TWD - Banana Coconut Ice Cream Pie

This week, Spike of Spike Bakes chose Banana Coconut Ice Cream Pie for our Tuesday baking task. You can find the recipe on Spike's website or on page 350 of Dorie Greenspan's "Baking from My Home to Yours". I was skeptical about a couple things when I read through the recipe; the first was the mixture of chocolate and banana and the second was getting the frozen crust out of the pie pan. I don't really care for fruit mixing with chocolate so I pretty sure I wouldn't like the taste but I forged ahead with the recipe as written to give the good old college try! Even the addition of rum couldn't mitigate my aversion to chocolate and fruit co-mingling in a single pie. Of course, perhaps if I'd used 2 cups instead of 2 tablespoons of rum, I might have made it through! Bottomline - I loved the taste of the crust but not the pie. Additionally, I needed a jack hammer to extricate a slice from the pie plate!

Try as I might, I could not get good pictures for this go round! Here is what Banana Coconut Ice Cream Pie V. 1.0 looked like.

On to the next. I like to call V. 1.2 "Deconstructed Banana Coconut Ice Cream Pie". Yes, I watch way too much food TV. I took all the components of the pie (except the chocolate, of course) and reassembled them into a smaller single serving pie type creation. I used a small bowl lined with parchment paper to form a bowl with the crust ingredients. I piled vanilla ice cream into the coconut bowl and topped the whole thing with a banana rum sauce. It was fantastic!!

Dorie says that the crust will keep for a couple of months in the freezer if wrapped tightly so I plan on keeping a stash of small crusts/bowls in my freezer for dessert emergencies!

Please visit some of the other TWD Bakers to see how they did with this weeks challenge!

TWD - Burnt Sugar Ice Cream

For this weeks TWD baking project, Becky from Project Domestication chose Burnt Sugar Ice Cream from page 432 of Dorie Greenspan's "Baking: From My Home to Yours". I was so excited to make this ice cream, that I accidently jumped ahead and made this last week when I was supposed to be making Chockablock cookies! I love homemade ice cream and this variation was no exception! I have discovered that freezing up a batch of ice cream requires a level of patience that I'm ill equipped to handle! First you have to cook your custard, slowly adding hot ingredients to the eggs so that they don't curdle. Then, cook and stir and cook and stir. Cool the custard, freeze the custard into ice cream and then freeze until scoopable. Playing the waiting game paid off though because this ice cream was fantastic! The flavor was so unique and the ice cream was super smooth and creamy.

The day before I made the ice cream, I baked some Double Chocolate Chunk cookies to reward my official taste tester for assembling a bunkbed for my son. He took all but two cookies home so I had two of these brownie like cookies staring me in the face. Rather than eat them, I mixed them into some of the burnt sugar ice cream. Holy cow - it was awesome! Chocolate-caramel is a flavor combination can only be surpassed by the chocolate peanut butter combo. Yum!

Please visit the rest of the TWD bakers to see how they mixed things up this week.