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.

How to make Baileys Brown Sugar Ice Cream

I know, I know.

There are a thousand and one ways to make ice cream from Baileys and I chose the most boring and straightforward flavour pairing.

Well, well. What can I say? Brown sugar and regular Baileys make for a deadly combination together. The molasses from brown sugar add a layer of flavour that goes together very well with the lush creaminess of Irish cream.

The overall scent makes it really palatable.

So here's what you need to do:

1. Beat 2 egg yolks with 30g of brown sugar

2. Heat 100ml of milk in pot and mix the heated milk into the sugar-yolk mixture

3. Transfer back into pot and cook until thickened

4. Stir in 75ml of cream when custard is hot

5. Set aside for 10 minutes and stir in 35ml to 40ml Baileys

6. Hand churn mixture

Ta-da!

What to do with a frozen solid custard

Sometimes I tend to forget and sometimes I just get plain lazy.

And one consequence is that the ice cream custard that has been left in the freezer for too long (usually overnight) becomes frozen rock solid. So what now?

For Already Been Churned ice cream custard:
Well, if the frozen ice cream custard has already been hand-churned at least twice, it should be of pretty decent texture. Simply leave the frozen custard in the chiller or fridge section for about 10 to 15 minutes and it will soften enough to scoop and serve.

For Never Been Churned ice cream custard:
Alternatively, let it chill for about 30 minutes or so and when the texture is soft enough, start whisking by hand again. Proceed to hand-churn and freeze normally until firm but soft enough to scoop and serve.

Do note that large ice crystals might have already formed in a frozen custard that has NOT been hand-churned at all. To reduce the ice crystals from big and flaky bits to less perceptible ones, it is advisable to allow the frozen custard to melt considerably, so that any icy bits will be melted down as well, and proceed to churn the custard by hand normally and leave to freeze firm.

Conclusion:
But if you aren't the particularly picky type, I guess a frozen custard texture can still taste pretty good.

Is there a basic custard recipe for fruit puree to be added into to make into ice cream?

According to this query, is there a basic custard recipe where fruit puree can be added into to make into different varieties of fruit ice cream?

Well, yes and no.

And here's the "Yes" answer:
To make a basic custard recipe, you need:
1 egg yolk
50ml milk
50ml cream
15g to 20g sugar

Basically, this basic custard is good for fruit flavours and you should preferably only dump in frozen fruit puree (such as those found in Phoon Huat). Try not to use canned fruits because they tend to be less flavourful and taste more syrupy than frozen fruit puree that have not been treated in heavy syrup.

And here's the "No" answer:
Not all fruits are created equal. So, if you were to, say, mix in fresh watermelon into your custard, you WON'T get nice ice cream at all. The watermelon is too moist and will result in a pretty mild and icy concoction.

But it you were to toss in fresh durian flesh, maybe you stand a chance of having a pretty decent and strong flavoured ice cream.

So, the all important question: How much fruit puree should I use? Well, there is no hard and fast rule. Use as much puree as you like. It's really up to personal preference.

Make ice cream using baby food: Pear puree for babies = Pear ice cream for adults

I have been asked this many, many times before: "So what exactly is fruit puree?"

Well, if you wanted THE MOST accessible option, Gerber baby food is fruit puree and you can use it to make into a fruit ice cream. (In this case, I have decided to try out the Pear puree to see how fragrant it is. The last time I ate it was several years ago when I snitched a few sips from my nephew's jar while watching my aunt feed him. So I don't even have the faintest idea how it taste like - until now.)

And I can just imagine working on this recipe for a Top Chef challenge (if there ever was one like this): Given a measly budget of $3, you are required to whip up a frozen dessert item using any form of basic ingredients, processed or otherwise, bought from a supermarket.

The catch? Well, there isn't any, except that you only have 10 minutes to prepare it, 30 minutes to freeze it and the final product shouldn't look or taste cheap.

So, here goes:
80g jar of Gerber pear puree ($1.50)
50ml cream (approx. $0.50)
1 egg yolk ($0.25)
10g sugar ($0.02 or less)

Total cost: $2.27

1. Beat egg yolk and sugar until smooth and mix into cream. Pour into pot and turn on heat.
2. Cook gently until custard thickens and pour into pear puree inside bowl.

