How to make ice cream waffles!

Alright... It's been a while since I last put any recipes up on this blog. Was basically slacking off a little but at the same time trying to perfect the recipe for ice cream waffles before taking a couple of pictures and putting some words to it.

After a few decent attempts, I more or less got the hang of things: But I think a little bit more experimenting will yield a better taste and texture.

Anyways, here goes: A simple recipe for homemade waffles to accompany your ice cream!

What you need:
2 eggs
2 cups of flour
1 and a half cups of full cream milk
Half a cup of butter
4 tablespoons brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 quarter teaspoon salt
A dash of vanilla extract

1. Get yourself 2 cups of plain flour.

2. Add 4 tablespoons of brown sugar. I like brown sugar because it has an additional flavour to it. Stick to regular sugar if you must. Then add your baking powder. The rule of thumb: Add the dry ingredients together and mix it till it is nice and even.

3. Next up: Melt the butter over low heat in microwave oven and pour melted butter little by little into dry mix of ingredients. Everything will start to resemble clumps of wet sand but that's fine. Add your milk in bit by by and the next thing I did, you probably won't believe how stupid it possibly is.

4. Being the absolute genius that I am, I opted to use the electric mixer because I thought it would make my life easier. But no! The bowl I chose was simply too small, and needless to say, there was waffle batter everywhere when the electric mixer went into overdrive! Brilliant!

5. And to cut the long story short: Add your milk bit by by into the buttered-flour-sugar-baking powder mix and mix until smooth. Careful not to over mix! Use a electric mixer by all means, but grow a brain and use a much deeper bowl!

6. As the kitchen was a mess, I opted to clean the place up and quit taking pictures. But what happens next is fairly straightforward: In a separate deep bowl, crack 2 eggs, add the salt and stick the electric mixer in and start to whip the eggs until they are foamy. I tried to make them stand on peaks by whisking and whisking. But I just couldn't do it. Oh well...

7. Finally, add the frothy eggs into the buttered-flour-sugar-baking powder-milk and fold everything up nicely. As you fold in the frothy eggs you will hear this sizzling sound which I think indicates that there is air going into the mix.

8. Heat your waffle maker until nice and hot and in goes your batter. Three to 4 minutes later, out comes your waffles! Ta da!

I like to melt stuff. You should too, if you're making Bounty Ice Cream...

Everybody goes through phases. Have I mentioned that before?

Sometimes it's about wanting to try out every possible combination of ingredients to get the perfect desired result. Other times it's about going off in some tangent and dabble in something new.

Right now for me, besides trying my hands at waffle-making (a food that is still kind of related to ice cream) and savoury-food-cooking (which involves a lot of butter, garlic and broth-making which is definitely not anywhere close to ice cream), I have been obsessively paging through Anthony Bourdain's 500-page Omnibus (consisting of Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour in one volume) to really feel what it is that makes someone who deals with food on a regular basis tick while at the same time reliving my voracious appetite for reading.

And right now I am going through this phase of wanting to melt every ingredient that can dissolve just to see how it turns out. Whether it is butter in a hot pan or emulsifying a mix of brown sugar in egg yolks and warm milk (for making dough), I am watching things sizzle, fizzle, gulp, plop, dilute and vanish.

And witnessing whether anything beyond what is expected might actually happen.

So what better place to start than to revert back to the Make Your Own Chocolate Ice Cream series where I try my hands at making ice cream from regular eating chocolate. Certainly a good place to start if I want to make stuff melt and disapper.

Without trying too hard to reinvent the wheel but still trying to keep things interesting, I am picking Bounty chocolate because it is less chocolate and more about its sweet coconut stuffing and figuring out how its core is going to turn out when made into an ice cream.

So here's what you need:
2 egg yolks
100ml milk
100ml cream
10g sugar
2 pieces of Bounty chocolate

1. In a bowl, beat yolks with sugar until smooth and set aside.

2. Heat 100ml milk in pot and dissolve the two pieces of Bounty Chocolate. They might take a while to melt completely, at which point you will see tiny bits of coconut inside but sinking to the bottom of the pot.

3. Beat hot milk with melted Bounty into yolk-sugar mix and pour everything back into pot and cook until thickened.

4. Add cream, transfer to bowl and hand churn.

Turned out pretty well and much smoother and firmer than I thought for an ice cream that is made from eating chocolate. But after a while, those pesky bits of coconut tend to get in the way and makes for irritating eating.

But other than that, it's fine.

Ok, so the next post will be about waffle-making. Till then.

Some thoughts: We should really be doing it for (and like) the kids...

So, the World Cup has ended, Spain won on a rather uneventful note, no Blue-and-White ice cream I could make (as promised in the previous post) in the event Argentina won (or alternatively, if Uruguay with any remote possibility did actually win) and no way am I experimenting making a Red-and-Yellow ice cream (as a tribute to Spanish colours) because any ingredient originally red usually turns bright pink when converted into ice cream form.

It will just look ridiculous.

And for more than two weeks this blog has gone sterile. Was I cutting back on sleep to watch the World Cup and ran out of time for blogging? Not at all. Have I simply stopped making ice cream for two weeks? Not exactly either.

