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The Pop-Tart Ice Cream Sandwich

plumpdumpling — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:45:19 +0000

In honor of the opening of Pop-Tarts World–mass market pastry retail heaven for those of us who were under the impression that only four or five flavors of Pop-Tarts existed–in Times Square this month, my officemates and I decided to make the mythical Pop-Tart Ice Cream Sandwich.

Thanks to Fresh Direct, we had the followed delivered to our office last Friday morning:

• Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts
• Frosted Strawberry with Sprinkles Pop-Tarts
• Edy’s Grand Vanilla Bean ice cream
• Edy’s Grand Chocolate ice cream
• Edy’s Cookies ‘N Cream ice cream
• Edy’s Grand Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream
• Edy’s Slow-Churned French Silk ice cream (possibly my favourite storeice cream in the world)
• Ben & Jerry’s Karamel Sutra ice cream

And with those ingredients, we made these:

strawberry with vanilla ice cream

brown sugar cinnamon with French Silk ice cream

The impending glee was too much for Chantee to handle,

but our notoriously non-gluttonous German interns Sven and Christoph surprisingly dove right in:

And speaking of diving right in, if you accidentally drop Pop-Tart down your bra, expect this from me:

This is one of those instances where once you have it, you can’t not have it. Like mixing heavy cream into iced coffee, spooning jelly into the center of a zeppole, or deep-frying a Snickers bar, I will forever be disappointed when there’s not a Pop-Tart in my dish of ice cream. The synthetic sugariness of it appeals so much to the truly indulgent part of me, and the lack of utensils needed to eat it appeals to my raised-in-a-barn-ness.

Recipe: Low-Carb Hostess Chocolate Cupcakes

plumpdumpling — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 16:00:57 +0000

I was in Ohio last weekend and spent much of it with my best friend, who–like me–finds lots of excuses to “cheat” on her low-carb diet. Meaning that whenever I’m in town, we go crazy and eat whatever we want, which is everything from Dairy Queen to Pizza Hut to McDonald’s with a couple of local joints thrown in as long as they’re all as unhealthy as possible. We’ve said 100 times in the past year that we’d love to try “being good” one time when I come home for a visit, but this time we actually meant it.

As luck would have it, the lovely Maria Emmerich posted a recipe for a low-carb version of the famed Hostess Little Debbie Chocolate Cupcake in her blog the very day I came home, and you know we went to town on those things. Here’s our take on her recipe:

Cupcakes:
1/2 cup of blanched almond flour
3 eggs, separated
1/4 teaspoon of iodized sea salt
1/4 teaspoon of baking soda
1 teaspoon of vanilla
2 tablespoons of cocoa powder
1/2 cup of Splenda
4 tablespoons of melted butter

Whip the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Combine the yolks, sweetener, and butter and whisk until well-blended. Combine all of the dry ingredients and blend well. Gently fold the wet ingredients into the whipped whites, then slowly fold in the dry mixture and blend well. Fill the cupcake pan 3/4 of the way full. Bake for 15-18 minutes at 350 degrees F or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Creamy Filling:
1 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup Splenda

Whip the cream until light and fluffy and add in the sweetener. Place filling in sandwich baggie with one corner snipped off. Scoop a dime-sized hole out of the top of each cupcake, push the snipped corner of the baggie into the hole, and squeeze until the filling rises to the top of the cupcake. (Maria injected hers into side of the cupcakes, so feel free to try both ways and see which gets more filling in.)

Frosting:
50g low-carb chocolate (we used a Lindt 85% Cocoa Bar, but Maria’s, made with a ChocoPerfection bar, turned out much shinier, like the Hostess version)
1 tablespoon heavy cream

Melt the chocolate bar in 10-second intervals in the microwave and add in whipping cream. Once the cupcake is cooled, dip the top of each one in melted chocolate.

Swirly White Topping:
Cream cheese

Add a small amount of cream cheese to another baggie, cut another tiny piece of the corner off, and swirl it onto each cupcake.

Nutritional Info:
297 calories, 6g carbs, 3.5g fiber, 2.5g net carbs
Makes 6 cakes

a cross-sectional view shows how much creamy filling was waiting inside for us

a cup of heavy cream makes a LOT of creamy filling, and you can guess where all of the leftovers went

Tracey and I loved these. A lot of low-carb swaps for common sugary foods are sad approximations that leave you wishing for the real thing, but we didn’t feel a sense of loss while eating these at all. The only problem we had was convincing ourselves not to eat all six in one sitting, and we were rewarded for that the next day with a deliciously hardened chocolate top on the two we saved. If you can double the recipe, I recommend it.

(Cross-posted to UNBREADED)

A Crunch Bar Without Any Crunch

plumpdumpling — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:30:14 +0000

I love crushing things with my fingers. I also love chocolate that has been melted and then resolidified.

One day, I found a mini Crunch bar in my pocket. I have a particular affinity for Crunch bars, because in high school, my best friend would bring a Crunch bar in her lunch every day, and she’d bite off the C and the H so it just said RUN. And then we’d sing Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” in as exaggerated a manner as possible. No one considered us normal.

