Easy-peasy Simple dessert!

Easy to make at home, it’s just pancake, ice-cream and chocolate. Not much of a recipe, but I am out of Inspiration for a while. Maybe next time I make some thing more special.

Ingredients:

200 grams of Flour or Pancake-mix
400 mL of Milk
2 Eggs
Any flavour of Ice cream (I chose Chocolate)
50 grams of Chocolate (for sauce)

Add the flour, eggs and milk in a bowl and mix it till you have a pancake batter/mix. (fluid with no chunks) Heat up a flat frying pan to bake the pancakes in. When heated add a bit of oil in the pan to prevent the pancakes from sticking to the pan. Use a ladle to scoop one scoop of pancake batter and pour it into the frying pan. Move the pan a little, in which the batter is fully covering the pan. Flip the pancake after it sturdy and bake it off till it is done.

Put the pancake on a plate and continue making new pancakes until the batter is used up. Melt the chocolate in an Au-bain-marie method, when done start plating the dessert.

First up a pancake, then add some scoops of icecream and top it off with some melted chocolate.

Have fun and Keep Experimenting!

Easy and fast Chinese dessert: Sweet potato soup

No rants this time just an easy and fast recipe for a soup-dessert.
It is common in Asian to have desserts like these.

Ingredients for 4-6 person

3-6 medium sized sweet potatoes (around 800-1200 grams)
(there are different kinds of sweet potatoes so choose the one you like, red with white on the inside and orangery with orange on the inside)
A chunk of ginger about 100 grams
200 grams of Rock sugar candy (crystal chunks of brown sugar)
200 grams of Brown sugar sticks.
1.5L of Water

*most of the ingredients can be bought at a Chinese supermarket.

Peel the potatoes and the ginger and cut them up in small chunks that are easy to cook. Get a large enough pan to make it in. Light up the stove and put the pan on it. Fill the pan with water and add the sugars to it. Dissolve the sugar and wait until the sugar-water is boiling. When the water is boiling add the cut sweet potatoes and ginger to the sugar water. Let it all heat up and wait until the sweet potatoes are cooked soft. Stir once in a while while heating the soup. When the potatoes are soft and the soup is hot turn of the stove.
Stir well and serve it while it is hot. Before diggin’in let it cool a little bit to not burn your tongues.

Try it out and Keep Experimenting!

Panna cotta with mango puree

The start of the year has not been good to me. Being sick and taking things slow (unproductive). Three months have gone by and I have more or less settled down in Amsterdam. Still I am nowhere near where I want to be. I am now at a crossroad where I can continue to do the things I am doing. (work, social life and living on my own) Or continue to aim for the things that I want in life. (the patisserie/dessert and coffee shop dream, being a barista/ sweetsmaker, cooking-enthusiast.) So, what is my next step?

It gives me a sense of happiness/fulfillment when I make things for the people around me. If the people I serve like it, ‘succes’ and if they don’t ‘too bad, next cooking experiment.’ This time I just picked a dessert which was easy to make and made it into the mess like in the pic. ;P

Ingredients

500ml cream
4 sheets of gelatin
30 grams of sugar
2 packs of vanilla sugar (8 grams a pack, it is sugar infused with vanilla flavour)
2 ripe mango

Start by getting a small bowl and fill it with cold water. When filled take out the gelatin sheets from the package and drown it piece by piece in the bowl of water. Let it stand and start with the cream. Light up a stove and put a pan on it, pour all the sugar and vanilla sugar in it and add the cream to it. Dissolve the sugar and let the cream heat up, up to the point before boiling. (it is when you start to see air bubbles starting to come up.) While heating the cream try to stir the cream for evenly heating.
After it is heated up, turn off the stove and remove the pan from the stove. The soaked gelatin should be jelly like, take it out of the water and squeeze out as much water from the gelatin. Add the squeezed gelatin to the warm cream and stir it in until all is dissolved.

Pour the pan with cream and gelatin into cups and let it cool off and refrigerate the cups. (cover the cups with foil before refrigerating) Let it form in the refrigerator for six hours or even a day.

The next day peel the mangoes and cut out the meat of the mango. Use a half a mango for mango cubes and the rest of the mango meat is used for the puree. This can be done with a blender.

The rest is to plate up. To get the Panna Cotta out of the cup is done by holding the sides of the cups against a running hot water tap. It warms the sides of the cups and melt the gelatin a bit but just enough to separate the cup and the panna cotta. Plate it up and done. Enjoy your Panna Cotta with Mango puree. Like, Share and Keep Experimenting!

DIY Chocolate Ice-cream… with out Ice-cream-maker!

Although it is often easier to buy your Ice-cream in store, I have to try to make my own ice-cream. This is all due to an upcoming dessert I want to make from scratch. (It takes some time to freeze it, so do not expect to have it on the same day)

The only problem I noticed is, that my ice-cream is not that smooth as the ones you buy from store. There are two factors which makes your ice-cream as smooth as silk. The first one is the amount of fat used in making your ice-cream, the higher percentage the smoother it will be. The second factor is crystallization of the liquid, if you put the ice-mix in a container and freezing it, it won’t create the same smooth texture as store-bought-ones but rather more popsicle-ish like.
Smoothness is created through breaking and forming of small ice-crystals, which happens normally in an ice-cream-maker by churning the ice-mixture.

So enough with the technical stuff, on to the recipe.

DIY chocolate ice-cream.

200ml of Chocolate ‘whole’ milk (around 10% fat content)
250ml of Cream (whipping cream 30% fat content)
100gr of Sugar
100gr of Dark Chocolate
1 shot of Espresso (or Ristretto)
2 Egg yolks
Oreo cookies

Break up the dark chocolate bar (or use chocolate chips) and put it into a pan. Add the sugar as well as the Chocolate milk to the pan. Start heating up the pan and dissolve the chocolate and the sugar by stirring. Do not let the mixture boil. Continue to gradually add the cream in the mix and stir it well.
After the cream is added also add the shot of Espresso and stir the pan while heating the mixture. Remove the pan off the heat when the mix is nearly boiling. (when small bubbles starts to appear)

After taken the pan of the heat, whisk the egg yolks lose (so it is not a round blob anymore) and add the egg yolks while stirring it into the mixture. Stir it well to dissolve it like the sugar and chocolate. When done get a small sieve and strain the mixture, to separate the undissolved residue and the liquid ice-cream.

Let the liquid ice-cream cool down a bit before putting it into the freezer. When it cooled down put the ice-cream mix into the freezer for 12 hours.
Top the ice-cream with crumbled Oreo cookies when it is frozen and finally enjoy.