Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Cake!

Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Cake


When I was very little (under six), my birthday cake was always the same thing—at least as far as I remember, which probably means it was made at least a few years in a row around the time I turned four and five years old*—a layer cake (alternate layers of chocolate and Party Rainbow Chip yellow cake) with Betty Crocker Rainbow chip frosting.  Which I loved.  However, the cake I had most growing up (between the ages of 6 and 19) was the Baskin and Robins Ice Cream Cake, with Chocolate Cake and Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream.  Now, let me tell you, I LOVED this cake.  The only reason that I stopped having this cake for my birthday's was because there wasn't a Baskin and Robbins in a convenient location in either New York City (where I went to university) or in Lowell, MA where my mother had moved.   And let me tell you, I missed that cake (there was a particularly bad incident of a Carvel ice cream cake, which I thought was rather disgusting).  Sure, there were times, especially after I met my wonderful husband, and he started buying the cakes, when there were still some great cakes.  I am particularly thinking of the year I turned 25, when Alex bought me a fantastic hedge hog chocolate cake:

Although it was hard to cut into the cake the first night (I looked away, Alex did the deed), but I must say, the cake—amazingly—tasted better and better the older it got!

Anyway, I was very excited when in January 2011 (or perhaps it was late 2010), I saw that a Baskin and Robins had opened on Great Russell Street (right across from the British Museum).  My excitement grew when we discovered in late January 2011 that they could indeed make me an ice cream birthday cake with a chocolate cake base and mint chocolate chip ice cream!  So we ordered the cake and agreed to pick it up on Sunday after church (my birthday being on a Monday that year).  There was a brief hiccup when the store wasn't open when we went to pick up the cake and had to run back over there after they called us a few hours before closing. But in the end it all worked out.  And it was (very, very, very nearly) just as good as I remembered it.  But...it was much, much, much, much, much, MUCH more expensive than it had been when I had last purchased one in 2002 in New York.  And also, the whole time I was eating it I was thinking—apart from yum, yum, yum—but, I could make this myself, surely.  Indeed, when a wonderful lady gave us an ice cream maker for our wedding, my plans became surer.  For my birthday this year I would make my own ice cream cake.  And I did. Here's how.

Cake Base


For the cake base I used Nigella's Old Fashioned Chocolate Cake recipe.  Of course, you could use any chocolate cake recipe that you want to use, any particular favourite cake recipe at all really (no need to go with chocolate, if you love a different flavour of cake)!  However, I can really recommend this particular cake recipe as it is very delicious (even when it is coming out of the freezer, which tends to take a bit of flavour away from any cake).  Nigella tells you how to do it all just wonderfully, so the only thing I will add is that if you are making it for an ice cream cake is that although Nigella gives instructions for making it as a sandwich cake using two tins, I made it in one large spring form pan.

Here's how it looked when it came out of the oven:

So, after the cake has come out of the oven, you need to let it cool down completely to room temperature.  Then, you get on with making the ice cream.

I have to say, this may be one of those recipes that is best if you have an ice cream maker.  I know you can make ice cream without one by churning the ice cream by hand every hour or so as it is freezing, but frankly, that is just too much of a complicated faff for me.  The other option is to go with a no churn ice cream, which usually is made by whipping double cream (and the flavourings) to very soft peaks (do not over beat) and freezing.

Anyway, we do now have an ice cream maker, so I didn't have to worry about that (Thank you, thank you, thank you Lauren!).  My only consideration was to go with the full "proper" ice cream which, which is made by first making custard and then adding double cream, chilling and putting in an ice cream maker, or whether I would make "cheat" ice cream, which I recently discovered, which is made by dissolving sugar in double cream and pouring it then straight into the ice cream maker.  My only concern was that I although nine times out of ten I can make delicious custard, I didn't want my birthday ice cream to be that 10th time.  So I bought extra cream and decided to try the "proper" kind, but if it went wrong to just go the easy way with the extra cream.

My decision was swayed as well because I found a fantastic "proper" ice cream recipe for mint chocolate chip...Isaac Mizrahi's Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream.   To me that just sound's fantastic!  What better way than to make you feel indulgent on your birthday than by having your favourite flavour of ice cream in a recipe by a wonderful fashion designer.  One who actually seems like a nice guy (with the only other "nice" male fashion designer in the public eye that I can even think of being Tom Ford).  So, I went with Isaac Mizrahi's Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream recipe.  And it was delicious, lovely, even as a custard before I put in the double cream, and even before it was made in to ice cream (I could have eaten it all up like soup, just as it was).  Just for information, the "cheat" recipe that I was going to use (and have used other times) is this Easy Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Recipe, which I still highly recommend as a lovely way to have home made ice cream on a Friday night after work as with an ice cream maker you can put it on when you come in, let the machine do its work while you get dinner, put it in the freezer before you sit down to eat and it will be ready when you are for dessert.

