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.