3. Hand churn ice cream.

So, the most important question is: How does it taste like?

Well, turned out a little disappointing. The pear wasn't as fragrant as it should be. The texture was very much like pear though: A little raspy with a sandy fibrous mouth feel. The custard was well-balanced, with the cream evened out by the fruit.

But I know what helps: Adding a 10ml dash of vodka while churning the ice cream! (An additional $0.53 to the cost.)

At $2.80, we still beat the challenge but I doubt it is enough to win it. But hey, you must admit baby food is a pretty neat idea for ice cream-making.

How to make Dark Orange Liqueur Chocolate ice cream: Rich, dark and bitter

A very good start to the Make Your Own Chocolate Ice Cream series is to build on something that you have already made and innovate a little more to make an unbeatable combination: Instead of just overdosing on super dark and rich chocolate ice cream, why not up the bitterness with a little citrusy-smelling Cointreau orange liqueur? Splendid!

Orange liqueur with its 40% alcoholic content and dark chocolate ice cream complement each other very well. Its almost like having one of those chocolate bottles that has hard liquor hidden inside, except in ice cream form?

If you are following this super dark and rich chocolate ice cream recipe, you can dose up to 50ml of Cointreau before you can say you have added too much.

And here is how a completely eaten Dark Orange Liqueur Chocolate looks like. This one had overdosed on alcohol, so it couldn't wait to start melting the moment it got out of the freezer. Which only means one thing: I had to eat it. Fast.

What to do this weekend: Make (Super!) Dark Chocolate Ice Cream!

I found this bar of really dark chocolate (85% cacao!) in the fridge. I don't remember who gave it to me or how it got there. Maybe it's not even mine. But I've seen it hanging around for quite a while now. All I know is that it is going to be made in a really yummy dark chocolate ice cream. (Mmmm mmm...)

So first thing's first: I take about 80g of the chocolate and break it into smaller bits in a bowl.

Then I toss them into a pot with 140ml of cream and heat it gently over a low fire.

Within minutes of heating, it melts considerably fast and becomes this gooey mess.

A few more minutes of heating transforms it into a silky, glossy chocolate paste-like texture. It is ready! Set aside.

Next up: Pour 70ml of milk, 25g of sugar and 2 egg yolks into another pot and stir swiftly to evenly mix everything up. Turn fire on and heat gently while stirring constantly until custard thickens to coat back of spoon.

Pour this cooked custard while it is still warm into the dark chocolate and cream mixture and stir evenly. Once mixed evenly, put in freezer to set. Take it out after an hour to hand whisk and leave it in the freezer to firm up.

After about 2 hours, the dark chocolate ice cream is set and ready to eat! But wait! It is frozen to a state whereby it is impossible to scoop because it is so dark and so rich in chocolate it has become a solid block.

I leave it in the chiller for about 5 minutes before I could stick a scoop in and make a ball out of it. Doesn't look that pretty but taste like damn fine dark chocolate ice cream to me.

I think some people might find this too rich and too sticky in texture. I think if you used an ice cream maker to churn this the blade might just break or the engine might use shut down. Or explode.

How to make chocolate ice cream (and invent your own flavours)

For the next couple of weeks or so, I am going to set out a simple goal: Make all kinds of crazy chocolate ice cream using whatever remaining pieces of eating chocolate I can find in my fridge.

This is perhaps the only way I can get rid of all the old chocolate. This includes all the unfinished, left-out-in-the-cold, forgotten-Christmas-presents that have been sitting around for quite a while and I doubt anyone would want to eat it any more.

Based on past experience, chocolate meant for eating is always not the most ideal ingredient to make into ice cream. Strange things happen to its texture when you heat them and turn out funny quite a lot of times - like being too soft or too mousse-like.

But nonetheless, we'll give it a shot: Once we are through, we shall evaluate how they taste.

Stick around for more updates in the days to come.

Final notes about making Mango Ice Cream...

This is how your mango ice cream should look like.

A slightly yellowish hue with bits of mango flesh sticking out.

