use real butter

Recipe: peach ice cream

Even though we have an ice cream maker (not the salt and crank kind, but the little Cuisinart brand), we don’t make ice cream very often. Jeremy calculated that the cost of making his favorite Coffee Heath Bar Crunch from scratch was the same as purchasing it in the store – and the store version had much better smoothness to it. For me, being lactose intolerant puts the kibosh on a lot of ice cream. I can take it from the time to time, but things aren’t always happy in the lower GI department. I do make sorbet on occasion. Problem is that I love raw fruit so much I tend to eat the fruit before I can make the sorbet.

But I like peach ice cream and I (still) had peaches and so I gave it a try based on a recipe snarfed off the web, snarfed from David Lebovitz’ The Perfect Scoop (which I just ordered because, how can I not?)

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: peach-raspberry galette

Peaches were on sale at the local Safeway when I passed through on Sunday. These aren’t the kind of peaches that are juicy and make a mess down your shirt when you bite into one, but they looked good enough for some fruity ideas.

Recipe: mocha hazelnut torte

After making a chiffon cake with swiss meringue buttercream, I usually wind up with at least a dozen egg yolks. I saw that David Lebovitz posted about using up egg whites which is the opposite of my problem. While perusing my old Chocolatier issues, I found a recipe from 1994 that uses at least ten egg yolks (more, if you go all out on the plating). Sweet! Except it’s a three truffle recipe. It doesn’t mean the recipe is necessarily difficult in terms of skill level, rather – it means there are several steps. That’s fine, I thought.

I had made the espresso pastry cream a day ahead because I knew doing all of the steps in one day would put me in a foul mood. Fine – that worked out alright. The recipe didn’t say to strain the pastry cream through a sieve. I am here to tell you to definitely do so. I like my pastry cream to be smoooooooth. The next morning I baked the chocolate genoise which turns out to be a little more brittle than I expect from genoise, but I was cool with it. While the genoise was cooling on a rack, I started on the hazelnut meringue. The first step was to skin some hazelnuts. God, I hate skinning hazelnuts. It’s fairly straightforward, just roast the hazelnuts on a baking sheet for about 10 minutes and then wrap them up in a kitchen towel to cool. When they heat up, they expand and bust their skins. When they cool, they shrink and will theoretically release from the skins with ease. Theoretically. My advice is to roast 25% more hazelnuts than called for because some of those suckers will refuse to release.

**Jump for more butter**