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Baking Sisters

Savory and sweet

Posted on 11 February, 2024 6:27 pm by Jennifer Comment

Today counts as a double because it was a Baking Sisters day, and since we’re still working our way through the states, this month we decided to tackle Montana and Nebraska.

I should note, for the record, that most states don’t actually have any sort of ‘official’ food (although some certainly do), so we have to rely on the internet to give us ideas, on either something the state is known for (producing) or something that’s most often found in restaurants in that area. So for Montana, we picked Butte Pasties, and for Nebraska we picked popcorn balls, because apparently Nebraska is a huge producer of popcorn.

Pasties are one of those foods that’s been around forever, in various forms. Let’s face it, basically every culture eventually develops a food that can be carried around and eaten without the need for a plate or silverware, and the outer casing is usually some kind of pastry dough. In this case, it’s a basic butter-based pastry dough (there are other versions that use lard, but as we’ve determined in previous challenges, my sister and I prefer to avoid that when possible). We made the dough and then, even though the recipe didn’t call for it, popped it into the fridge to chill while we made the filling. I chose to make the traditional filling, which is cubed beef, onions, and potatoes.

Once you have a huge bowl of filling, then you divide the dough into 4 pieces, and roll each piece out into a round the size of the dinner plate (yes, really). Divide the filling between the four ginormous dough circles, then fold the dough in half over the filling, and seal the edges with a little bit of whisked egg. The tops are given a quick egg wash, and then they go into the oven and bake for roughly an hour, which seems like an inordinately long time to bake anything involving pastry dough, but which is necessary for all the raw meat and veggies to actually cook through.

It’s hard to get a sense of size from these, I know, but Richard and I split one between us and it was plenty for an extremely filling lunch. The rest will go into the freezer for future lunches.

These were fairly easy to throw together, and I could easily see doing similar pasties (maybe without the potato but perhaps some additional veggies – carrot, double the onion, a little chopped celery, leeks) and even ground meat instead of the cubed stew meat to save some time in the prep work. Delicious.

And now on to Nebraska. My sister and I decided to make Peanut Butter Popcorn Balls, because why not. And here’s where it gets amusing.

Today happens to also be a Big Day if you care about Sports Ball. So Richard went to the store first thing this morning like he usually does the morning of our Baking Sisters sessions, except that we very belatedly realized that the stores would be packed due to everyone getting ready for the big Sports Ball Event. Oops. Anyway. The point of this little sidebar is that the only popcorn he could find was little bags of microwave popcorn. Okay. So those should still be fine, right?

Ha. No. The package said the bag should only take about 1 to 1 1/2 minute to pop. After zapping it for probably closer to 8 minutes, I still didn’t have more than half the kernels popped. In fact, despite the fact that the package said each bag should have produced over 5 cups of popped corn (and I only needed 5 cups), I ended up having to microwave three separate bags, in order to get enough popped corn to use for the recipe. And on the other side of the videocamera, my sister was having very similar problems with her plain popcorn she was trying to pop in a pan on the stove. We both found it pretty amusing that the most difficult part of today’s baking adventure was popping corn. Thanks Nebraska!

But anyway. Corn finally popped, you then make a caramel out of corn syrup and sugar, and once that’s done, you stir in peanut butter and a little vanilla, and then you very quickly mix that into the popcorn until it’s well coated. Let it sit for just long enough so you can work with it, and then it gets formed into balls.

These are definitely snack sized little confections (each one has only about half a cup of popcorn in them), but they turned out quite tasty. My caramel was the perfect consistency so the balls hold their shape without it being too brittle. The peanut butter flavor comes through, but also the caramel, and the whole thing is a chewy, delicious treat. Nebraska, you are forgiven!

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.



Baking Sisters: The Christmas Edition

Posted on 30 December, 2023 7:56 pm by Jennifer Comment

This month, instead of doing our baking date through virtual means, we decided we would actually do it in person. It was my year to host, so my entire family was here (you would not think we could cram eleven full grown adults into our tiny living room but somehow it always works out), and my sister and I figured we could sneak in some baking time then.

We’ve really enjoyed this season of Great British Bake Off – the new host is much better; the format was back to what it used to be; nearly every week my sister and I wanted to bake at least one of the recipes (unlike in years past when we’ve been uninspired), and sometimes we have even struggled with *which* recipe to make because we wanted to make them all.

