Bizzerko remake

My husband and I are a bit obsessed with Amy's Ice Cream if we ever happen to be in Texas. In particular, they have a flavor, I don't know the exact name, with Bizzerko in the title. It is amazing. Amazing as in the best ice cream flavor I can remember having. I liked it best with a teeny bit of Chunky Natural Peanut Butter mixed in.

So that I don't have to go to Texas and hope this flavor is featured to get another taste of this, I'm going to attempt to replicate it for my husband's birthday. Since I don't have an ice cream maker, I'm going to have to do this by mixing what I think are the key elements into store-bought vanilla.

The elements are:
Cream cheese/cheesecake
Hazelnuts
A teeny bit of cinnamon
Graham Crackers
Pecan Praline

So in the name of "science" I'm actually going to try 3 things:
1) Make a cheesecake with all of these elements and mix into ice cream. I'm going to use this crust with a bit of cinnamon added in and the filling from this cheesecake with hazelnut in place of most of the peanut butter.
2) Since I loved the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cream Cheese Bars from Bakingblonde so much, I am going to make some, but use the crust from above. Instead of chocolate chips in the dough, I'll use hazelnut butter, and top with the extra pecans from the crust. I'll bake as cupcakes again.
3) Make this cream cheese, but use hazelnut butter instead of hazelnuts, and add a bit of cinnamon. Make these Praline Pecan Squares, and pulse in food processor. Mix both into ice cream.

I cannot wait to bake, taste test, and help pick the winner!

Lucky Charms Cupcakes

I wanted a St. Patrick's themed treat for my niece, nephew, and sister who are coming tonight for a sleepover.

Because my husband and I both still have a soft-spot for the cereals of our youth, I was sold on idea of Lucky Charms Cupcakes from the Cupcake Project.

However, I couldn't wrap my mind around the homemade corn syrup and homemade Lucky Charms. For one, I'm trying to be a little less crazy with the time I spend in the kitchen. For another, as a born and raised Midwestern girl, I could not get my mind around corn on the cob in March.

So I went the lazy way, and just followed the ideas from the Cupcake Project:
1) I used the Lucky Charms crust (doubled) in the recipe. However, I left lots of the marshmallows in the cereal mix (store-bought), only taking out some for the cupcake topping. I realized after I got the crust in the food processor that it turned an eery green. My husband taste-tested just the crust, and said it was delicious so I proceeded. Once I tasted the crust baked on the cupcake I also loved it, and I think the marshmallows must have added to the chewy sweetness. So if you do remove all marshmallows to avoid a funky color, maybe replace them with chopped white mini-marshmallows?

The doubled crust recipe filled 24 cupcakes + 4 star shaped cupcakes in my silicone mold.

2) I folded 2+ cups of Lucky Charms into the prepared batter of a Betty Crocker yellow cake mix.

The batter with the extra cereal filled 24 cupcakes + 6 stars, but the cupcakes were not overly-filled (I could have made fewer, bigger cupcakes).

3) Normally I love chocolate frosting on yellow cupcakes. So I made the sticky chocolate icing, that I've mentioned here before.

My husband and I each tried 1) a quarter of a cupcake with the sticky chocolate, and 2) a quarter of a cupcake with this buttercream frosting, leftover from yesterday's brownie pie.

The buttercream won hands down!!!

So I frosted the rest with green buttercream and topped with the reserved Lucky Charms marshmallows.

Next up? If I have the energy after the sleepover, I'll make the kids either green or rainbow pancakes for St. Patrick's day tomorrow!