Anyway, this Crunch bar had melted in my pocket, so I spent a good 10 minutes of my lunch hour pulverizing every last little crunchy bit inside of it (with the wrapper still on, of course). Then I waited an hour while it cooled off and reformed into a bar. Then I greedily unwrapped it and excitedly tasted it.

Weirdly, it was not delicious.

Sundaes and Cones – Sweets – East Village

plumpdumpling — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:00:26 +0000

I like ice cream more than any other dessert. I rarely order it in restaurants, because it’s usually not being made in-house, but I lovelovelove to visit ice cream parlors. I wanted to try Sundaes and Cones, I’ll admit, because I read a review that described their scoops as “too big“, and I thought that was idiotic.

I tried the corn and the chocolate-peanut butter flavor and would happily go back for both. I thought the corn could use some of the berry swirl you usually see at other gourmet parlors to sweeten it up a bit more, but someone who likes less-sweet desserts would love this one. And, well, the picture pretty much tells you how chocolatey that chocolate scoop is. Not an ice cream for those afraid of flavor. Not one for those afraid of gluttony, either.

Sundaes and Cones
95 East 10th Street
New York, NY 10003 (map)

Black and White Cookie CAKE

plumpdumpling — Thu, 27 May 2010 16:45:02 +0000

I’ve already told you how much I like the ubiquitous New York black and white cookies. But look what we found at the grocery store!:

It’s a black and white cookie cake! I was a little worried that it wouldn’t be as delicious as the cookies, because it’s not like I eat cookies because I like dough; I want icing. And lots of it. So the icing-to-bread ratio had me skeptical.

But no! It’s moist, almost sticky with sugar, with a slight lemony flavor. The fact that the bread is so NOT dry made me feel like maybe I could even eat it (gasp!) without the icing at all. But I obviously wouldn’t, especially since the icing was about twice as thick as it is on a regular black and white cookie.

I bought mine at the Amish Market on 45th Street, but I’ll bet they’re available at the other locations, too, and maybe other places in the city? Let me know if you’ve seen ‘em!

Amish Market East
240 East 45th Street
New York, NY 10017 (map)

Black and White Cookies

plumpdumpling — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:45:37 +0000

The first time I saw a black and white cookie, it was at my best friend Tracey’s “Seinfeld”-themed bridal shower. Everyone else gushed over the cookies, but I thought they were stupid. The bottom was soft and fluffy like a cake, and if I’m going to eat cake, I want an inch-thick layer of frosting on top; the stuff coating these things was icing, the kind you see on a slice of cinnamon-raisin bread, and I don’t go to bridal showers for bread.

The black and white cookie is native to New York, though, so eventually I had to give in and eat one. My boyfriend and I were at one of the weekly summer street fairs last summer and happened by La Delice Pastry Shop, an 80-year-old bakery in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, with black and white cookies in the window.

Oldschool baker on a skateboard!

Something just . . . took hold of us . . . and we found ourselves being dragged inside to purchase two of the oversized treats. And they were delicious! Like, really, really delicious! It turns out that the cakey cookie part is an invariably moist shortbread and that the vanilla icing forms this sort of crunchy layer to juxtapose the sponge cake. (The chocolate icing doesn’t, for some reason, and I always eat the chocolate first to get rid of it, because the vanilla’s so much better.)

sugar-associated guilt

Since then, we’ve had about a zillion black and white cookies from all over Manhattan and Brooklyn, and I haven’t had one yet that I disliked. Court Pastry Shop in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, has the biggest in diameter (like, monstrously huge). Flavors in Battery Park, Manhattan, has the moistest. Crumbs, the mighty cupcake chain, has the thickest (although The Lunch Belle thinks it sucks).

the black and white cookie from Crumbs

I know everyone has strong opinions about black and whites, and I’d love to hear where you buy your favourites. I’d also like to know if you think the vanilla icing is so much better than the chocolate, because it is.

My First Gingerbread House (that I didn’t in any way construct)

plumpdumpling — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 19:30:50 +0000

Right before I left for Christmas break, my boyfriend and I watched a Food Network show about a company known for its pre-decorated gingerbread houses, and all we could talk about was how badly we wanted to rip the roof off of one of those things and go to town on it with our teeth.

Well, while we were in an-unnamed-discount-store-that’s-taking-over-the-world in December, my best friend, Tracey, and I spotted shelves loaded with gingerbread house kits for only $10 and decided to go for it, not only to make my boyfriend jealous but as an added benefit.

We imagined how hard it’d be to attach the roof to the sides, to keep ourselves from crushing the soft gingerbread underneath the weight of our decorations. What we didn’t find out until we got back to Tracey’s house and took the thing out of the box was that it was preassembled and hard as a rock. But hey, we’re lazy.

Can you imagine how great it is having the job of putting this thing together? Whoever it is obviously doesn’t have to be concerned with neatness, and I fantasize daily about slopping icing onto giant cookies.

