"Healthy" Desserts

No, I haven't gone completely mad. I still love butter and cream, and you won't see recipes for tofu cheesecakes or fat-free brownies any time soon. It just happened that I made some desserts this weekend that might seem healthy at first glance: banana coconut chocolate chip cookies and plain frozen yogurt.  

I read about these "healthy" cookies on Heidi Swanson's 101 Cookbooks blog and was immediately seized with a morbid curiosity to make some for myself. This is possibly the strangest cookie recipe I've ever seen.

Here are the things this cookie does NOT contain:

- butter

- sugar

- eggs

- flour

Is this possible? Yes. Does it taste good? You bet.

Kinako Ice Cream with Soy Sauce Caramel

A friend had the brilliant idea of hosting a homemade ice cream party last week, which gave me the chance to try something unusual. My original idea was to make a peanut stracciatella gelato, but while I was leafing through The Perfect Scoop, I landed on a recipe for kinako ice cream.

Kinako is Japanese toasted soy bean powder. I first learned about the term while reading Clotilde's blog entry on warabi mochi, although in hindsight, I've eaten it in pastries while growing up in China (there's a famous Beijing specialty that's basically red bean-filled mochi dipped in kinako). Maybe my palate is biased - after all, I was raised on soy products - but I'm a big fan of kinako's nutty, toasty, unmistakably-soybean taste.

I had a fun time coming up with something to pair with the kinako ice cream. A certain photographer from Scotland suggested caramel, so I made a batch of David Lebovitz's salted butter caramel ... and enhanced it with soy sauce. I learned that trick from Alton Brown, and it just makes so much sense to pair soy with soy.

Anyway, I absolutely loved the ice cream. It's one of those flavors that I'll definitely make if I ever opened my own ice cream shop (for the record, it'll also have strawberry rhubarb and lemon speculoo flavors).

I think that next time, I'll follow the latest NYC trend and flavor my caramel with miso instead...

Toasted Almond Gelato

Even though French pastries get all the spotlight on this blog (okay, most of the spotlight, sometimes I feel perverse and do this), I'm always curious to explore the desserts of other cultures. I stumbled upon a wonderful book at the library a few weeks ago. Dolce Italiano by Gina De Palma, the pastry chef at Mario Batali's Babbo Kitchen, takes you on an amazing cultural journey through Italy. She describes not only the desserts of various regions, but their wine and cheese as well. I tend to read cookbooks for the vicarious pleasure of traveling to other places and pretending I'm living among the locals, rather than to get recipes, so I had a blast with this book. One day, I'll be sipping vin santo in my Tuscan villa, surrounded by my vineyards...

There was a toasted almond gelato recipe in the book that I just had to try*. I wanted to make something refreshing and fragrant, but with enough toasty body to be fulfilling.

This recipe is perfect for someone who likes almonds. For those of you who don't (shame on you), replacing the almonds with hazelnuts, and amaretto with frangelico, would probably yield equally amazing results.

* Okay, so there were other recipes, like fried orange cream and custard donuts, that I wanted to try more. But I know better than to purchase a deep fryer.

Lemon-Speculoos Ice Cream

If I ever open my own ice cream shop some day, this will be my signature flavor. The combination of cakey, spicy gingerbread and aromatic, creamy lemon ice cream is so nicely balanced and addictive...

Before I start raving about how much better my own ice cream is compared to commercial ones, I have a confession to make: I used to be a non-believer. Sure, I churned out batches now and then from my Cuisinart machine, but the ones I made were so rich that I felt like I was eating clotted cream. I like my ice cream creamy, but with enough icy-ness to be refreshing as well. When I was making this recipe, I lowered the ratio of cream to milk to 1-1, and that made all the difference.

Now I make homemade ice cream once a week :)

(Vanilla ice cream with leftover caramel sauce)

Strawberry Ice Cream + Gianduja Stracciatella Gelato

I hosted an ice cream and movie party after picking up David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop from the library. Some flavors, like green pea ice cream, were a little out there (but then again, even Le Berthillon sells foie gras ice cream). Gianduja seemed like a safer choice since everyone likes hazelnut and chocolate. Plus, I learned a really cool tip for making the chocolate stracciatella - tiny chocolate shards that permeate the creamy ice cream so you get a little bit of (alarmingly addictive) crunch with every bite. But more on that later.

I wasn't really planning on making strawberry ice cream until I came back with a 5 lb flat of strawberries from Costco. Yes, I realize they weren't fraise du bois, but they smelled pretty good and I couldn't resist the bargain. I used a old-school recipe from Alice Waters The Art of Simple Food, but tweaked it a little by marinating the strawberries with balsamic vinegar and some home-grown basil leaves. I couldn't really taste the basil, but the balsamic vinegar definitely enhanced the fruitiness of the strawberries.