Frosted Oreo Brownie Pie

With my husband home on spring break and lots of recent family gatherings, I have a few new recipes to share before I forget what I did!:
The first:
Frosted Oreo Brownie Pie
A) I used this Oreo crust recipe.
I made 1.5 times the crust recipe, and used a 9" in pie plate + 1 cupcake to bake these in (that way my husband and I got to try these the night before!!!)
B) I used the Betty Crocker Brownie mix with the syrup pouch. I also added a bit more (maybe around 2 tbls. ?? Hershey's syrup), and a few handfuls of chopped semi-sweet chocolate chips (mini would have been perfect) folded into the batter.
C) I layered half the batter into the pans, and then spread about 5 crushed Oreos over the batter, topped with the remaining batter, and baked until a toothpick barely came clean (no idea how long this was!)
D) I put a thin layer of this buttercream, a new favorite, on top of the brownies the same night they were baked. The frosting was quickly melting so I covered up the brownies, and made a nice, thin smooth layer of frosting on top the next day.

It was absolutely sinful (maybe the wrong dessert for a confirmation dinner??) and delicious! But it was super rich, so it is best enjoyed with a scoop of ice cream.

Lemon Tahini dressing

This dressing is AMAZING. I literally licked the food processor clean after making this!
Recipe is from Oh She Glows:
Lightened Up Protein Power Goddess Bowl

I haven't made the protein power bowl, just the dressing. I put it on green salads and steamed veggies, and since I am a meat eater, on top of grilled fish, chicken, seriously anything would taste good with this stuff on top!

I made mine with no water, 2 tbls. olive oil, almost 3/4 c. lemon juice, 1/3 c tahini, 4 garlic cloves and 1/3 c. nutritional yeast.

I also wanted to post today because I saw a quote on a food blog I had to share:
"Remember, a balanced meal is a cookie in each hand!" - Anonymous

Of course, my husband added--And a cookie in your mouth!

Lemon goodies for my mom's retirement party!

Filled this cake from smittenkitchen (made lemon with some lemon extract and lemon zest) with lemon curd made using this recipe for lemon curd and this method from Joy of Baking. I made some as mini cupcakes filled with the lemon curd and topped with Ina Garten's cream cheese frosting from her amazing Pineapple and Carrot Cake mixed with seedless raspberry preserves.

I also made some in a 9 in spring form pan, sliced in two layers, with the lemon curd mixed with the seedless raspberry preserves in between the two layers, topped with a simple buttercream.

The layer cake version was best, but honestly for the cake part, a yellow cake mix with the lemon adaptation would beat my implementation of the smittenkitchen recipe. Don't know what I did wrong.

However, my mom's good old lemon bars topped all of this.

Brownie Stuffed Cookies

This idea is AMAZING inside the peanut butter dough from my mom's kiss cookies (with any varieties of mix ins). Actually the idea makes any cookie that pairs well with chocolate incredibly moist.

Texas Cake Batter Cookie Dough Ice Cream Cupcake

To spare the readers of The Cupcake Project and Scoopalicious who are hosting the online ice cream cupcake contest, I relegated my very long winded explanation of the development of these cupcakes into a separate post. Here, I will just post the mouth watering photos and recipes.

I say recipes, because this dessert is really several desserts in one:



1) Make an edible chocolate wrapper

2) Make Texas sheet cake and its accompanying frosting, and put an appropriately sized circle of this miracle cake into the bottom of the chocolate shell/wrapper

3) Make edible macadamia nut butterscotch cookie dough (my favorite cookie flavor combination), and flatten into an appropriately sized circle and place this on top of the cake



4) Smush the cookie dough down onto the cake a bit because you want more ice cream to fit in your chocolate wrapper!

I cannot even tell where the frosting ends and the cookie dough begins...



5) Make cake batter sprinkle ice cream. This is the easiest and arguably the best part! Place a scoop of cake batter sprinkle ice cream on top of the dough. This picture was a couple of days after I made the cupcakes, because the ice cream needed to recover from my 100 degree kitchen!



Be thankful if your house is less than 100 degrees and the ice cream is not melted by the time you can stick a spoon in it:



6) Make hot fudge sauce and sticky chocolate icing. Mix equal parts to create a chocolate sauce that is a bit less dark than the hot fudge sauce.

7) Drizzle (ahem pour!) this on top of the ice cream!