The house came packaged with icing mix, hard candy balls, and spearmint leaves. Tracey added the orange slices because we’re gluttons.

Here’s Tracey making a wreath on the front of the house with the bowl of icing beside her. Mixing the icing powder into water was literally the only thing we had to do before we started decorating. You’ll note the giant K on the side of the roof, which I put there, because I’m narcissistic and also uncreative.

The finished product, with Tracey’s Christmas tree in the background to prove that we actually did do this in December and not just last week. Unless Tracey kept her Christmas tree up until March just in case we ever found a gingerbread house kit on super-clearance, which is quite possible.

Beauty shot! You’ll note the fine reindeer-covered fleece blanket Tracey held up as a backdrop for me.

Tracey posed for this picture in which she was pretending to go at the house with a spoon before we figured out that it required a hammer to actually break through any of the gingerbread.

Hard as it was, though, that shit was 4 realz delicious.

My First King Cake

plumpdumpling — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:00:11 +0000

My office ordered two king cakes last week under the guise of needing them for a co-worker’s going-away party but actually because I’ve always wanted to try them. The first king cakes were introduced to the southern U.S. by French and Spanish settlers and were originally associated with Christmas but are now traditional in Mardi Gras celebrations. Which makes sense, considering how indulgent they are.

A southern co-worker recommended Paul’s Pastry Shop as the source for an authentic king cake, and the going-away girl choose a lemon over cream cheese and a chocolate Bavarian. I spent the week before they arrived telling everyone we were going to have cake made of baby, because a tiny plastic doll is stuck into the cake post-baking and is said to provide good luck to whoever finds it in their slice.

When we opened up the cake box, we thought it was a lump of unbaked dough, but it turns out that an undecorated king cake is just sort of ugly. Luckily, bags of icing and sprinkles were provided, along with Mardi Gras beads to use as payment for boob-baring. Or, since my office is full of men, manboob-baring.

Jack dons the provided gloves–a little freaky, right?–and prepares to ice the cake.

Ash goes for decorative swirls, but we figure out later that Jeff’s way of just slopping it on in a straight line makes for better coverage and easier hand-spreading.

Nik, it turns out, has no future in cake-decorating.

The finished product!

Dripping with icing and caked in layers of sprinkles, it was a diabetic’s worst nightmare. The cake itself was mostly a thick, sweet bread with the tiniest layer of lemon preserves or chocolate spread and a layer of cream cheese baked into it, and it was good, but it wasn’t the sort of super-moist cake we usually go for in the U.S.

The best part was the way the icing collected in pools around the edges of the pan and began to harden. Some people acted grossed out when I spooned the extra icing onto slices of the cake, and those people are no longer my friends.

Jack, the cake slicer, isn’t so pleased with the Valentine’s Day decorations that arrived with one of the cakes.

It was clear to Jack in slicing the first cake which piece the baby was in, so of course he took that piece for himself.

After licking the baby clean, Jack threw his away, but

Steve, who found the baby in the second cake, proved to be a doting caregiver.

Happy Fat Tuesday!

I still basically have no idea what the word crunk means.

plumpdumpling — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 16:00:48 +0000

When it comes to candy, the Japanese really know how to name their products for maximum American kitsch appeal:

Note that I found this on the same day I bought the bacon-flavored jellybeans from the SoHo Pearl River location, because the Japanese also know how I love to eat fattening foods but am too lazy to grill up some actual bacon.

The Crunky bars were like Kit Kats but less dense and less sweet, which is basically how all Japanese candy is in my experience. Which is why I’m never leaving the U.S. for it, despite the number of karaoke joints there.

Financier’s Bûche de Noël

plumpdumpling — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:00:35 +0000

I figured it was too late to post about my first bûche de Noël experience before I left NYC to spend the holidays with my family in Ohio, but since Blondie & Brownie revealed that Financier is still selling them, it looks like I’m good to go.

Being from the Midwest and being very much culturally sheltered, I had no idea what a bûche de Noël was until my office decided on a whim to order a couple of cakes from the downtown Financier Patisserie the week before Christmas. When I called at 3 p.m., the order-taker told me that they were down to a couple of roll cakes, one in white chocolate and one in Grand Marnier. I told her I’d take them, but she kept stressing that these were not normal cakes and kept asking if I was sure I wanted them. I was like, “Lady, cake is cake.”

But no! A traditional bûche de Noël is a French sponge cake rolled up with frosting to resemble a log, complete with buttercream bark, meringue mushrooms, and protruding branches (made of chocolate, in this case). The Grand Marnier version was entirely untraditional, but the mound of berry-flavored mousse was no less delicious.

I usually think Financier’s cakes are too light and fluffy to really count as a decadent dessert (because I’m a glutton), but the yule log was a total exception and one that I’ll look forward to next year. It seems like the woman at Financier shouldn’t have been warning me about the cake but should’ve been asking why I wasn’t buying all three.

Is this something normal, non-Midwestern people often eat for Christmas?

donuts4dinner.com » pure carbs

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