This is the second time I am trying it and the second time I am getting it wrong.
Last time I dropped the whole cake halfway through the baking process, while I was trying to check on doneness. You can refresh your memory here. This time even before starting, I managed to drop the box of cornmeal on the floor. On the plus side, the box did not empty completely and some of the cornmeal did not spill onto the floor, leaving me with sufficient cornmeal to use in the cake. On the negative side, the cornmeal did make quite a mess on the floor.
If that was not enough, like last time I forgot that I was supposed to put the espresso water and cocoa after I divided the batter. I would like to blame the whole cleaning up of the corn meal from the floor process for my temporary absent mindedness, but I dont think it was just that. The cake is just jinxed.
Since it was too late to do anything I thought I will make a mocha chocolate swirl bread. So I added 4tsp of cocoa, 3 tsp of sugar and 2 tsp of yogurt to one of the parts and baked it. It might not be like the original, but it did not turn that bad either. Anyway I will try again. Maybe third time’s the charm?
If you are like me, then the mention of cookies, alcohol, and ice cream in the same breath would make your eyes brighten up and your mouth drool! That is if the long name doesn’t scare you away!
The idea behind this crazy sounding name came the other day while I was thinking of how to incorporate the cookies left from the time I made the Mocha Chocolate chip cookies.
Now, during the visit to my grandparents’ place, somebody had invited us for dinner and I had the most amazingly creamy strawberry ice cream- which was homemade and completely eggless. The aunty told it was a fairly simple eggless recipe with equal proportions of milk, cream and milk powder and she adds strawberry crusher which lends the sweetness and flavour to the ice cream. But, I wanted to add the cookies, so I thought I would replace the strawberry crusher with crumbled cookies.
The Bailey’s was something I remember from one of David Lebovitz “no ice cream machine” ice cream. Just before leaving US for my India vacation I got my copy of Room for Dessert and I remember seeing David’s chocolate and banana ice cream that requires no ice cream maker.
Now the thing is I think I am allergic to banana. I think so because everytime I eat a banana I get this horrible-horrible pain in my stomach. This allergy was never there before. I experienced it for the first time when I was at some one’s place and had taken my banana bread for them. I ate it at night. The next day I had severe pain. Since we had eaten out I thought it was a result of that. But it remained for quite a few days, because I was still eating bananas. Anyway, our home stock of bananas finished and so did the pain. Still it did not strike me. After few days again the same thing and the same happened when my in-laws were there. The only food that was common all these times was banana. So well, I guess I am allergic to it, which kind of sucks because I love banana bread!
So with these two recipes and a little help to get it all together from here I set out to make my jacked up mocha cookies, dulce de leche ice cream!
Dulce de leche (pronounced DOOL-say day LAY-chay) is Spanish for “milk candy”. It tastes quite like caramel but with the additional taste of cooked milk. (Technically, dulce de leche is a type of caramel.) It’s often used in liquid form as a sauce for ice cream, cakes, cookies, just about anything that needs a sweet topping. In solid form, it is most often eaten as a tasty candy.
The ice cream turned out more like mocha cake batter ice cream.-probably because of the soggy cookies that I had used. Anyway, that wasn’t a problem. Only problem that I had was that it was melting too soon. Homemade ice creams are generally more soft than store bought- they have the soft serve consistency. But this one was melting way too fast. It is really hot here but still not so much that a ice cream can’t behave itself for a few minutes. I guess it could be the alcohol level that did not allow the ice cream to freeze too much. The person, whose original recipe I used, does not add alcohol and has a very creamy ice cream thanks to the milk powder in the recipe. And since I added alcohol, as well as the milk powder, it might have changed the science behind freezing the ice cream. I, actually like my ice cream melted. So I wasn’t complaining, but my mom likes her ice cream “ice cream consistency” (which she couldn’t get because the tub had been out for quite a while as I was busy clicking some photographs). She loved the taste though.
The melted ice cream did make a darn good adult cookie and cream shake! But next time I would skip the cognac and see how that works.
We won! We won! India got home the Cricket World Cup after 28 years! What football is to Europe, super bowl is to the Americans, cricket is to India. Its a religion here- and every one goes crazy with competitiveness when it comes to cricket. And yesterday was the final of World Cup 2011- where India took on Sri Lanka and made history when Dhoni, India’s captain (and my current crush!), hit a six to cross Sri Lanka’s score of 274 with still 6 wickets left in hand. Its such an exhilerating feeling and still sinking in! The last time we won, in 1983, I was not even born and had only heard and seen pictures of Kapil Dev, the then Indian team captain, holding the coveted Cup. I am so proud to be an Indian today and I think I share this sentiment with 1.2 billion Indians. Team India you did us proud!
Today was my third day of the massage treatment and I just did not want to go. I slept real late- the excitement of winning the World Cup made it difficult to sleep last night. In fact, I have been sleeping quite late these days. For the past few weeks I didn’t get time to sit on the internet too much. And ever since I am back at my parents place, I realised there was a lot of blogging to catch up on. So, I have been busy thinking what else can I make. And as a result, I’m surfing through all the lovely food blogs out in the web world. And once you start doing that, there’s just no end! Plus, going through all the lovely blog sites at night leaves me so hungry that it becomes difficult to sleep with a growling stomach.
The cookies baking in the oven
As a result of incomplete sleep for the past few days, getting up early today was a task. Also, it’s not a relaxing kind of massage that I’m going for. The old lady who does it uses all her strength and it is quite painful. In fact, day before I hurt my knee really badly (I’m very clumsy and keep bumping into stuff), so when I went yesterday morning I told her to massage gently. But she didn’t. In fact, she put even more pressure! I oohed! & aahed! but she continued, saying that this would help the swelling to go. And well it kind of did, but I don’t know if it was a result of time or the massage. They do say, though, that since she uses so much pressure and probably because of the heat generated in the body, it helps one lose weight!Well, as they say – no pain, no gain and since I am already seeing some results I pushed myself to get up and go for the massage.
I told you about the tea party my mom had kept for her friends. Besides the caramelized onion tartlets, I also made some mocha chocolate chip cookies that day. I did not want to make regular chocolate chip cookies, and found the addition of coffee to the cookie batter a good twist. I found the recipe here. Kate’s site is beautiful- very creative with mouth-watering photographs. I saw a lot of recipes on her site and they are all going on my to-do list!
I did, though, like always, goof up with this recipe too. I know, such an easy recipe and I make a mistake here too! Well, I accidently left the oven on grill setting instead of bake and as a result the tops browned and I thought the cookies got baked. When I took them out and was putting the second batch- I realised the goof-up! I could have put them back in- but I thought of keeping the almost baked cookies for a cookie dough ice cream, which, hopefully, I’ll be making tomorrow. By the way, the cookies were a hit. Everyone enjoyed them!
Seriously this cake is jinxed.
