Fresh Peach Ice Cream

I brainstormed a lot of ways to dress up this ice cream. Perhaps by adding some fresh ginger, or cookie crumbs to make it peach cobbler ice cream, I could make my ice cream more interesting and to keep it from being buried by the hundreds of thousands of hits that come up when you Google "peach ice cream."

But in the end, I decided to keep it simple, and just let the very basic ingredients of this ice cream to shine through.

So here it is, fresh peach ice cream without any of the bells and whistles I usually add. This ice cream really lets the peaches shine through, so be sure to only use sweet, juicy peaches you would want to eat on their own

It's the quintessential summer dessert; there's really no substitute for making your own creamy custard and stirring in fresh, juicy peaches.

We can get most fruits year round now, we hardly think about their seasons (For the longest time, I thought that grapes grew during the winter, before I figured out that we imported them from Chile.) But that trick we pull with so many fruits doesn't really work for peaches. Out-of-season ones are mushy, grainy, and tasteless. Peaches remain a summer fruit; there's something fleeting about them, their brief appearance at farmer's markets and in our desserts as we scramble to use as many of them as we can before they go out of season.

This ice cream capitalizes on their short-lived nature, packing as much of their flavor as possible in a single scoop, a single spoonful. It's a flash of summer, sweet and fragrant, to be savored slowly before it melts and slips away.

-Caroline

Fresh Peach Ice Cream

Yields about 1 quart | Click here for the printer-friendly recipe.

Ingredients

1 cup heavy cream
1 cup whole milk
¾ cup sugar, divided
4 egg yolks
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
6 ripe yellow peaches
pinch of cinnamon
1 teaspoon lemon juice

Directions

1. Pour the heavy cream and milk into a saucepan and heat until it just begins to simmer.
2. Whisk together the egg yolks and ½ cup sugar. Slowly pour the hot cream into the eggs, whisking constantly.
3. Pour the mixture back into the saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring constantly. Cook until until the custard thickens and coats the back of a wooden spoon.
4. Take the saucepan off the heat and stir in the vanilla extract. Let it cool completely, then refrigerate for several hours or overnight.
5. Peel the peaches and cut them into small cubes.
6. Place the peaches in a pot over low heat. Add 2 tablespoons of sugar, the cinnamon, and the lemon juice.
7. Cook for 5 - 10 minutes, or until the peaches have released their juices. Taste, and add more sugar if needed. Let cool completely, then refrigerate for several hours.
8. Stir in the peach mixture to the custard. Freeze the mixture in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s directions.
9. Freeze the ice cream for several hours, until it is firmer.

Cherry Brownies with Goat Cheese Frosting

In a blogosphere featuring things like bacon ice cream and chocolate-covered pickles, the flavor combination of these brownies doesn’t seem that out there. Sure, it’s a little strange to make an icing out of goat cheese, or to pair it with brownies, but it’s definitely not innovative or completely unusual. Some of you might just wonder why I can’t leave well enough alone and just make normal brownies; it might seem a little like a gimmick.

So I want to explain why I like to to experiment with new flavors and baking ideas, why I think I and other food bloggers and chefs can’t seem to resist playing around with well-loved classics.

Let me take you on a little detour. For the first day of my history and literature tutorial last semester, I had to read an excerpt from Terry Eagleton’s book on literary philosophy called “What is Literature?”. One of the schools of thought that came up in the article was the Russian Formalists, who believed that the purpose of literature was to defamiliarize the familiar. Literature deformed traditional structures of language, making them strange and forcing us to struggle to understand their meaning, and thus causing us to comprehend their meaning and content with new appreciation. Eagleton compares it to how poisoning the air gives us a new awareness and awe of our facility of breathing.

Perhaps this isn’t a flattering comparison for either literature or food, but I believe bakers aim for a similar reaction when we push the bounds of traditional recipes. We aren’t trying to ruin the comfort food you take for granted, but rather to give you a new appreciation for them. A while back I read a review of Grant Achatz’s restaurant Alinea; it singled out one of his dishes, which looked more like a piece of modern art than food, yet its smell and taste were incredibly nostalgic, evoking memories of autumn and woodsmoke.

I’m not presuming to understand why Grant Achatz cooks what he does, but on the consumption end of things, I think such dishes involve this process of defamiliarizing the familiar. Finding old flavors and memories in such a strange setting make them particularly poignant. In a class called Science and Cooking at Harvard, I met similar chefs who worked in gastronomy; they showed us the weird and cool things they could make, explained the scientific reactions behind them. But what was missing from the lectures was the question of why, why someone would want to eat these dishes.

It isn’t just that the food tastes good or sells well or teaches chemistry to a bunch of humanities students terrified of lab work, but that it tastes both familiar and strange; and in tasting strange, it makes us appreciate the the familiar anew.

And so, to the brownies. I think the tang and savory flavor of the goat cheese complements the richness of the brownies, bringing out the chocolate and keeping it from being too sweet or overwhelming. The cherries’ juiciness and tenderness becomes particularly noticeable as it cuts through the creaminess of frosting and the dense fudginess of the brownies (this recipe is definitely on the fudgy end of the brownie spectrum).

