More ice cream! Three ingredients each: Banana ice cream and Raspberry ice cream

fter our fig ice cream extravaganza the other day, there was a bit of cream left over, and far be it from our family to allow that to go to waste!

Also, we stopped by a beautiful fruit stand in Victoria yesterday and Mom got another flat of raspberries--big as your thumb, these babies! So naturally we thought: raspberry ice cream. Good thought. I found a few recipes online but ended up culling the best of a few and making my own mixture. Keeping the raspberries fresh was key, as was not using eggs (we ran out after making potato salad for lunch!).

See, I meant it. Big as my thumb, anyway.

Raspberry Ice Cream
2 cups cream
1/2 cup sugar
3 cups fresh raspberries

Combine the cold cream and sugar in a bowl, stirring with a whisk until the sugar has dissolved. Put the mixture in your ice cream machine/mixer and let it mix for 10-15 minutes, then add the raspberries and mix for another few minutes until well blended.

When I added the berries, the mixture got quite soft again for awhile, and Pa made the bright suggestion that I should stick the berries in the freezer to chill prior to making it next time. I agree that might help speed the process up a bit, but we persevered and it was a good half hour later with occasional stirs that the ice cream was hard enough to scoop into dishes.

This makes not quite a quart in a Donvier ice cream make. I would recommend splitting this between six people, rather than the four we had... I know, we didn't have to dish up the whole batch, but it just kinda happened, and then we all walked around in a raspberry ice cream coma for a bit. Not eating cream on a daily basis, it was quite rich. Quite yummy too.

I had also glimpsed a recipe a couple of days ago on a Serious Eats post on my sidebar over there to the right... banana ice cream, using frozen bananas. Since I usually have some sad overripe bananas on my counter at home, I thought experimenting with this might be a good thing. And why not do it while visiting the parents, so they can be guinea pigs too?! Two birds with one stone. How handy.

Banana, Honey and Peanut Butter Ice Cream
serves 1
Adapted from The Kitchn

1 large, slightly over-ripe banana
1 teaspoon peanut butter
1 teaspoon honey

Peel banana. Slice it into about ten chunks. Freeze the chunks. Once frozen, put them in a food processor with peanut butter and honey. Puree until creamy, like soft serve ice cream, stopping the processor to scrape the sides when necessary.

OR

Forget to peel banana. Freeze it. Wrestle futilely with now-frozen banana peel. Give up and let it sit for 30 minutes to thaw. Peel banana like a two-year-old. Break it into three or four pieces. Add pieces to food processor with peanut butter and honey. Puree until creamy, like soft serve ice cream, stopping the processor to scrape the sides when necessary.

I picked the first method (doubled it to share with the family) and it worked really well. The whole family enjoyed it, thoroughly. Of course, there was also consensus that a dribble of chocolate would be a wonderful addition to the banana/peanut butter flavor and I have to agree. But for a dairy-free ice cream, that is one amazing dessert!

Best banana bread. EVER.

have made banana bread for years, and generally the same recipe too... a very serviceable set of ingredients as laid out by Fanny Farmer. And then I started to experiment a bit, with almond flour. I really enjoyed that first loaf, which split the almonds and wheat flour about 50/50.

But the bold statement laid out in the headline above was made possible by the desire to go even further down the path toward gluten free... I swear you will have no idea this bread is gluten free. It doesn't have the heaviness and chewiness that I often associate with gluten-free baked goods. It's moist and yummy and full of banana goodness, without being overwhelmed by the nuts.

Best banana bread
4 ripe bananas
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups of ground almonds (run blanched almonds in the food processor until they are truly mealy)
1 cup Namaste muffin mix (pretty widely available in the baking section at grocery stores these days)
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder

Preheat oven until 350 degrees.

In a large bowl, mash the bananas and add the eggs and vanilla. Mix up the dry ingredients and add all at once to the wet. Stir until well mixed. Pour into a bread loaf pan and bake for 45-50 minutes, until a knife or wooden skewer inserted in the loaf comes out clean. Let cool in the pan for 10-15 minutes, then invert loaf out of pan and cool completely on a baking rack.

I wasn't prepared for how much I enjoyed this bread! It's really moist (I already said that, didn't I?), which is what I like in banana breads--some of which taste more like banana cake--I have when out and about at Starbucks, on the ferry to Mayne Island, etc. But the nutritional value of those breads tend to leave a lot to be desired. While the fat content is pretty  high due to the nuts, it's important for me to remember that it's the good fat, right?

Off to have another slice with my coffee...

Experimenting with almond flour: Banana bread

We came home to some super-ripe bananas in the fruit bowl... forgot to freeze those before we took off on vacation! My first thought with ripe bananas is banana bread, of course. I have a tried and true basic banana bread recipe in Fanny Farmer that I've used forever, but lately I've been wanting to experiment with almond flour as an ingredient, and that's something I don't think dear Fanny knew anything about. A blog about gluten-free cooking that I look in on occasionally, Elena's Pantry, advocates almond flour, and even though I don't need to avoid gluten (that I know of...), it just sounds good to me. Nutty and yummy and all that.

Of course, when I looked at the fat content of almond flour, I did a little quick breath intake and thought, "Oh my, well, at least it's the GOOD fat." Since I've been eating pretty much non-stop on the BAD fat lately, might as well do a bit of battle with the good... So I took Elena's recipe and fiddled with it--added back a bit of the Fanny--and it turned out wonderfully. Next time I might just make it with just the almond flour and skip the whole wheat entirely... we'll see.

Sher's experimental banana bread

2 cups blanched almond flour

2 cups whole wheat flour

½ teaspoon salt

1 ½ teaspoons baking soda

½ cup brown sugar

½ cup canola oil

3 eggs, whisked

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

4 bananas, mashed

In a large bowl, mix together whole wheat flour, almond flour, salt and baking soda. In a smaller bowl, combine mashed bananas, brown sugar, oil, eggs and vanilla. Mix wet ingredients into dry. Place batter in two greased/sprayed loaf pans. Bake at 350° for 40 minutes, or until skewer inserted into the bread comes out dry. Remove from oven and allow to cool.

I especially like the texture of the bread, and the feel as you're chewing; it's just less wheaty. It's hard to know how to describe it, exactly... you'll just have to try baking with almond flour. I think this ingredient is going to find its way into more of my recipes in the future...