Anyway, here is the ice cream in the machine:

Of course, normally when making ice cream with our ice cream maker we would put it in the freezer to harden up a little bit more, but when making an ice cream cake you need to use the ice cream straight from the machine (or if this isn't possible/convenient, you need to let the freezer hardened ice cream melt a bit before adding it to the cake).

So, I took the ice cream from the machine and spooned it onto the top of the chocolate cake up to the brim of the spring form pan.  As shown here:

Then I covered the whole thing first in a couple of layers of cling film and then in a couple of layers of tin foil and popped it back into the deep freeze.

The next day once it had had a chance to get good and hard, I got on with making the frosting.  Now, I thought long and hard about frosting, and after reading widely on the subject and thinking about it, I decided that the only way to go was with a whipped cream icing.  You could use buttercream, but it will be a bit odd, so be warned.  Also, I love whipped cream, and my husband is only okay with it in certain dishes, never on its own, but once it is made into a frosting and frozen it is really more ice cream than whipped cream, even my husband agrees with that!

In my search for the frosting recipe, I turned to the good old American stalwart of The Joy of Baking for this frosting recipe, which was wonderful, so I'm glad I did!

Here is a picture of how it looked being made in our KitchenAide Mixer:

Then I took the cake out of the deep freeze, unwrapped it and frosted it:

Then I re-wrapped it in cling film and aluminium foil and put it back into the freezer to freeze the frosting.

Then I had a fantastic birthday!

First, my husband surprised me by getting up in the middle of the night to blow up balloons for me to wake up to:

Then, after work, he took me out for a wonderful romantic dinner at "our restaurant", the fantastic Gourmet Pizza Company in Gabriel's Wharf on the South Bank, and we came home and had ice cream cake.

And this makes a lot of cake (thank goodness!) and so we enjoyed it again and again (it last very well in the freezer).

On the Friday after my birthday we even had it with my favourite meal from when I was six (only this time I made it from scratch, just like the cake, rather than getting it from a restaurant): Pepperoni and Pineapple Pizza.  Which we ate while watching 'From Here to Eternity' (GREAT film) and drinking "Crockford Mai Tai's" in bug cocktail glasses (another fantastic and fun wedding present)!

Next Time: A Valentine (or anytime) treat!


*update:  my mum has just informed me that when I turned one and two I had a Raggedy Ann decorated cake

Pasta with Mushroom Cream Sauce

Creamy Mushroom Pasta for a Monday Night

So, not this past week, but the week before, my husband gently expressed his slight weariness with having whole wheat pasta with pesto every Monday (and sometimes every Wednesday or Thursday as well) in the  few weeks after New Year, when I have been a bit busy.  But eating pasta on Monday nights while watching our Monday Night Serial (currently 'The Borgias') is one of our ingrained traditions.  So, I decided that a more exciting version of pasta was called for.  I thought I had come across a recipe for a creamy mushroom pasta on BBC Good Food, but it turned out that it wasn't exactly what I wanted for last Monday (even though it looks good).  So, I blithely assumed that I would easily find a recipe for a creamy mushroom sauce for pasta. But after about 20 minutes of looking, I hadn't found one that really fit the bill, and I needed to get doing on cooking it.  So, I created my own, and here it is (you may have noticed I did a live twitter update as I was cooking it).

Creamy Mushroom Sauce for Pasta


Ingredients


1 onion, chopped
4 bulbs of garlic
1 TBSP olive oil
1 TBSP butter
250g (or one supermarket sized package of) chestnut mushrooms, sliced
dried herbs to taste (rosemary, basil, oregano, etc.)
1 chicken stock cube (or veggie stock cube if making vegetarian)
1/2 cup dry sherry
250ml double cream
1tsp salt
100g parmesan cheese, grated

Method


Sauté the onion, garlic and mushrooms in the olive oil and butter (I chopped and added the onion, then chopped and added the garlic to it and then chopped and added the mushrooms).

Boil a kettle and add 1 and a quarter cups of water to the stock cube.

Add the herbs, the stock and the sherry to the pan and bring to a boil.

Now add the cream, salt and parmesan cheese and reduce to a simmer.

You can cover, turn off the heat and let it keep warm while you get on making your pasta.  I made whole wheat fusilli with broccoli.

Enjoy!

Muffins and More Muffins!

That's right it's time for some Muffin Mania here on Doctor Kitten in the Kitchen, quite literally as the recipe featured in this post is my own variation on a muffin from a fantastic little book called, you guessed it, Muffin Mania (it is a fantastic book, which, although currently out of print as far as the big sellers (such as Amazon) are concerned, can be obtained through the website of the granddaughter of one of the two Canadian women who originally wrote the book.  If you have any doubts whatsoever about the widespread love and devotion, which really does reach cult status, you need only check the blog devoted to  paeans of praise for it.  Indeed, a quick internet search has led me to believe that an unusually high proportion of baking bloggers have a copy of this book (often photocopied from their mother's copy).