8) Enjoy! But, to spare yourself a food coma, enjoy with a friend.



Also, these are best eaten when they are first made. Then the cake is warm and gooey and so is the chocolate sauce, to perfectly offset the cool ice cream.

Recipes!!

Edible Chocolate Wrapper
I got the idea for this from Made with Pink's ice cream cupcake post.
However, lacking candy melts and silicone baking cups, I could not follow that recipe so well. I looked up recipes for homemade magic shell. These used chocolate chips and some form of butter, oil or shortening, so I ran with that idea. I used jumbo aluminum foil cupcake wrappers instead of the silicone baking cups, and these actually worked quite well.

Ingredients:
1 bag's worth of chocolate chips (I used half milk and half semi-sweet)
1 tbsp of butter
About 1 tbsp. canola oil

Combine ingredients in a double boiler and stir until melted. Use a spoon to spread the melted chocolate thickly all over the inside of the cupcake wrapper. Place in refrigerator until well chilled and hardened before unwrapping.

It works best to leave the wrapper on while you fill the edible chocolate wrapper, to prevent your fingers from melting the chocolate:



Oh no! I had wanted to unwrap these with my mouth!!!

Texas Sheet Cake and Frosting
Texas Sheet Cake


Macadamia Nut Butterscotch Safe to Eat Raw Cookie Dough



As the dough base, I used the dough from the Best Big, Fat, Chewy Chocolate Cookie, substituting for the egg and egg yolk with:
3 tbls milk, 1.5 tbsp melted butter, and 1.5 tsp baking powder
You may need to add a bit extra milk at the end.
I don't know exactly the ratio of macadiama nuts to butterscotch chips to dough that I used. You can adjust this to taste, and since the dough is safe, taste to your heart's desire!



Cake Batter Sprinkle Ice Cream




Coldstone's cake batter ice cream is my favorite ice cream. Thus, it was obvious my submission required cake batter ice cream. Unfortunately this is not very common in grocery stores, and I have no Coldstone ANYWHERE near me. I also lack an ice cream maker, so I had to improvise.

Ingredients

2 quarts vanilla ice cream (I used 1.5 Quarts of Dean's and a pint of vanilla from my local ice cream shop)
1 yellow cake mix (I used Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Yellow Cake Mix)
Rainbow Sprinkles to taste

Mix together. I used my Kitchen Aid mixer until the cake mix was distributed throughout the ice cream (no lumps). Using the full box of cake mix provides a VERY strong cake batter flavor. Just like eating yellow cake batter with a creamy ice cream texture. And since I am not afraid of salmonella (perhaps irrationally), I have plenty of experience with yellow cake batter.

However, you can add the cake mix slowly and have some tastes here and there to get the flavor YOU like most! This is actually what I did.

I also just added sprinkles until I reached a distribution that looked appealing. Enough sprinkles to notice, not enough to mess with the cake batter flavor.

Finally, because there just wasn't enough chocolate on the top half of this ice cream cupcake:

Chocolate Sauce


I set out to make Smitten Kitchen's Hot Fudge Sauce.
I have made this before and really liked it. My husband, a dark chocolate lover, loved it this time too. However, I thought it was a bit too dark to go well with the other parts of the cupcake. Because I also had some extra cupcakes from my experimenting while deciding on the final recipe, I decided to also make an amended version of Pioneer Woman's Sticky Chocolate Icing. I mixed equal parts of both for the final sauce.


This one is too cold -- right out of the fridge



Oh yea, that's better:



Smitten Kitchen's Hot Fudge Sauce
I used 1/2 tbsp. vanilla rather than the suggested tablespoon of rum.

Pioneer Woman's Sticky Chocolate Icing
This time, I used the whole can of sweetened condensed milk, some butterscotch chips (a handful), and about 10-12 oz. semi-sweet chips, as well as the original 2 tbsp. of butter.

And finally, if you choose to make these when it is 96 degrees outside with no air conditioning, be ready for a puddle:



Best puddle I've ever tasted!