Just remember: The more mango you use, the stronger the flavour gets but the more icy the ice cream would be due to the higher amounts of moisture present.

If flavour is not tangy enough, feel free to add a tablespoon or two more of lemon or lime juice to taste.

Best of tropical Singapore style ice cream: How to macerate fresh mango for Mango Ice Cream

So how do you macerate fresh mango for The Simplest Mango Ice Cream recipe? Well, it is really pretty easy:

Step 1: Slice mango in half and use a metal spoon to thinly scoop out the flesh. Toss out the large seed and do the same for the other half.

Step 2: Mix one mango with 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar in bowl (really depends on how sweet you want it or how big and sweet your mango is).

Step 3: Mix mango and sugar evenly by tossing them about. Add about 1 tablespoon of lime or lemon juice and toss together. The acid from the lime or lemon juice prevents the mango from oxidising.

Step 4: Transfer macerated mango into a holding bowl or container and store in fridge for at least 2 hours or up to a day before use. It should produce a lot of liquid by now.

Once you're done with macerating, just follow The Simplest Mango Ice Cream recipe and you are pretty much on your way to a wonderfully tangy tropical flavoured fruit ice cream!

Note: Pick the fleshiest mango you can find! If not, you might have to use 2 skinny mangoes instead of 1!

Ice cream fail: How to make ice cream that will cause you diabetes

I was flipping through an old issue of a supposedly authoritative food magazine and got the shock of my life.

There was a little feature about making ice cream at home and this was one of the recipes they provided: To make 1 litre of Basil Ice Cream, you need 500g of sugar!

This means that half of the total weight of ice cream is actually made out of sugar!

No doubt you will get an ice cream with a super smooth texture because there is a lot of sugar used (Remember: More sugar used, the smoother the texture). But I don't know how is it possible to consume an ice cream that is this sweet. And I can't imagine how it is even possible to taste the basil.

Eating this will make you sick. Epic fail. Period.

My Coffee Ice Cream refuses to freeze up properly and resembles a granita. What happened?

Simple.

Anytime an ice cream starts resembling the icy texture of granita, it could mean a few things. In the case of coffee ice cream, it might fail to set as firmly as say, chocolate ice cream, simply because it does not contain as much solid particles. (Remember that coffee ice cream is made using quite a miniscule quantity of coffee powder as compared to huge chunks of cooking chocolate that eventually gets made into chocolate ice cream.)

Therefore, in terms of proportion in a head-to-head comparison, there is much more moisture present in coffee ice cream as compared to chocolate ice cream, for example. Which explains the slightly icier texture.

So, if you want to make your coffee ice cream richer and more firm and scoopable with less iciness, simply cut the amount of milk by 25%. Or add an extra half or one egg yolk size and everything should even out nicely.

I can't transfer my freshly made ice cream when it has frozen solid? So how now?

After you've made your ice cream custard, hand-churned it about 2 or 3 times and left it to set firm, the texture of the eventual ice cream can be frozen pretty rock solid. Which means it can't be transferred immediately. So what can I do about it?

Well, timing is everything considering that ice cream can only be transferred from one holding bowling to another storage container if it is SOFT ENOUGH to be scooped.

With this in mind, here are 2 simple suggestions:

1. Leave it in the chiller or fridge for about 10 to 15 minutes. This should allow the ice cream to become softer when left to warm up under controlled temperature preventing it to not turn too soft too fast.

2. After the second or third churn by hand (so ice cream has already been sitting in the freezer for around 2 hours), if texture of ice cream is already semi-frozen and somewhat firm, leave ice cream in freezer for an additional 20 minutes at most and then transfer into a storage container.

Mix and match: Layering different flavours of ice cream

To get this sort of an effect for your homemade ice cream, all you need to do is to first make two complementary flavours of ice cream. They can be something like chocolate and bandung (rose syrup) ice cream as seen in the picture.

When filling them into a container, spoon one flavour of homemade ice cream, say chocolate flavour, and flatten it out as the first base layer. Leave to set in freezer for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, spoon in the second layer, bandung this time round, and flatten it on top of the first layer.

Repeat this as often as you like or with as many complentary flavours as you like.

When scooped into a ball, it can give a pretty decent effect.