Pumpkin pie ice cream and Bake! ox tongues

Right after I went on my baking/dessert hiatus, I stumbled on David Leibovitz's post for pumpkin ice cream. Each week when we picked up our squash-overwhelmed CSA box, I would click back over to the recipe and drool. I'm normally a chocolate-chocolate-chocolate girl, but for some reason, I have been obsessed by the idea of ice cream that tastes like pumpkin pie.

And today was the day! Today was our annual orchard/pumpkin festival trip with some good friends and their little ones, and we decided to come back to our house after the festival for dinner. I needed a dessert, and what better treat after a pumpkin festival than pumpkin ice cream?

I still had some pumpkin puree in the freezer, leftover from my pumpkin muffins (post tomorrow!), so I was able to skip the roasting-the-squash step. I started organizing for DL's recipe, and then said, "I wonder if Jeni has a recipe for pumpkin ice cream so I can skip the egg/custard part?" and sure enough, she did! Her recipe calls for Chinese five spice, and first of all, I didn't have it, and second of all, I really wanted a more pumpkin pie flavor. So this is what I came up with:

Pumpkin pie ice cream
adapted from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams and David Lebovitz

3 1/8 cups (800 g) half-and-half (both Jeni and DL call for a combination of whole milk and cream, but half-and-half was all we had in the house)
2 tbsp (33 g) milk
1 tbsp + 1 tsp (13 g) cornstarch
3 tbsp (43 g) neufchatel cream cheese, softened
1/4 tsp fine sea salt
1/4 c (85 g) honey
3/4 c (180 g) fresh pumpkin puree
2/3 c (135 g) packed light brown sugar
2 tbsp (22 g) light corn syrup
1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1 tsp freshly grated ginger
1 1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground cloves

1. Whisk the softened cream cheese with the salt in a large bowl. Then whisk in the pumpkin puree and honey. Set aside.
2. Combine half-and-half, brown sugar, corn syrup, and spices in a large sauce pan. (Use a 4 qt saucepan. I tried a smaller one and it boiled over!) Bring to a roiling boil over medium-high heat and boil for 4 minutes.
3. Whisk two tablespoons of milk with cornstarch.
4. After the milk mixture has boiled for four minutes, turn off the heat and gradually whisk in the cornstarch slurry. Bring the mixture back to a boil for one minute, stirring with a heat-proof spatula.
5. Pour the milk mixture into the bowl with the cream cheese/pumpkin mixture, whisking until smooth.
6. Strain the mixture into a gallon zip-top plastic bag. (I actually strained it into a measuring cup and then poured it into the bag to limit the mess.)
7. Put the bag into an ice bath for 30 - 60 minutes until cool. (Or put in the fridge overnight.)
8. Freeze in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions. Freeze in a container for four hours.

I decided that we needed a little cookie treat to go with the ice cream, and Phyl's Bake! pick of ox tongues seemed like the right choice. So I took a small piece of puff pastry from the freezer (about 200 g), rolled it out in some sugar, used a small round cutter to cut out small circles, rolled them into ovals, chilled them, and baked them for about 15 minutes until the sugar had caramelized.

This ice cream was a huge hit! In fact, the entire quart disappeared in one night, and one of our friends' little ones kept saying, "More? More?" after the container was empty. It tasted just like pumpkin pie filling, only in ice cream form. The ox tongues were perfect; a little piece of sugary buttery goodness to round out dessert.

Check out the layers!

Modern Baker Puff Pastry and Raspberry Mille-Feuille

Several months ago, one of our Bake! recipes called for puff pastry. Rather than purchasing some, I tackled my fears and made the recipe in Bake! I found this video invaluable; Nick Malgieri makes the puff pastry process look effortless.

And now, here we are in the puff pastry section of The Modern Baker Challenge. I began by following the recipe in The Modern Baker. As in his other recipe, NM focuses on a faster and easier method for making puff pastry, eliminating the 5,000,000 folds and turns and rests in traditional puff pastry. This recipe is slightly different from the one in Bake! You start by combining flour and salt in a food processor. Then you add chunks of butter and pulse just a very few times. Finally you add a bit of water, pulse a few more times, and dump it all out onto your counter. For some reason, I had a more difficult time getting this dough to come together; I think the one in Bake! was slightly easier for me, but this one did finally work.

I rolled and turned the dough, and then folded it. I cut it into four pieces (about 325 g each), stuck three into the freezer, and turned the smallest one into elephant ears...yum!

A few days ago, I moved two batches of dough into the fridge to defrost. And now a new challenge: baked puff pastry layer. When defrosted, I pulled the dough out of the fridge and began to press on the dough until it was soft enough to roll, turning 90 degrees after each press or roll. When I had each piece into a 12 x 15" square, I placed them on jelly roll pans lined with parchment paper and stuck them in the fridge.