So for Christmas we decided we wanted to make a plaited bread. Christmas morning I mixed up the dough for another lardy cake (since my sister hadn’t yet made that one), while she mixed up the dough for a basic white bread. Then once that was ready, we rolled it out super thin and brushed it with garlic herb butter. Once that was rolled up, we then had a discussion of how many strands to do in our plait. The contestants had to do a minimum of 5, but we decided to do six. My sister started cutting the long roll, and then as she finished we realized she’d actually cut it into eight pieces instead. Oops.

Ah well. We roped my niece into helping while my mom took pictures, and we rolled each piece out into a long, thing rope. Then we got to plaiting. My sister wanted to find a video, but I was pretty sure I had an idea of what to do.

Things got a little silly.

Three women laughing, heads back, while forming bread.

Okay, we probably should have watched a video, but once we got started, we got the hang of it.

Two women plaiting a loaf of bread. Picture shows just their hands and the bread in progress.

Ta da!

Two women holding a large plaited loaf of bread

It was a lot of fun to make, and it was nice to be able to bake together in the same place for a change. And bonus, it was absolutely delicious!



Lardy, (not) lardy

Posted on 2 December, 2023 6:10 pm by Jennifer 4 Comments

This year, once again, my little sister and I watched the Great British Bake Off together (Great British Baking Show in the US), and did our version of a bake-along. Every week we picked one of the challenges and attempted to bake it, within the time constraints that the challengers were given.

Yesterday was the finale, and while we were very sad that our two favorite contestants (Tasha and Saku) didn’t actually make it to the finale, we were both quite happy with the person who won.

Options for the finale included eclairs, which was, eh, mainly because we’ve both made choux pastry a bazillion times in the past so it wasn’t going to be any sort of challenge, and a three-layer fancy cake, which neither of us wanted to make because that’s a lot of cake when there’s only two people in the house. The third option, however, was something neither of us (or the contestants, for that matter) had heard of: Lardy Cake.

Lardy Cake is a yeast-based dough that is laminated with a mixture of butter and lard. The recipe the contestants were given, however, sounded absolutely revolting, as it included (yes you guessed it) lard, as well as a bunch of dried fruit. On a whim, though, I started poking around on the internets, and lo, the internets graced me with recipes for lardy cake that not only did not include lard, but also did not include dried fruit. Specifically, this recipe.

Normally I would have been timing myself, but because we veered significantly from the GBBO approved recipe, I didn’t bother setting a timer. So this morning, after the usual round of cat-related chores (filling feeders, scooping litter boxes, giving the diaper-clad incontinent cat a butt bath, why yes, my life is super glamourous, why do you ask?), I set up the dough. An hour later, I rolled it out and spread two thirds of it with a mix of softened butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg.

Lardy cake dough, rolled out into a rectangle, with spiced, sweetened butter.

Then I did the first of 5 envelope folds, which are how you get the layers in laminated dough. You fold one third of the dough to the middle, then the other outer third over the first third, and let it rest. Turn the dough, gently roll it out into a rectangle again, and then repeat the envelope fold a couple more times. This helps spread the flavored butter out between ever thinner layers of the dough.

After the final fold, I pressed it into a greased springform pan. I did smoosh it into a circle but during the rising process it kind of, well, unsmooshed itself. Ah well.

Lardy cake batter, brushed with egg wash and ready for baking.

Half an hour in the oven and here’s my finished Lardy Cake. It isn’t very exciting to look at, I realize.

Fully baked lardy cake

But look at what’s inside!

A slice of lardy cake, showing off the interior layers. And yes, that ant is part of the plate – it’s Calamityware!

I am super pleased with all those layers.

The cake itself is more like a sweet bread, and is actually very reminiscent of a croissant in that the outer layers were flakey and buttery, and the inner layers are soft and lightly sweet. Cake or bread or whatever you want to call it, however, this thing is absolutely delicious. And except for about half an hour of folding and resting, it doesn’t take all that much effort to put together. It’s certainly not a fast bake, as there were two hour-long rises before it even went into the oven, but oh, it’s definitely worth it.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.



Baking Sisters: Alaska

Posted on 13 March, 2022 9:28 pm by Jennifer Comment

When my sister and I discussed what to do for Alaska, we tossed around a couple ideas. Technically the official recipe is a salmon pie made with a puff pastry crust, but my sister is not a fan of fish. So instead we decided to make sourdough the over-arching theme, since that’s a common thing up there.

Obviously we had to make sourdough bread, but if you’re doing true sourdough, you do not use commercial yeast, but instead use a starter that you’ve either nurtured for years by carefully feeding it (cough cough, kept in the fridge and fed once every month or three when I remember it’s there), or something you throw together quickly because your old starter died (my sister).