I first discovered the brownie-goat cheese combination through my roommates. Lynette is a huge goat cheese fan, and I’ve come to expect the little Ziploc container of goat cheese in our fridge, which she dips into every night. When we went to Toscanini for ice cream, she went immediately for the brownie and goat cheese flavor. It was fairly mild, with the goat cheese barely noticeable, but I’ve intensified the flavors in this recipe. Familiar, yet new.

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Cherry Brownies with Goat Cheese Frosting

Click here for the printer-friendly recipe.
Yields: 16 servings | Brownie batter adapted from Alice Medrich’s Cocoa Brownies

Ingredients
For the Brownie Batter 
10 tablespoons butter, cubed
¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 cup granulated sugar
½ teaspoon instant coffee
2 eggs, cold
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup all-purpose flour
1 cup pitted and quartered cherries

For the Goat Cheese Frosting
4 ounces goat cheese, at room temperature
4 tablespoon butter, at room temperature
2 tablespoons honey, or to taste

Directions 

1. Preheat the oven to 350 F.
2. Place the butter, cocoa powder, sugar, and instant coffee in a large microwavable bowl.
3. Microwave until the butter is completely melted, stopping every 30 seconds to give it a stir. The mixture will be very thick.
4. Stir for about a minute to cool the batter slightly, then beat in the eggs one at a time. Beat the mixture until it is smooth and shiny.
5. Mix in the flour and salt, and then fold in the cherries. 
6. Spoon the batter into a greased 8x8 inch pan or a 9-inch circular pan. Bake for about 25 minutes, until the center is barely set. (When you insert a toothpick into the center, it won’t come out clean; you want it to be thickly coated with moist crumbs).
7. Let the brownies cool completely.
8. Whisk together all the ingredients for the frosting until light and fluffy. Spread over the brownies.
9. Cut into small squares or very thin slices. 

Blueberry Cheesecake

I wish there were more cafes in D.C. Not sandwich shops, open Monday through Friday from 9-5, full of people in suits impatiently waiting for their order so they can be on their way again. Cafes, where you can sit down with a book and a cup of coffee for a few hours in relative peace.

The pace is really different here compared to Boston; much of D.C. is centered around the work week. The subways are surprisingly empty on the weekend , even with all the tourists, and the streets become devoid of people in the evening after rush hour.

I guess there are much better things I could be doing while I'm here, like networking and schmoozing with my fellow interns over dinner, rather than reading

Gone Girl

in a cafe (which, by the way, is a really, really creepy but good book). But still. I wish there were more cafes.

Even though I have more baked goods than I need at home (and frequently tell people that I can always bake it better), I still frequent bakeries quite often. Though I'm often not impressed with the food, I like the experience of looking through the rows of carefully arranged pastries behind the glass case, reading all the labels, the indecision of choosing one of them.

I think that's why a lot of bakeries don't mind publishing their recipes; people don't really come because they really like a certain secret recipe. They come for the experience of being able picking out a baked good and getting it served to them without having to worry about cooking or cleaning up.

This cheesecake would have caught my eye behind a bakery counter. First the bright purple color, standing out from the other pastries. I would have looked at the label next, "blueberry cheesecake," a departure from most blueberry cheesecakes, which are really vanilla cheesecakes topped with a blueberry sauce. If I needed further convincing, the cool, creamy texture would have done it.

Paired with a cup of coffee or iced tea and a book, it would have made a good afternoon.

-Caroline

Blueberry Cheesecake

Click here for the printable recipe. | Yields: 1 9-inch cheesecake

Ingredients
For the Crust:
1 ½ cup graham cracker crumbs
¼ cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

For the Filling
1 ½ cups blueberries
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon water
⅔ cups plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar, divided
16 ounces cream cheese, softened
2 eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions
Make the blueberry syrup for the filling. In a saucepan, mix together the blueberries, 2 tablespoons of sugar, lemon juice, and water. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, until blueberries burst and are cooked down to a sauce. Let cool to room temperature.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Make the Crust. Mix together the graham cracker crumbs, butter, and vanilla extract. Press the mixture onto the bottom of a 9-inch round cake pan that has been lined with aluminum foil and greased.

Beat together the cream cheese and remaining granulated sugar until fluffy. Beat in eggs one at a time, and then the vanilla. Beat in the blueberry syrup.

Pour the batter in the pan over the crust. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until the center is barely set.

Let cool to room temperature, then refrigerate overnight.

Roasted Blueberry Basil Cornbread

As you might have noticed, we really like blueberries around here. So of course, when I got Stephanie Wise's fabulous Quick Bread Love e-book, her recipe for blueberry cornbread caught my eye.

It definitely didn't disappoint, and stood out from a lot of ordinary cornbread recipes. The recipe calls for roasting the blueberries, concentrating the flavors of the berries and making them extra sweet. The blueberries are paired with fresh basil, and the yogurt and honey makes the cornbread very soft and moist.

It's a perfect summer recipe. It only has a few ingredients and is really easy to put together which is great for me while I'm interning in D.C. this summer, with a tiny kitchen and a crappy gas stove and oven that kind of scares the crap out of me.

I won't include the recipe here, but will direct you over to where you can get Stephanie's e-cookbook. It's pretty inexpensive, very well put together, and definitely worth looking at!

Enjoy, all!

Caroline