new watching paint dry.

Red Wine Berry Sorbet: The Stuff of Fantasy

I think authors and daydreamers have a romanticized notion of red wine. I can easily imagine several of my favorite fantasy characters sitting around a hearth fire with a glass of red wine mulling over their next enemy or the fates they have been dealt by the gods. Ok, so I'm mainly thinking about Cersei Lannister at the moment, but I'm sure that you too had someone pop into your head.

As I, and so many other college/young professionals have been told, alcohol is an acquired taste (that is, if you're not dousing it in orange juice first). While I have acquired a taste for beer and to a certain degree white wine, red wine continues to challenge me. Sure, it has a nice warmth to it, and I don't think I particularly mind the tannins, but something about it just makes me excessively sleepy and occasionally gives me a mild headache. But red wine in the books seems reserved to be sipped only by the oldest, most elite, most evil, or most wise. Perhaps I need to work on losing more of my sense of rationality and morals before I can sip away at wine like Cersei can. Or you know, just grow very old with wisdom in a cold, mildly post-apocalyptic setting.

But until that happens, I'll have to get my serving of red wine (since thats a key part of the nutrition plate of course) via the one food group almost everyone easily fills--dessert. In this case, red wine berry sorbet. After making white wine cupcakes, I felt I needed to make something out of the other wine. While I throughly researched several potentially great red wine and chocolate cupcakes, a little visit to a winery during senior week where we sampled a chocolate red wine (yes, it was literally a red wine flavored with chocolate) turned me off from the pairing. Especially after one of our friends commented that it tasted a bit like cough syrup and it was forever imprinted into my taste pallet (Thanks--you know who you are).

Since the chocolate and wine combo was off the table for now, I ended up making this sorbet instead (incidentally my first sorbet). Luckily, there was about a half cup of Cabernet Sauvignon in our fridge at home, which was just a little less than what I needed for the recipe I used from Today's Nest. I believe the recipe says you can use either frozen or fresh berries, so I just used a the frozen mix that my one true love Costco sells. While the sorbet came out sorbet-like in the end with both berries and wine present, I think I would have liked it if it were a little more creamy. The taste was a lot like a berry smoothie with a bite of red wine at the end. I personally prefer my sorbets and ice creams on the creamier side, so perhaps I should have used a creamier milk than 2%. I might stick to custard based ice creams for now since they are just so delicious, but maybe I'll peruse the sorbet side of frozen treats again one day.

TL;DR:

• Red wine is used a lot in fantasy. Even one of my favorite bands titled a song after it.
• Sorbets aren't as creamy as ice cream.

P.S. I know my pictures are usually not very good, but these have some seriously questionable lightening/color. So for that, I apologize profusely.

Crepe Cake: Aka the Leaning Tower of Crepes

Baking is often associated with love. Fresh baked cookies for your elementary school bake sale. The fruitcake your dear aunt bakes every Christmas that everyone says is lovely but secretly leaves to decay. Ok, so the latter example is probably a stereotype taken from far too many American sitcoms. In this case, this biscoff cream cheese crepe cake is more of a labor of love rather than baked with love (or er, assembled with love). Though the French would probably gaze down unsympathetically at my pleading and begging for my crepe cake to not turn Italian. Well, as Italian as the Leaning Tower of Pisa at least.

Its hard not to be immediately enamored by the sight of a crepe cake. After all, it consists of delicate, thin crepes stacked till they become something stronger and greater together. Kinda like the Avengers, but in cake form. The entire cake took two days to make, one evening of crepe making, another afternoon of crepe stacking. To be honest, my crepes probably weren't the paper thin, lacy delicacies that people like the Domestic Goddess aka Nigella Lawson think of when you say crepes. However if you wanted a semi-decent crepe that is still thin enough to be not-a-pancake, then call me up! The most difficult part of the crepe making process was getting the pan tilting and whirling just right so you got an evenly thick crepe without random pockets of nothing. I don't think I've got it down quite yet, but my imperfections just give me more excuses to make crepes right?

I call my cake the leaning tower of crepes not because of the occasionally mismatched crepe sizes, but because of the next component--the glue to the cake. The filling in the ultra-traditional crepe cake is pastry creme, but judging by the sheer number of hits on foodgawker and google, people have taken great liberties with this filling. Heck, Sprinkle Bakes even covered the whole cake with a healthy layer of ganache to make quite possibly the most beautiful cake in the history of the internet. I've been dying to make something with remaining part of the jar of biscoff/speculoos I towed back with me from Belgium, so when I saw a biscoff crepe cake, my heart was set. But I'm not about that buttercream life so I opted for cream cheese biscoff frosting.

Alas, my 3 month hiatus from baking led to one small problem--the notoriously slippery nature of cream cheese frosting. As I stacked the cake with layers of frosting in between each crepe (28 total!), the frosting began to melt quite a bit. Towards the 20th layer, things started sliding around quite a bit. The cake made several trips to the freezer to firm up. Overall, it was a very stressful labor of love. But one I would totally repeat in a heartbeat should the occasion for a crepe cake ever arise again. Except, maybe not with cream cheese.



Another thing I forgot was the speculoos is already intensely sweet, so to make a cream cheese frosting with speculoos thickened with cups of powdered sugar equals a very very sweet filling. But sweetness seems to relative from my experience with a very picky mother (shockingly, she liked the cake a lot despite its sweetness). And anyways, just look at those layers. stare long and hard at them. How could you resist baking such a beautiful creation?
(also, whipping cream melts rapidly in a warm kitchen when you're trying to take pictures of a cake while adjusting the camera settings)

TL;DR Baking Notes:

• Crepes can be stored in a ziplock bag with parchment paper in between crepes in the fridge for a few days in the fridge, or even longer frozen.
• A firm, non-melty frosting is probably ideal if you're gonna make a crepe cake that doesn't tilt everywhere.
• Biscoff frostings are really sweet.