My own copy of my mother's much battered copy, filled with annotations and notes is a treasured possession.  And I have to say, our copy was liberally shared around a great number of friends of the family (who in turn, I believe, passed it on to everyone who tasted muffins made to the recipe in this book).  Indeed, so much is this the case that I figure a good high percentage you you reading this blog will have a photocopy of the book already (especially if you knew me when I lived in California).

The book has any number of fantastic recipes divided into categories (Breakfast, Coffee Break, Lunch, Brunch or Instead of Bread, Teatime and Dessert), with some of my favourites being Muffins that Taste Like Donuts and Chocolate Cheesecake, but there are delicious savoury ones as well.  At the start of the book is a plain basic muffin recipe, which makes a great springboard for throwing in anything else you want to throw in (like seasonal, frozen or dried fruit, or anything really).  This plain recipe is on the fan blog, here.  I find that this plain recipe (or most of the recipes in the book really) make 6 large 21st century style muffins, so double if you want to make 12.

However, as much as a love all the recipes in this book (with the possible exception of Sandy's Seafood Muffin—which to be fair, I'm not sure I have ever actually tried), some of my favourite muffin recipes are the variations that my family has developed based on the recipes in this book, for instance, the Blueberry Cornmeal Muffin (use the Cornmeal muffin recipe and add blueberries).

Anyway, I recently decided to play around with the Muffin Mania recipe for Peanut Butter Muffins (page 34 in the section entitled "Coffee Break").  Now, I always have peanut butter in the house.  Moreover, guided by the fact that peanut butter is easily obtainable in all the major and minor supermarkets in the UK, I had thought that most people must also have peanut butter in the house at all times.  Not so I believe.  Nor, so far as my British husband would have me believe is PB&J (Peanut Butter and Jelly, a.k.a Jam) a mainstay of the average British schoolchild's lunchbox, let alone the Peanut Butter variation sandwiches (such as Peanut Butter and Banana slices and especially not the wonderfully named "fluffernutter", which is Peanut Butter and Banana Marshmallow spread—indeed, no amount of descriptions of this Marshmallow Spread that I had eaten in my youth, or glimpses of the product in the pantry of Nigella's BBC kitchen could actually make my husband believe that such a thing really did exist until I showed him a jar of Marshmallow Fluff up close and personal in a candy store in Greenwich, although I would like to point out that it is available via Ocado as well).  However, I have not put Marshmallow Fluff in my muffins yet.  Thus far, my main aim has been to make my husband truly accustomed to PB&J as a culinary concept.  So, I added jam to my Peanut Butter muffins. Now, the  batch that I made back in June (see photo below), were your basic peanut butter muffins with homemade raspberry jam just spread on the muffins as they came out of the oven (as the recipe suggests as a variation).

However, having made muffins with "surprise" centres before (particularly the Chocolate Cheesecake) muffins from Muffin Mania) and having just had some of my cousin-in-law's Nutella muffins during the Christmas festivities, I decided to make these truly PB&J muffins, which required rejigging the recipe a little.  So here it is:

PB&J Muffins adapted from the Peanut Butter Muffins of Muffin Mania

170g Plain (All Purpose) flour (which is about 3.5 cups)
60g of golden caster (or granulated) sugar (about 2 cups)
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
50g melted butter
2 cups of milk
4 eggs, beaten
100g peanut butter (or to taste)
50g jam, plus a tbsp more more the topping

Large 12- Muffin tin
Muffin cups or baking paper cut into large squares


Pre-heat the oven to 180C/360F.

Put all the dry ingredients into a bowl (or a food processor), combine and then add the peanut butter.

Either stir/cut in the peanut butter, or if using a food processor, just blend.

Combine the melted butter, the milk and the eggs.

Add the wet mixture to the dry, stir (just) to combine, but don't over mix.  The mixture may be quite wet at this point.

For the baking tin, if you are using muffin papers, place these in the tin.  If you have run out of muffin papers or forgot to buy some, cut up large squares of baking paper.

Put one large spoonful of muffin batter into each muffin compartment (if using baking paper, try using a one cup measuring cup to first press down the paper, then take the cup out and quickly and carefully put batter in the compartment.  The batter should hold the baking paper in place).

Add a small spoonful of jam (I used homemade raspberry jam, but any flavour of home made or store-bought should do) into each muffin compartment.

Cover each muffin with an additional large spoonful of batter (covering the jam), or as much batter as you have left.

Cook the muffins in the oven for 15-20 minutes.

Take the muffins out of the oven.

Place a couple of TBSP of jam in a cup and microwave it for about 30 seconds to a minute, or until it is all gooey.

Spread the jam over the top of the still warm muffins.

Enjoy (they should keep on the counter for about 5 days to a week, if covered or in a sealed container, or for a few months in the freezer).  For reheating either a few days old or frozen muffins, place a damp paper towel/piece of kitchen roll under the muffin and microwave for 30 seconds/1 minute.