And here's what it was: I just didn't felt like making anything worth blogging about. It was the same-old-same-old working on past techniques I developed and fine-tuning the rehashed recipes over again and again because the human taste and palette evolves organically over time and what you make goes through phases of reinvention.

But that doesn't mean I wasn't scheming about what to do next while resuming my voracious appetite for reading (a periodical process of more input and less output). Which usually sets me thinking. And comprehending. And seeing things a little differently.

But what I did earlier today got me thinking more than anything else. (Well, just a little context about what I did today: Teaming up with more than a dozen of the tireless folks who are employees from Singapore Tourism Board, we headed to a home for kids to teach the little ones the basics of making ice cream. It was purely charitable on their part to want to spend some time mingling and getting to know the kids from the home.)

And boy, it was rowdy (as expected) with more than 20 of them. But the kids were more into it than any group I have ever encountered. They sure beat any adult group any day in wanting to do something! Most importantly, they didn't mind the endless stirring and the seemingly mindless task of mixing one ingredient after another without really understanding what the heck they were really doing it for. Or the fact that they had to toss a bag of emulsion in a larger bag of ice. And freezing their fingers off in the process.

All they were interested in was the payoff. The payoff that they were going to eat what they made and seeing for themselves the transformation of that brown messy mushy squishy emulsion turn into solid ice cream.

Damn right, I'll pay anything for that kind of fascination. It is a payoff in itself for me. Because with fascination, you can take everything and anything you ever read or know about making ice cream (or making anything for that matter) and toss it right out the window. You rely less on theory, and more on doing. You don't really know how it turns out, because you just can't wait to get there and find out for yourself by making it from scratch.

I think in the right environment, kids or adults can rely on their natural curiosity to get them through from fascination to boredom to routine to overhauling the establishment and back to fascination again.

And I think the bottomline of what I'm getting at is this: I'm really glad I agreed to do this ice cream making gig for the kids on an absolutely washed out Saturday morning. It really reminds you what you were in it for in the first place. To re-live that fascination of making something out of nothing while knowing close to nothing about what you were doing in the first place.

And that's fun.

World Cup, Holland and Orange Ice Cream...

Since we are in the midst of the World Cup season right now and Holland has just made it to the final eight with a convincing win over Slovakia, let's make a simple Orange Ice Cream to pay tribute to their victory.

All you need is:
2 yolks
100ml milk
100ml cream
About 40ml to 50ml of Sunquick Orange Squash concentrate

1. Mix the yolk and milk in a pot and heat until it turns thick and stick. Remove from heat and stir in cream.

2. Pour in concentrate and mix thoroughly. Pour through sieve into holding bowl. Freeze and handchurn!

Ok so, here's the deal: If Brazil wins the World Cup, we'll be eating green coloured ice cream ok? If Argentina wins, we'll make one that is blue and white no?

You bet.

How to make Gula Melaka ice cream

When it comes to making ice cream at home, the fun part of it sometimes is to not know how much of what you are using or going to use. Ice cream-making should remain an art and not a rigid scientific experiment.

So, to make Gula Melaka ice cream, all I did was take this much of Gula Melaka (probably about 100g of it):

And put it in a pot with about half a cup of water (equal or slightly more than the weight of gula melaka) and cooked it until it was brown and sticky. (The gula melaka should cook, dissolve and steam but all of a sudden, it stops steaming and bubbles gently. This is an indication it is done.)

Pour it through a sieve and set it aside. (You might see one little worm or two here and there sometimes. Don't pani, it's normal. This is, after all, palm sugar - a nice saccharine home to hungry little worms.)

Next up, make a custard: Beat 2 egg yolks with approximately 50ml of gula melaka. Whisk this mixture into 100ml to 150ml of full cream milk inside the pot. Cook this mixture until it thickens. Pour through a sieve into 50ml of cream. Freeze and handchurn this completed custard and you're done.

If you feel the ice cream is not sweet when served, don't worry: Drizzle some leftover gula melaka for extra sweetness.

How to make Andes Mint Choc Ice Cream!

Alright. This Andes Mint Choc Ice Cream is part of the Make Your Own Chocolate Ice Cream series whereby you ransack your fridge for any leftover eating chocolate and convert them into ice cream.

And here's what you need:
- 8 to 10 pieces of Andes Mint Choc (kind of like the ones seen above)
- 2 egg yolks
- 100ml milk
- 100ml cream
- 25g to 30g sugar

Here's what you got to do:
1. Heat milk in pot and melt 3 to 4 pieces of Andes mint chocs

2. Beat sugar with yolks until smooth and pour heated milk-Andes mint choc mixture into yolk-sugar mixture

3. Transfer back into pot and cook until smooth and thick enough to coat back of wooden spoon

4. Pour through sieve into cream and handchurn ice cream custard

So, 2 hours later, we're done!

Finely chop up the remaining 6 or 7 pieces of mint choc and mix them into semi-frozen ice cream for a bit of texture and additional mint taste! The amount of chocolate mints to add is according to taste.

Next up... Andes Mint Chocolate

Ok. Got to try Andes Mint Choc this weekend.

This will become into ice cream. Soon.