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: lime cake

I had originally planned to make petits fours with a full sheet of the chiffon cake yesterday, but after the first half made me so bloody crazy, I bailed on the idea of more petits fours. Instead, I looked at the leftover cake, the leftover buttercream, leftover lime syrup, pulled a jar of opened lemon curd from the refrigerator (thanks Sam!) and threw together a lime-lemon cake of sorts. I’m playing out the different permutations of cake, buttercream, syrup, and jam/curds and writing up the successful combinations in my quadrille notebook. It’s nice to be able to experiment instead of trying something new whenever we entertain – that’s just a little more stress than I need in a day.

I assembled the cake last night and thought about garnishing. I’ve candied lemon slices before and they are beautiful and delicious. Not so with lime slices. The lovely green becomes a most unappealing brownish green when candied. I shouldn’t care, but… the OCD color-loving parrot in me can’t do with brown-green. Sleep on it, right? I did and I thought a flash dip in hard crack stage sugar might work. Instead, I got a green-brown lime slice that fell out of it’s candy shell and dripped lime juice everywhere. Amidst my mess of wax paper, cooling racks, crystalizing sugar, and slaughtered limes, I just settled on raw slices and some spun sugar (about all that could be salvaged from the sugar).

**Jump for more butter**