Chocolate Ice Cream

Now now, this is Philadelphia style chocolate ice cream. What that means, ladies and gentlemen, is that there is no custard going on in there. Custard ice creams scare me so I haven't tried them out yet. The ingredients of the ice cream are heavy cream, milk, cocoa powder, chocolate, sugar and vanilla. There is only one cup of milk that is required and the recipe said whole milk, but I was sneaky and used fat free milk. And guess what, the ice cream was still good! The next trick will be to substitute fat free milk for the heavy cream. Yeah, that won't work, but I would still like to come up with ways to make ice cream less bad for you! The night the ice cream was made, it was pretty soft, but after it had been in the freezer a while it got pretty hard. Some might say it was too hard. But it was still good. Overall great success in my mind!

Double Chocolate Crackle Cookies

Wow, this recipe is amazing. This is the kind of cookie recipe I've been looking for for a long time. The cookies are delicious, and they're SOFT THE NEXT DAY!!! Even the edges are soft. And it's not cakey soft, it's just good. They're very chocolately, and you can tell that I used dark chocolate to make them, which is delicious. These are my favorite cookies out of all of the cookies that I've made. And they only require 2 tablespoons of butter! Of course all of the chocolate in the recipe makes up for that. The recipe is here. The chocolate bar that I used had almonds in it, so I chopped that up and there were little almond pieces in the cookies. I didn't know how that would turn out but I ended up liking them in there. As Borat would say, GREAT SUCCESS!

Vanilla Frozen Yogurt

The recipe for this came from my ice cream cookbook. The ingredients are 3 cups of yogurt, 1 cup of sugar and 1 teaspoon of vailla extract. I used Fage Greek yogurt, because they said that Greek yogurt is the best for this. I noticed that one serving of that Fage yogurt, 1 cup, contains 90% of the daily value of saturated fat. That is kind of disgusting. The frozen yogurt doesn't taste like soft serve vanilla ice cream, unfortunately, because that would be awesome, but it has a sour flavor, that just tastes like the yogurt. I don't really like it that much and don't think I'll make it again.

Vegetarian "Pad Thai"

I got this recipe from here. It definitely does not taste like pad thai but I enjoyed it. It was much better the second day, after it sat around a while. I think there was too much tofu and not enough delicious filling such as spinach, scallions, bamboo shoots, peanuts and bean sprouts. I think that next time I attempt to make pad thai I will look for a different recipe.

Red Lentil and Cauliflower Curry

My roommate made this curry and it smelled really good so I decided to make it. It is from Veganomnicon (and it is vegan!). I really liked it, especially how the whole curry turned all mushy. It had parsnip in it, which I don't think I've ever had before. I do think it is missing some spices since I didn't have any tumeric or curry powder. I also think I cooked it too long since it was a little too mushy but it was still delicious.

Wheat bread with seeds

I made my second loaf of bread from this book. It involved me making two separate doughs one day in advance, then mixing them together as well as adding additional ingredients, and then letting the resulting dough sit for some time. After that I had to knead the dough some more and let it rise in the loaf pan before I could finally bake it. This bread has sunflower, pumpkin and sesame seeds in it. It also happens to be vegan. I like the texture of the bread even though it is a little dense, and I think it tastes especially good after it is toasted. I used the Kitchenaid for all of the kneading and mixing, which was nice. I didn't get sticky dough fingers or anything.

Chocolate chip muffins

I made muffins again, mostly following this recipe, except using chocolate chips instead of blueberries. I used 1 cup of whole wheat pastry flour and 1/2 cup white flour instead of the 1.5 cups white flour. I think it made a difference - it's better than having all of the flour be whole wheat. Also I'm not sure if the fact that it was whole wheat pastry flour made a difference, as opposed to regular whole wheat flour. I again used cracked wheat instead of wheat germ, which adds a crunchy texture. I'm not sure if I like that or not, but regardless I will continue looking around at random healthy ingredients I can throw in muffins. Overall I liked these muffins.