She makes excellent cookies for these sandwiches and her explanations are outstanding. Stiffer dough so the cookies don't spread, salt because the cookies are eaten cold, control of the temperature of butter, and why, all along answering the unasked question "why," storing overnight so the cookies hydrate so the ice cream doesn't squish out when they're eaten, things like that all the way through.
For a green layer she chooses tea flavored ice cream.
Lame.
I'd choose mint. To go with the chocolate.
She uses four pints of top quality ice cream. Around here those are $5.50 each approximately. Twenty-two dollars of ice cream for fifteen sandwiches. 22/15 = less than 1.50 each. Plus the cost of the other ingredients.
Walmart sells 12 for $3.00, 25¢ each, and that means their ice cream is crap.
MATHS!
Like foam ice cream. Not dense and rich and heavy.
Claire sure does have a following on YouTube. She left Bon Appétit and her viewers grieved.
She is an excellent teacher.
Bonus Video!
Jenny Britton Bauer with Epicurious compares ice creams and along the way explains why some ice cream is better than others, and why it is worth the cost.
It's like all things in life, you really don't want crap products, not ever, so best to be able to identify quality and distinguish the real from the ersatz. The real thing is almost always more expensive for its materials and its labor, and almost always worth it. Not always but almost. But for the real product to be worth the extra cost you must be able to appreciate the differences.
Did I ever tell you the time that Ed stole my gift to his dad?
Ed told me his dad likes nougat.
Enstrom in Grand Junction makes the best almond nougat that I've ever tasted. The chunks are thick, the ingredients are butter, sugar, vanilla, that's it. The very thick slabs are coated with soft ground almond dust.
Heaven.
And I mean it.
They have a store in Cherry Creek in a strip mall across University from Whole Foods, not in the larger mall. I picked up a box for Ed's dad and gave it to Ed to give to his dad, which he did.
In Burmuda.
What do you buy a person who has everything he could possibly want?
You buy them the things that they like.
Ed has a twin, and boy, those two are scary identical. Turns out, this whole time Doug is actually the nicer twin. I didn't know this, for decades my friend is actually the evil twin.
I knew he is deviant while still very nice to me, an outstanding friend actually, but the contrast in niceness between them is sharp.
Their mother died. Her estate was large and unsettled. Vast, actually. It took years to discover and sort through. Immediately after her death the family assembled at their compound in Bermuda. The troubled sister was being ugly at the dinner table. They were all emotional but his troubled sister is the worst. She made it clear she wanted the whole compound in Bermuda. She created disruption about it right there at the table. Their dad was distraught, his world falling apart, his life coming to its close, he barked at his children, now all grown adults, and stormed off to his study.
Ed waited awhile then left the table and went into his dad's den. He was sitting behind his desk in the dark. Ed approached the desk, "I'm sorry, Dad, for what happened out there."
"Grumph."
Ed put the box of Enstrom on the desk and pushed it to his dad.
His dad took the box, opened it and choked.
He was emotionally wrecked. He collected himself momentarily. It happened to be Valentine's day. He whispered to Ed, "Nobody has ever given me a Valentine present."
!
After that, Ed couldn't admit in that tightly wrought emotional moment that the box came from me. A person he's never met.
Months later when I asked Ed how his dad liked the candy, Ed told me this story and said, "Sorry, Bobby, I stole your present."
So you should buy a box of Enstrom. It really is quality.
5 comments:
Don't look like no Carolyn Jones to me.
Best stories ever this AM. At least the evil twin was able to feel remorse and confess.
Great info about the ice cream sandwich cookies. I have been wanting to make those for a while, but I have been wanting to make an ice cream cake for many, many years. Such an easy thing according to the mag article I have saved. But maybe it lacks the applied science in your post. If it would apply to cake v. cookies.
JUST DO IT!!!
Holy Cow, deborah, what are you waiting for?????????????
BTW, I don't hear remorse from the friend but I do hear confession.
My mom who was eight when the Great Depression hit, spent her adult life cutting and saving recipes. She collected boxes of recipes clipped from newspapers and magazines for women. Food was a fantasy and dreaming about it her hobby. Perhaps it was her obsession, I don't know, but it certainly was a life long focus. Although she cooked good meals for her family and would occasionally make something new she hadn't made before (usually a sweet thing like a pie or cake) she mostly used the same recipes over and over and ended up throwing all her clipped recipes away untried when she moved to senior care, where the food served there became the main topic.
Now when I hear of someone who's not only gone through the work of saving a magazine article about something that seemed important or desirable, but has spent YEARS (many many years) wanting to make something relatively easy without doing so, I wonder as I did with my mother, what the heck that's about?
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