Elderflower Ice Cream & Elderflower Cordial

I have been wanting to try my hand at making ice cream from scratch for ages. However, my house had one of the old-fashioned ice cream churns, and... well, in all honesty, I didn't want it so much that I was prepared to sit there turning a crank for a couple hours. This week, however, I picked up an electric ice cream maker on sale– let the confections commence! This Cuisinart and I are going to be good, good friends. I have any number of ideas bumping around in my brain, so there will probably be quite a few ice cream recipes popping up here throughout the summer.

Elderflower isn't a flavor that most of us here in the US are familiar with– for some odd reason, we just don't eat it here. This is a mistake. Elderflower has a beautiful, delicate flavor that's difficult to describe– sweet and lightly floral, with faint notes of citrus and herbs. I first encountered it when I spent a week in Denmark to visit a friend. She had picked up a container of ice cream from a local shop, and one of the flavor stripes was... elderflower? I was a little bewildered, but instantly fell in love. It's also used in a refreshing spring drink, elderflower cordial. Both the beverage and the ice cream are based on a sweet syrup made from elderflower blossoms, sugar, and citric acid. It's hard to track down in stores in the states, so I order online from l'Epicerie. A bottle of it lasts quite a while if you're just using it for drinks, but ice cream will run down your supplies a little faster.

Chocolate Lemon Tart

This is the result of the tart experiment I mentioned in the post prior. Technically, it's actually a chocolate, lemon, and ginger tart, a flavor combination inspired by the most delicious chocolate bar ever (which I encountered in France). The recipe I'm putting here leaves out the ginger, though, since it was undetectable in the finished dish. Though it's frustratingly not what I had imagined, it's tasty enough that I still feel good about sharing the recipe. Until I get my ~vision~ right, I'll probably be riffing on the flavor combination in various other forms, so don't be surprised when you see them reappearing in a different guise.

Tomato, Cheese, and Onion Tart

This is a dish that actually came about roughly a year ago, and it occurred to me tonight (as I was working on a different tart– more on that later) that I really ought to post it here. Mother had brought home some really lovely cherry tomatoes from the farmer's market one day and left them sitting in a colander at the end of the table, so I was staring at them all through dinner. I think they were originally intended to become a gazpacho, but my creative wheels were turning, so I claimed them as my own for an experiment dish. To be perfectly honest, tomatoes aren't usually my favorite vegetable (fruit, whatever), but these just looked so beautiful, all red and plump and shiny and smelling perfectly ripe even from across the table. And that's the trick to making this dish work– great tomatoes are an absolute must. Flavorless hothouse stuff simply will not work, and is a sin against produce to begin with. These tarts rely on fresh food being its naturally delicious self.

Book rec.

Sorry about the lengthy gap in posting– college started up again in January, and I was in the throes of studying for my comprehensive exams in Comparative Lit. Eek! They're now over, and spring semester has begun. Unfortunately, what all this amounts to is that I'll be lacking a proper kitchen until May, which will make regular cooking somewhat problematic.

I am, however, working on a culinary sort of project for my Honors seminar. This term all the students in senior Honors are assigned to choose a book related to our career interests and present a project on it, so I'm currently working my way through Culinary Artistry by Andrew Dorneburg and Karen Page. It's an interesting read! Anyone interested in the concept of cooking as art or who wants some good guidelines for playing with flavors should get a hold of a copy and check it out.

My project will probably involve some heavy-duty baking for the class. I'm thinking the mint chocolate shortbreads will be involved– they're such pretty cookies– and I'm currently toying with the idea of ginger tuile cones with pomegranate-lime mousse filling. That, however, I'll have to experiment with a bit to see if I can achieve it with my limited kitchen apparatus!

Soupe de Champagne

Happy New Year, everyone! This is a brief drive-by post of a drink recipe I became very fond of during my semester studying abroad in France last year; since it's champagne-based, it seemed appropriate to post for New Year's. I was first introduced to it about a year ago at a party there with a mix of French and American students, and the punch bowl was emptied in short order! That said, it's also a great summer drink– bubbly, light, and refreshing, with a bit of citrus tang.

Mocha Panna Cotta

Merry Christmas, everyone! This is a dessert I whipped up for my family's Christmas Eve celebration, based off a recipe from Giada De Laurentiis. (I'll confess I had my doubts about her when I first saw her on the Food Network– she's so thin and cheery– but I've come to love her. I squealed with joy when I unwrapped a copy of Everyday Italian this morning). The original recipe is simply espresso panna cotta, which I'm sure would work just fine, but coffee and chocolate are a match made in heaven as far as I'm concerned. Hence, I tweaked it a bit.

Brussels Sprouts & Bacon

So sprouts and I, we never used to get along. As a child I always found them a vile, bitter vegetable that looked way better than they tasted. However, there is nothing bacon cannot fix! This recipe is adapted from one from Jacques Pépin's More Fast Food My Way.