Fall Friday breakfast: French toast and hot cocoa

You don't need me to tell you that French toast made out of chala leftovers is awesome. What I will add, though, is that Israeli date syrup makes a fine maple syrup substitute. On this occasion, we didn't even have that, so I resorted to spreading a thin layer of raspberry jam and coating with some fresh real whipped cream.

To adapt a joke from P&R, it wasn't really that amazing, OH WAIT IT SUPER WAS.

The hot cocoa was a recipe, again, from Jeffrey Steingarten. It's basically half a chocolate bar shaved down and stirred into boiling milk, along with some cocoa powder and sugar. I'd never have thought of adding cocoa powder, but it retrospect it seems so obvious. The other step I wouldn't have thought of is to stick blend the cocoa for a few minutes at the end to really emulsify everything, and give the cocoa a rich foam on top.

Fudge and PB cookie sandwiches

This dessert was really a combination of two previous desserts. We love our recipe for chocolate fudge cookies, and we also really like mixing peanut butter with chocolate. So this recipe practically wrote itself!

The main question was how to do the peanut butter filling. Last time, we mixed peanut butter with parve creamer and whipped it up into a peanut butter foam. I was afraid that would not hold up for this application, and so I instead went to work making a peanut butter pudding with some fish gelatin I bought a while ago.

The fish gelatin instructions only tell you to dissolve a whole packet in 1/2 cup of milk or water for 20 minutes, then to heat the whole thing to 50-60 degrees C. I added two packets to 1 cup of soymilk with peanut butter mixed in and waited. 20 minutes later, it was a hard lumpy mess. I heated it and added more soy milk, which resulted in a nice smooth liquid.

Getting past this smooth liquid was the hard part. As a liquid, it was too runny. After chilling in the freezer, though, it got too hard and rubbery. Depending on the texture, the taste varied from smooth and creamy to chewy-pudding. But it always tasted like peanut butter, which was the main point.

It was hard to work with my peanut-pudding, but the filling was ok in the end. I think next time I'd use the peanut butter whipped cream from last time.

Oh, another weird thing was that the peanut filling seemed to cause the cookies to lose their stiffness and instead become soft mushballs. Oh well, it's fudge anyway, right?

Ice Cream: Garden Mint Chocolate Oreo

Ice cream is one of my greatest loves. I am definitely not an ice cream snob as I found out this past week in Rome when I experienced gelato - rated the "best gelato in Rome" by some. It was in fact delicious (stay tuned for our attempts to recreate the fantastic pistachio and hazelnut flavors), but give me a tub of Edy's and I'll be perfectly pleased. In any case, I love ice cream but unfortunately we have very few if any options for decent ice cream here in Israel. So you can imagine how excited I was when my sister and brother-in-law got me an ice cream maker for a birthday present! They are way ahead of us in their ice cream inventions, having had their ice cream maker for a few months already, so when I heard about their latest experiment I asked my sister to share her recipe. Enjoy!

I found some recipes online for mint chocolate chip ice cream using real mint that looked really good, most notably this one. David Lebovitz is the ice cream man, so I figured it would be pretty good, but I didn’t want to use eggs. Eggs make the recipe more complicated and expensive. But I did want it to be super-creamy. I decided to make the custard with cornstarch instead of eggs, and made a few other alterations. Here’s the recipe I used:

125 grams mint, with stems

1 1/3 cups sugar

500 ml 10% cream

1 cup 1% milk

Dash of salt

250 ml 32% cream

4 Tablespoons cornstarch

Oreo cookies

1 bar of chocolate

1-2 tsp peppermint extract

I bought a bundle of mint from the grocery store pulled off all the leaves (I weighed it with stalks it was 125 grams) and combined that with 1 1/3 cups of sugar approximately, dash of salt, 500 ml of 10% cooking cream, and 1 cup of 1% milk. I cooked that until it was steaming but not boiling and then let it sit in the fridge for a few hours. There was a significant differences between how minty and green it was after the first hour and how minty and green it was after the second, so I would say leave it in for even longer if you want it to be even more minty and even more green.

When you think it’s minty and green enough, strain the leaves out. You have to really press and squeeze the leaves to get the minty-ness out of them. Discard the leaves and reheat your minty milk on the stove.