I got my sourdough sponge started Saturday afternoon. Before I went to bed, I mixed up the dough, then put that into the fridge. After that, it seemed like a good idea before the fact to plan to get up at 5am and pull it out of the fridge…except that I forgot that it was Daylight Saving Time day, and that meant it was actually 4am (no matter what the clock said) and since I’m going through another round of super fun insomnia, that meant I was riding on roughly 3 hours of sleep. Fun times!

But anyway. Dough comes out of the fridge, then gets shaped, then gets set aside for another couple hours, so that by the time we were ready to meet via video call, all we had left to do was pop it into the oven.

This is where things got interesting for me. For years my oven has taken just a couple extra minutes to bake things. But during an attempt at making cookies last week, things were taking more than twice the normal time to bake, and after we bought a hanging thermometer, we discovered why. The oven is now heating roughly 100 degrees lower than the dial says.

So I turned the oven up as high as it would go (500), put my boules on the bottom rack, and crossed my fingers.

Thankfully, they baked, although they aren’t as browned as I might have liked.

But one cannot live on bread alone (ha!), so we also made cake and cookies, both of which used sourdough starter, and also soup, which did not use sourdough starter, but was instead to join the bread for lunch.

First up was the soup. I decided to make this Cheesy Broccoli Soup based solely on the fact that we had a lot of broccoli in the fridge that needed using up. So while I was waiting for the oven to come to temperature, I threw all the soup ingredients together and got that simmering. I also stirred in some leftover chicken sausage, because soup is an excellent way to clean out the fridge.

Next up was a Sourdough Chocolate Cake. This cake involves a sponge that’s stirred together a couple hours before you’re ready to bake it, with sourdough starter, flour, and water. Once it’s baked, then it’s topped with an espresso buttermilk glaze. It’s also supposed to be drizzled with some melted chocolate, but I decided that that was a bit overkill, so left that out.

And finally, the cookies – Sourdough Soft Ginger Cookies from Ruth Allman’s book Alaska Sourdough. These are spiced with molasses, ginger, cloves, cardamom, and lemon zest. They were supposed to be cut-out cookies, but by the time we got to them I was starting to wear out, so I just pulled out a cookie scoop and made ginger lumps instead.

So how did everything turn out?

The soup was super tasty – the addition of the sausage worked really well, plus since I doubled all the veggies it was quite filling and substantial.

The cookies will not win any prizes at a beauty contest, but they’re actually really tasty. I would definitely make these again – super quick to stir together and they hold their shape really well so would work for either scoops or cut-outs.

Aside from being slightly burnt on the sides (see above for my oven temperature woes), the cake was delicious. The addition of the buttermilk and the espresso powder kept the icing from being too sweet (which is usually a problem with glazes).

Oh, and because all of that wasn’t nearly enough, I also made Sourdough Cinnamon Crumb Cake for breakfast before the official baking extravaganza started, primarily because I’d doubled my starter in preparation and had a lot to use up to get it back to a manageable amount before it goes back to lurk quietly in the fridge for another couple weeks.

This was…a lot of crumb topping (and I didn’t even make the full amount the recipe called for), but it’s delicious and so I can forgive the mess involved in eating it.

Overall, this was an extremely successful baking day, even if I did have to do a bazillion adjustments with oven temperature in order to get things to cook.



Baking Sisters: Alabama

Posted on 12 February, 2022 3:44 pm by Jennifer 1 Comment

This year for Baking Sisters, my sister and I decided that we would try making the official (or unofficial) foods of each state. Initially we toyed with the idea of picking and choosing and skipping around, but after January’s bake, we decided to focus on one state a month. And since we’re going in alphabetical order, that meant Alabama was first.

All the ingredients used for today’s session

Not all states have an official food, but in Alabama’s case, it’s the Lane Cake. This is a four-layer vanilla sponge, filled with a mix of dried fruits and pecans soaked in bourbon and cooked into a sort of caramel, and frosted with a cream cheese and whipped cream frosting. The recipe also calls for coconut but we don’t like coconut, so both my sister and I decided to leave it out.

We didn’t want to make a ginormous cake where we were unsure about the flavor, so we decided to quarter the recipe, which made for some fun with calculator apps when trying to work out measurements. I still did four layers, but used my little 4-inch springform pans, while my sister did larger pans, but only two layers.