Crepe recipe and presentation inspiration from Olga's Flavor Factory. Biscoff cream cheese frosting from Center Cut Cook.

Tres Leches Cake: Shoutout to Yale Dining

If you happen to be an ~alumni~ colleague reading this, then you're probably mildly tired of all the post-commencement photo dumps and sentimental posts. Well, at least I am. Commencement is certainly an exciting time, but after a week of senior activities PLUS 3 days worth of ceremonies and events, it gets pretty exhausting.

For my first post in post-college life, I decided to keep up with the sentimental spirit floating around social media and make tres leches, a Yale dining classic. We students do love to complain about college dining, but every once in a while, there's a few things they get right. One of which includes tres leches, a sponge cake soaked in a mixture of three milks--condensed milk, sweetened evaporated milk, and heavy cream. Now, pan or tray desserts, like brownie fudge or cobbler, in the dining hall creep me out for some reason. Something about it being produced in such a large pan quantity I think. Unfortunately, tres leches was one of these desserts, so it wasn't until junior year that I tried this deliciously moist, creamy, and milky cake. It seemed only fitting to tie off the end of my college career by attempting to recreate something I associate with friendly conversations and meals.

Unfortunately, my baking skills are still not quite up to par. Its a bit embarrassing to think that the dining hall, with its huge bulk quantity cooking and baking, can make something of a superior quality than I can in my tiny kitchen with all the time in the world. While my brother, mother, and father all seemed to enjoy the cake to a certain degree, my sister who has eaten dining hall tres leches could only laugh at my meager attempts. Rather than a ridiculously squishy, gooey, bread-pudding like texture dessert, my tres leches was much drier and dense. Granted, I get the feeling that my sponge cake was not right given its lack of rise. Which was possibly because of over beaten egg whites, too much flour, or too much folding--all of which I have had issues with in the past. I was hoping that the sweet milk mixture would soak the cake enough that these wouldn't be issues, but I tried taste testing the cake after only half a day of soaking rather than overnight as most recipes seem to suggest. The lesson here is that you really should plan your baking more in advance if you're trying to make a 9am EST deadline for a blog post the next day. 

The recipe I used was from All Recipes, but I found that there were a few things that were off. While instructions called to bake for 40-50 minutes, it only took 20-30 mins to finish baking mine. Other weird things I mentioned earlier. I used about a pint of heavy cream to make the whipping cream topping, but that was definitely way too much if you only wanted to cover the cake.

While the dining halls version of tres leches didn't have whipped cream topping or fruit on top like many of the recipes I found online, one can never go wrong with some extra homemade whipped cream and raspberries right? I'm hoping that if I try the cake tomorrow morning, the cake will have had more time to soak so that it'll be more moist. Regardless, I think that tres leches will have to eventually become a perfected recipe in my "repertoire" for any future days of college nostalgia.

Ba Chi Canteen: Pork Belly Canteen Indeed

side note: all store fronts in NOLA are the cutest

As its namesake suggests, Ba Chi Canteen is a Vietnamese restaurant in New Orleans, LA that specializes in pork belly. Well, that and a whole host of generally delicious asian, fusion-y food. Can you tell that I don't actually know anything about food writing? Self deprecation aside, this was the very first place we went to eat after landing in New Orleans during "Dead Week," aka post-finals, pre-senior week, pre-pre-commencement (cue tears). While others may have sought warm beaches and cheap booze, we flew out in search of good eats, jazz, and swamps for our post-college relaxation break. It would be amusing if I counted the number of times the phrases "hashtag NOLA hashtag notmyrtle" were repeated every time we ate or saw something spectacular.

apologies for the slight blur. sometimes I get too excited about actually consuming food for nonsense like focusing

One of our friends who came with us was in New Orleans the previous summer and is planning on moving back there post-graduation, so she made sure to give us all the deets on the best food places, bars, second-hand stores, and all the other things that revolve around a 20-year-old's life. I'm so glad we had her around or else we probably would have never made it to Ba Chi Canteen, let alone started our trip there with a dish of kimchi fries. To be honest, I still am mildly confused about exactly what kimchi is, though a quick google search would easily remedy that. Regardless, asides from animal style-fries a la In-N-Out, I'm not really a huge fries person (years of conditioning to hate potatoes from the mother). But if you lather then with gooey cheese and savory meats and pickled things, even I'm a convert.

And honestly, just look at these pork belly spring rolls. My NOLA friend really hyped these up for us, and while normally hype just leads to disappointment, these definitely lived up to the hype. Not only are they just really gorgeous and wrapped SO well (in general, translucent things are fascinating), but the rich, warm fat of the pork belly mixed with peanut sauce and crunchy vegetables inside made each bite a perfect mix of flavors and textures.

For our entree at this meal, we all essentially ordered the same thing--a pork/pork belly banh mi. In retrospect, these sandwiches were really too huge and could have easily been shared. I mean just look at that terrible bread:filling ratio. However, French bread rolls are classic it seems when it comes to banh mi slash po boys down South, so maybe I need to expand my tolerance level of different bread:filling ratios (you've already heard me rant about the egg cheese sandwich ratio anyways, so I'll spare the details). Regardless, even with the abnormal bread:filling ratio, the banh mi was really quite divine. When I was young, I was certain that I hated pickled vegetables, but as this sandwich reinforced, pickled vegetables are a great way to reinforce or add flavor it seems. I only managed to get through half of a sandwich, and proceeded to pick out the fillings of the second half, which may have been slightly blasphemous. But if you don't deconstruct your food, or play with it even just a little, are you really eating for yourself? Or just the convention of how your should be eating things?