Orange and White Chocolate Ice Cream

Here's the ice cream recipe I promised yesterday! I love the combination of white chocolate and orange, there's something royal in it. (Not everyone shared my opinion, though, but most did!)

I've been making ice cream for some time now, but so far I've never tried recipes involving egg yolks. I've thought they're not necessary - if you buy ice cream at the supermarket, there's no egg in them either! (But some artificial thickening agents to compensate, I guess...). But now that I gave it a try, I do understand there is a clear advantage when using eggs in ice cream: the texture is much creamier, even after two days of freezing.

For about 5 smallish servings you need:

• 3 egg yolks


• 100g sugar


• 50g white chocolate


• 300ml milk


• 200ml heavy cream


• 1 Tbsp dried orange peel powder (if you don't have any, try grated orange zest instead!)

First, choose a baking bowl that you can use for a hot-water bath. Then, place yolks and sugar in the bowl and mix until pale yellow. Scald 150ml milk and beat it to the yolk-sugar-mixture. Now heat the custard in hot-water bath, constantly stirring, until it is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Be careful, it overcooks easily! Remove from the heat and add the rest of the milk, cream, melted white chocolate, and the orange peel powder and stir until well combined. Chill for a couple of hours.

Prepare the ice-cream according to the instructions of your ice-cream maker. Serve with rhubarb tarte Tatin, for example!

P.S. To make orange peel powder, I dried peels of organic oranges in the oven, at 50 C. It took about 24 hours for them to be totally dry - and during that time, there was a heavenly smell at hour house! Then I asked a friend to grind the dried peels into powder (I don't have any machines at my kitchen, besides ice cream maker, coffee grinder, espresso machine, water boiler, and an old hand mixer...). I warmly recommend!

Coconut Balls with Almonds and White Chocolate

My advice is - do NOT try out this recipe. I did, and there’s no turning back. These crunchy almond coconut cookies dipped in white chocolate and rolled in coconut flakes are highly addictive.

The recipe is from a small booked called Weinachtsplätzchen, and had to be somewhat modified - I had to add a bit of water in the dough, and the amount of white chocolate (100g) just wasn’t enough. That’s why half of my cookies are covered with dark chocolate (which didn’t work as well as white chocolate, though). You can also leave the coating out - the cookies taste great even without it.

For some 35 cookies you need:

• 300g all-purpose flour


• 100g ground almonds


• 100g desiccated coconut


• a pinch of salt


• 100g sugar


• 250g butter or vegan margarine


• about 50ml water

For the coating:

• 200g (vegan) white chocolate


• 100g desiccated coconut

In a baking bowl, combine together flour, almonds, coconut, salt, and sugar. Add butter or margarine in small cubes and work with your fingertips until fine and crumbly. Add enough water so that you can form the dough into a ball.

Divide the dough into about 35 pieces. Roll each piece into a small ball. Bake in a preheated oven (180 C) about 15-20 minutes, or until cooked but not brown yet. (Lower the temperature if needed.)

Once the cookies are baked and cooled a bit, melt the white chocolate - add some (vegan) cream if needed. I’m too lazy to use a bain-marie, so I melted mine in a pan - it worked, too, but I needed to add a bit of milk. Drop a couple of cookies at a time into the chocolate, take out with a spoon and roll in the desiccated coconut. Let dry on a plate and transfer into an air-tight container.

I’m going to bake a second portion of these cookies and coat them only just before Christmas. My guess is, even well-hidden, they won’t keep as well as other Plätzchen types.

Blondies

Everyone knows brownies, but who has tasted blondies? Blondies are brownies’ blond siblings, baked with white chocolate and pecan nuts instead. They are miraculously simple and quick to bake, and totally irresistible! I got the recipe from a book called “New York - les recettes culte” that I bought last May when visiting France. I highly recommend the book! The only thing I changed here was the amount of sugar - I’m not a big fan of overly sweet stuff, and even with this new reduced sugar amount, they are quite on the sweet side… For a non-dairy version, opt for margarine instead of butter and look for white chocolate made with rice milk.

Dry ingredients:

• 300g wheat flour


• 2 tsp baking powder


• ½ tsp salt (again, if you’re using salted butter, you’ll need less salt)


• 80g white chocolate (or even 100g)


• 100g pecan nuts

Liquid ingredients:

• 150g butter


• 8cl neutral tasting oil (sunflower or such)


• 250g sugar (I use a mixture of brown and white) + 2 tsp vanilla sugar


• 2 eggs

Set your oven to 190 Celsius. Start by combining all dry ingredients in a baking bowl. Then melt the butter in a pan, set aside and pour the oil in. Mix well, then add sugar and eggs and beat for two minutes or so. Pour the liquid mixture over the dry mixture, mix thoroughly, pour the batter on an oven pan covered with a baking sheet - mine is 24cm wide and 30cm long, but that’s a bit too big - a square 24cm pan would be ideal. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until nicely brown and evenly cooked. Let them cool before cutting them into squares.

Blondies taste excellent with coffee at any time of the day - and what’s more amazing: they stay fresh and crunchy for days and days! Having some guests over next weekend? No problem, bake some blondies, enjoy them during the week and you will still have them fresh and ready for the weekend! If you can resist eating them all, that is...