My four cute little cake layers

While the cakes were baking, I made the filling. I soaked chopped dried apples and dates in some bourbon, then cooked egg yolks, sugar, and butter until thickened, and mixed it all together with some toasted chopped pecans. That was put into the fridge to chill.

The final step was to make the frosting, which consists of cream cheese, powered sugar, and whipping cream, all blended together until light and fluffy. Then I assembled the cakes and frosted the whole thing. Ta da! Look, it’s a very small Lane cake!

Coffee cup included for scale.

Here it is, sliced, so you can see the layers of cake and filling.

So how did it turn out? Well, the cake itself is tasty, and the frosting is absolutely delicious. The filling is…different. It’s not a bad thing – there’s a caramel sort of feel to it, and it’s tasty enough, but the bourbon was a little overpowering, so I’m not sure it was all that necessary. Still, it was fun to make, so I’m counting that as a win.

Next up, cookies. Alabama Cookies, to be exact. And yes, this is another recipe that calls for coconut except we left it out because coconut is Not Food.

There’s a bazillion variations of this cookie recipe on the internet and I don’t think it’s necessarily unique to Alabama, although maybe it’s the pecans that makes them claim it, who knows. It’s basically a Jumble Cookie, in that it’s a standard cookie base into which a bunch of random extra things get mixed – in this case oats, chocolate chips, toasted pecans, and weirdly, Rice Krispies.

These are not the prettiest cookies in the world, clearly, but they’re certainly tasty, and super quick to throw together. Definitely worth making again.

And finally, we decided to tackle something savory – the Alabama White Chicken Sandwich, which is basically shredded chicken on a bun, with White BBQ Sauce, and topped with coleslaw and pickles. We both started with precooked chicken (Richard picked up a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store), and store bought coleslaw (since none of us are big coleslaw eaters), then stirred up the sauce (which is a new-to-both-of-us thing – we’d never actually heard of white BBQ sauce before this). It is white, by the way, because of the horseradish and the mayonnaise.

Here’s my sandwich, all assembled.

I admit I was a bit hesitant about this recipe because I am not normally a fan of horseradish, but this turned out actually super tasty (and in fact I added in a bunch more horseradish because I felt like the sauce needed a bit of an extra kick).

So overall, this month’s bake was a delicious success.

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.



Chocolate – the new fruit

Posted on 12 December, 2021 9:47 pm by Jennifer Comment

Today was cold outside, and I had originally planned to be driving kittens places, except that that changed so instead I stayed home and did laundry and pet kittens and knit, and also I baked, because hello, have you met me.

I made another batch of the Alfajores because I’m apparently not rolling out my dough thin enough or else the number the recipe claims is a giant lie (there is no way it makes 42 filled cookies (two cookies per sandwich) – that would be 84 cookies from one batch and I definitely did *not* get that many cookies!). I’m not going to bore you with pictures of that though, because they’re not very exciting to look at yet – just pale brown discs that are now resting in the freezer until it’s time to assemble.

However, I also made panettone, because my sister and I decided to extend our little Great British Baking Show bake-along to include the two holiday episodes they released to Netflix (which technically were from 2020, but eh, who cares, it’s more baking!).

I’ve never been a huge fan of panettone because 1) it tends to be kind of dry, and 2) it usually includes a lot of dried fruit, which I don’t like (raisins and all their wrinkly little counterparts are Not Food). But it looked intriguing, and when compared to the other two possibilities (a mincemeat pudding – which is chock *full* of the Not Food things) or an illusion cake (neither of us was in the mood to deal with an entire full-sized cake), panettone was the natural choice. Plus, by making it myself I could replace the fruit with something far more tasty, like, say, chocolate.

Technically we were supposed to make 12 individual panettone, but I pondered trying to turn a muffin tin into a set of panettone molds, and gave up and made one big one instead.

Panettone is basically just an enriched bread dough, but you mix stuff in (dried fruit or nuts or chocolate) after the first rise. Otherwise it’s really not that much different than any other bread dough out there.

I used a large metal bowl because I wasn’t entirely sure what else would work, and it was clearly too big, so when it was finished baking, it….does not look like a panettone.

A loaf of panettone

But it tastes fine. I might have added a little more chocolate than it called for because I wanted to use up the remains of the bag of semisweet chips in the cupboard, so you definitely get chocolate in every bite, which helps because oh hey, what do you know, apparently a main characteristic of panettone, even if you bake it yourself, is that it is dry.

But now I have made panettone (and will be gifting large chunks of it to other people) so I can check that one off the list and never bother again.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.