When it was time to bake, I removed a pan from the fridge, pierced the dough with a fork, and covered it with another piece of parchment paper and another jelly roll pan. My layers were perfectly done in 25 minutes (15 minutes on the first side, 10 minutes on the second). Check out Phyl's detailed post on how to bake the puff pastry layers.

And now it's time for my official post for the puff pastry section: raspberry mille-feuille. Raspberries are one of my favorite fruits, but because hubby doesn't like them, I rarely bake the raspberry recipes. However, it's my dad's birthday, and he loves raspberries, so I thought this seemed like the perfect birthday dessert for him!

Knowing that hubby and the little girl don't like raspberries, I decided to make a half recipe of the raspberry mille-feuille and a half recipe of the molded chocolate-filled Napoleons (post tomorrow). So I took one of the baked puff pastry layers and, using a parchment paper template of my 6" cake pan, cut out two circles and two semi-circles.

I made a half recipe of the pastry cream, using milk, sugar, cornstarch, egg yolks, unsalted butter, and vanilla. It rested in the fridge overnight.

I whipped heavy cream with sugar and kirsch, and then combined a bit of it with the pastry cream. Even after the overnight rest and the addition of the whipped cream, my pastry cream was really liquidy. I'm sure I did something wrong; the pastry cream for the Parisian fruit tart worked perfectly last year.

Assembly was easy: layer of puff pastry, pastry cream, raspberries, whipped cream, puff pastry, pastry cream, raspberries, whipped cream, puff pastry. And a dusting of confectioners' sugar before serving.

This was a huge hit, with the birthday boy, my little guy, and even my raspberry-hating husband!

Bake! empanadas

As I mentioned in my last post, Marthe chose empanadas for this week's Bake! Twitterbake.

We opted to try the chicken variation. The filling (picadillo) was made from potatoes, onion, red pepper, garlic, chicken thighs, cumin, tomato puree, salt, water, white vinegar, green olives, and chipotle chili powder. (I skipped the capers.) It was time consuming, but not difficult to make.

The puff pastry was easy to use. I rolled it out, chilled it, and cut it into eight circles. Dropped the filling in the center (I used about a 1/4 cup), crimped it together, and baked them for about 30 minutes.

My hubby loved them and the baby girl ate all the filling. I thought they were pretty good, although I think I prefer our normal pasty recipe (from Cook's Country, made with leftover pot roast). Mostly, I was just impressed by how perfectly flaky, layered, and buttery my puff pastry was! I think I'll use it to make pasties next time.

Oh, and with the leftover scraps, I rolled them out in sugar and then tried the corkscrew shaping method that Nick Malgieri demonstrated on Martha Stewart. We liked them as much (more?) than the elephant ears yesterday, and I'm a little worried...they are so delicious and so quick to make, I'm afraid they might appear here frequently!

Another fear bites the dust: puff pastry

Not only have I never made puff pastry before, but I've never even cooked with it. Whenever I see it in a recipe, I get annoyed that they want me to use store-bought when I could just make my own...but then I've never made my own. It's a vicious cycle.

And I knew that it was a little intimidating...something about rolling butter and flour 500 times, keeping everything cold, if you breathe wrong, it all melts together and is ruined.

But I also knew that it was coming up in our Modern Baker Challenge. Andrea, Phyl, and Sara have already made the puff pastry and elephant ears, and seeing their results really made me want to try it.

And then Marthe picked empanadas for our next Bake! twitterbake, and they're made with puff pastry. Looks like today was the day!

I used the recipe from Bake!, although it looked pretty similar to the Modern Baker one. I mixed up flour, salt, and half a stick of sliced cold unsalted butter in my food processor. Then I switched to a bowl, where I added tiny pieces (1/4 inch) of more butter. Cutting the butter into those tiny pieces was actually the most time-consuming part! I started folding in cold water until I could push the dough together and then I began the press and fold sequence. It seemed like the instructions in Bake! are much easier than the traditional puff pastry, but a little more involved than the instructions in Modern Baker. I was a little worried about whether I was doing it correctly, but by the third turn, I felt like I had the hang of it. My dough looked like this before I put it into the fridge, and I couldn't see any of the layers I was supposed to have:

But after an hour of refrigeration, I cut off a piece to use for the elephant ears, and I saw this:

Layers! Sigh of relief!

Also, while I was waiting for my dough to cool, I found a link on Nick Malgieri's website to a video of him demonstrating the puff pastry recipe from Bake! on Martha Stewart. It was so helpful!! I will definitely have it by my side the next time I make puff pastry, and I hope other beginners watch it, too.

The rest of the elephant ear preparation was easy. I rolled out the dough in sugar, folded it over on itself per the instructions, and put it back in the fridge. Then I sliced the dough into 1/2 inch segments, dipped them in sugar, and placed them on my silpat-covered jelly roll pan. The only issue was that they took way longer to bake than they were supposed to and I needed my oven for dinner...they ended up taking about 20 minutes or a little longer.

These were easy and awesome...I'm really glad I only made part of a batch because they were all gone within a couple of hours. Yum!