In the meantime, combine the 32% cream with the 4 tablespoons of cornstarch and whisk so that there are no lumps. After the mint mixture is hot (steaming, but not boiling) add in your cornstarch mixture.

Bring it to a boil and wait until it thickens while stirring. It should coat the back of the spoon/be the consistency you would expect hot pudding to be. When it’s done put it in the fridge to cool overnight and then process according to your ice cream makers instructions!

That’s the basic recipe for the mint ice cream. Also don’t forget to cover the custard mixture with saran wrap pressed into it while it’s cooling. I did and it formed a skin, but it was no harm done anyway. I think you could probably make it with more milk, less cream, or lower fat creams too -- this was just kind of what I had in the house.

I couldn’t decide whether I wanted mint cookies and cream or mint chocolate chip. So in the end I decided that I should just have both. I melted a bar of chocolate in the microwave and added a few teaspoons of peppermint extract to it.

My original plan was to dip the oreos in the mixture, but once I added the extract it got all grainy (probably something to do with the emulsion blah, blah, but whatever that’s Yoni’s department), so instead I just spread the chocolate over the oreos. I put them on a plate covered in tin foil, covered them in plastic wrap and stuck them in the freezer.

The next morning when the ice cream was churning I took them out and put them in the food processor. I pulsed them a couple of times to break them up some and then dumped it into the ice cream mixture towards the end. So good! The mint has an herb-like natural taste and the peppermint chocolate oreos are amazing. In theory you could also make this ice cream using regular old peppermint extract instead of mint leaves and it would taste more like store bought mint ice cream.

This sounds crazier than it is. It's really not that complicated. And it tastes so good.

--SNH

Chocolate Fudge Cookies

An attempt to find the perfect chocolate fudge cookie...

If I was in the U.S. I would probably have just bought a brownie mix and made cookies with it instead. Since I am mix-less and on my own here, I'll have to make do with what I have. I used this recipe. As usual I made some modifications. Instead of yogurt I used a chocolate pudding mix (made with soy milk). I also had to find a brown sugar substitute since I was running low. My substitute worked like this - for every 1 cup of brown sugar the recipe calls for, I substituted 1 cup white sugar plus 1 1/2 tablespoons honey. You could probably just substitute 1:1 with white sugar alone. What difference does it make? I did consult with a food scientist but the answer didn't sink in. A quick internet search revealed exactly what I was looking for: "Are Brown and White Sugar Interchangeable when Baking?"

A little trick to get the "cracked" look with the cookies - place the dough onto the cookie sheet as balls (somewhere between a teaspoon and a tablespoon each) and bake for 5-7 minutes. A few minutes before they're done - take them out and using a spoon, press each one down a bit. You'll notice the cracking right away. If it doesn't work exactly, leave them in for a bit longer and then press down.

All in all the cookies were delicious - very chocolatey (thank you chocolate pudding). As always there's room to grow.... With this recipe I would say my issue is the amount of sugar. Next time I'll either repeat the recipe and cut down on the sugar or try a different one.

chocolate mud pie with peanut butter cloud

Rachel and I are very proud of this dessert we made for Shabbat, and not just because it tasted great. People cook great tasting things all the time. But how often do they do so while improvising with leftovers? Or innovating new tastes, all while keeping things well within the limitations of a tight, underemployed budget?

This is what it's all about, dear SF2 readers.

Ok, now that I've got the drama out of my system, here's how it went down. Rachel crushed up some chocolate cookies we had left over from the previous Shabbat and mixed them with margarine to form a cookie crust. (See previous post.) She let that harden in the freezer, then prepared a chocolate pudding mix with soy milk for the filling.

Since we're really into the whole chocolate-peanut butter desserts, I tried to think of a way to incorporate peanut butter without relying on margarine. I settled on making a peanut butter whipped cream by first mixing a few large spoonfuls of peanut butter with parve whipped cream and a little soymilk to make a smooth and less viscous peanut butter base. Then I whipped the rest of the parve cream and folded in the peanut butter.

That parve creamer must have lots of emulsifiers in it, which worked out great for us and held the peanut foam together. A bunch of hours in the fridge helped it set nicely; not quite whipped cream texture, but definitely light, almost marshmallow like, and with the unmistakable kiss of peanut butter.

Gourmet? Definitely not. Fantawesomely delicious? Definitely yes.