Baking Sisters – the 2021 Cookie Edition

Posted on 9 December, 2021 6:20 am by Jennifer Comment

Yes, yes, I know that we’re all done now with the Great British Baking Show for another year, but there’s just one more baking-related catch-up I need to do. At least this one is more recent, as in from this past weekend.

Each year since we’ve been doing our monthly Baking Sisters video bakes, my sister and I pick some sort of general theme. But then we hit December and we’ve already got a lot of holiday-related baking to do, so December usually is just cookies – whatever kind we feel like making. This past Saturday we baked our cookies together over video chat, and had a lot of fun.

This apparently being the year of ignoring traditions, I asked Richard if there were any cookies he absolutely had to have at Christmas, and he and I agreed that it might be nice to have something ginger-flavored but otherwise no. So since I’ve got two cookie exchanges going on this year instead of the usual one, I decided I’d take this opportunity to try out a bunch of new recipes, to see if any of them might work.

Conveniently, King Arthur Baking Company recently posted a list of 14 new recipes, some of which sounded super interesting, so I picked four:

I made the chocolate molasses dough first, since that had to chill for a couple hours, and then moved on to the alfajores, which only had to chill for one hour. Next I mixed up the rye ginger dough and got those into the oven, and then moved on to the lemon shortbread…except that the recipe calls for masa harina, which I don’t have and didn’t want to have to go buy (there’s only so much room in the freezer for flours that don’t get used very often), so instead I did some quick Googling and found these Whipped Lemon Shortbread cookies and decided to try those instead.

After the rye and the lemon cookies were cooling, then I made the chocolate molasses thumbprints, filling them with a molasses and chocolate ganache after they were cooled. And finally, I rolled out the alfajores, and once they were cooled, sandwiched a couple with some of the dulce de leche I made earlier that morning.

So how did they all turn out, you ask?

Well, as tasty as chocolate and molasses might *sound*, I did not actually like those at *all*. Nor was I a fan of the Rye Ginger – there was something very off-putting about the texture of the rye in those cookies. As for the Whipped Lemon Shortbread, something was wrong with that recipe because they literally crumbled into pieces when I tried to remove them from the pan. Delicious pieces, mind you, but somehow I doubt anyone in either cookie exchange would be happy to get a bag of crumbs, no matter how tasty they might be.

The alfajores, however, were a success. The cookie is thin and has a delicate flavor of spice (interestingly the coffee didn’t come through much at all) and the dulce de leche added just the right amount of creamy texture and sweetness.

As for the rest, well luckily Richard liked them, so they’re all his.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.



Round and round

Posted on 8 December, 2021 8:05 am by Jennifer 2 Comments

And now we’ve reached the end of the GBBO catch-up: the finale. Our options were: carrot cake (signature), Belgian buns (technical) and a collection of tea party treats (showstopper). We did ponder the carrot cake, as that sounded tasty, but the Belgian buns won out.

And what, you might be asking along with contestants, is a Belgian bun? It’s a layered sweet roll (think cinnamon roll) topped with a glaze and a cherry. Also they had to put raisins in theirs which my sister and I both agree would make it completely inedible.

After all the much fussier recipes over the previous nine weeks, this one felt almost anticlimactic. I’ve made cinnamon rolls a bazillion times before, although I don’t think I’ve ever filled them with lemon curd before. You make the dough, then make the lemon curd while the dough is going through its first rise, then roll out the dough and slather it with the curd and roll it up into a log, then cut those into even slices, and put them on a cookie sheet for their second proofing. Once the filled rolls have puffed up a bit, they get popped into the oven until golden brown, and then you brush them with a glaze, and ta da, you have Belgian buns.

You’ll note that I did not bother with the cherry on the top because it didn’t seem worth having to go out and buy something I’d only be picking off to throw away anyway.

I got mine done just a couple minutes over the timeline, and only because I was using the proofing setting on my oven to help them rise.

Verdict – they’re super tasty, but if I was to do these again (which I probably will, in some form, since we have that overly prolific Meyer lemon shrub in the backyard), I would use the tangzhong method from King Arthur’s Cinnamon Roll recipe so that the dough would stay softer. Regardless, lemon curd is an excellent filling for these buns and if you also happen to have a lemon tree drowning you in fruit around this time of year I highly encourage you to give these a try.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.



Should have been called gelatin week

Posted on 7 December, 2021 7:06 am by Jennifer 1 Comment

Only two more weeks of catching up to go! Moving on to Episode 9, it’s time for Pâtisserie week. The challenges were: 8 patisserie layered slices (signature), a Sable Breton tart (technical). or a fancy schmancy (not its real name but close enough) entremet dessert (showstopper). By this time it was the week before Thanksgiving and all the kitchen energy was focused on that, but we decided we’d do the slices, at some point over Thanksgiving weekend, since those would be easiest to stash in the freezer for later eating.

I still had half a box of apples sitting on the counter needing to be used up, so after a bit of searching on the internets, I found a recipe for a Apple Caramel Entremet cake that sounded tasty, so decided to give that a try, by assembling it as a the full cake, but then turning it into the 8 required slices.

First you make the base, which is a basic sable breton (crumbly sort of shortbread/cake thing)

Next up is the caramel creme layer, which is basically just caramel flavored custard, but with some gelatin added to help it firm up. Here is where I point out that the recipe called for three separate batches of caramel to be made, and I ended up having to make five, because I burned two of them. Oops. That got popped into a plastic wrap lined pan to chill in the freezer until firmed up.

Step three was making the apple compote, which is just basically cooking the apples down in some butter and sugar until they’re the right consistency. Those were set aside to chill, before being pressed in an even layer into the creme caramel.

Step four was the caramel cream (this, by the way, was the second caramel I burned and had to remake). Basically you just make the caramel, add yet more gelatin, set it aside to cool, whip up a bunch of cream, then fold them all together.

The full cake is assembled by lining a cake tin with plastic wrap, then putting in a layer of the cream, then the custard and apple layer, then more cream, and finally topping it with the sable Breton base. That gets popped back into the freezer to chill for as long as possible while making the caramel mirror glaze, made from yet another batch of caramel, which I did *not*, for a change, burn and have to remake, and yet more gelatin, .

Here’s where I should have either just glazed the whole cake and then cut it later, or else doubled the mirror glaze amount, but I did not do either, so I ended up not having quite enough mirror glaze, which is actually a shame because my glaze turned out shiny and smooth and *perfect*.

Ah well. I did the best I could with the glaze I had, and ended up with my 8 slices.

They’re definitely not the prettiest things to look at, plus I also wasn’t really thinking about the fact that an 8×8 pan cut into 8 slices still ends up with 8 ginormous slices. But I got them done, just a couple minutes over the time limit, so yay!

Here’s the inside, so you can see all the layers.

For something with so much caramel involved, it is actually not too sweet. Using the granny smith apples was a wise choice since the cake definitely needs that hit of the tartness to keep it from being all one note. If I ever was to do this again I might try to incorporate a crunch layer – perhaps some nuts or honeycomb or something – to add a little texture, but otherwise, it was super tasty, and fun to make, so I’m calling that a win.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.



Chilled

Posted on 5 December, 2021 10:35 am by Jennifer Comment

Onward to Episode 8: Free From week, which meant that each challenge was free from a different ingredient. The Signature was dairy-free ice cream sandwiches, the Technical was vegan sausage rolls, and the Showstopper was gluten-free cakes. Neither my sister or I was in the mood to tackle a huge cake, and the sausage rolls didn’t sound appealing, so…ice cream sandwiches, it was!

My sister made up her own version because she’s talented like that but I decided to go with Guiseppe’s Ginger Orange Ice Cream Sandwiches, because the ice cream is made with tofu and sounded intriguing.

The cookies were pretty straightforward – just a slightly spiced cookie made with margarine instead of butter. The ice cream required orange juice and zest, soy milk, and silken tofu all blended together. This time I planned ahead and stuck the bucket for the ice cream maker in the freezer the day before, and shockingly the ice cream actually churned for a change, instead of just remaining a sad, cold liquid consistency like previous attempts. Hooray!

There were supposed to be candied orange peels on the top for decoration, plus melted white chocolate drizzled for a pattern, but after I assembled them I got busy doing other stuff and almost forgot about them, so ran out of time to do any sort of drizzling, plus orange peels take WAY longer to candy then the recipe says they will, so after a tentative nibble, those went directly into the trash. But at the end of the three hour time limit I had 8 completed ice cream sandwiches, even if the ice cream was a little soft during assembly so it blorped out everywhere.

Dairy-free ice cream will never be as creamy or taste as rich as real ice cream, but for what it was, these turned out pretty tasty. I wasn’t sure if the tofu would affect the taste or texture, but honestly, if you didn’t know it was there, you’d never guess. The ice cream has a pleasing orange taste, and the cookies are lightly spiced with ginger and have the consistency you’d expect from an ice cream sandwich, so overall, this was a win.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.




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