Haagen-Dazs Ice Cream Truffles

 

Chocolate truffles are something of a must in my house for Valentine's day, but I've made them a few times before and wanted to do something different this time. By a stroke of luck, I was sent some Haagen-Dazs vouchers to review their Strawberry Cheesecake flavour ice cream and I found some recipes on the US version of their website for 'gelato piccolinos' - piccolino just meaning little tiny thing. These are basically chocolate truffles filled with ice cream!

I didn't use oil as in their recipe as I just wanted a crisp coating for my truffles. I also switched up the flavours so I could use the strawberry cheesecake ice cream, which I thought would be better coated in white chocolate, and I also made some with their Belgian Chocolate ice cream, which I coated in milk chocolate and rolled in cocoa powder. The strawberry and white chocolate ones are decorated with little edible butterflies but these would also be great with pieces of freeze dried strawberries!

The ice cream needs to be soft enough to scoop but still pretty solid. I took some scoops from each tub and moulded them into balls, placing them on a piece of greaseproof paper on a small plate (I only wanted to make a few). I returned them to the freezer for an hour to firm up again - the strawberry cheesecake ice cream seemed softer than the chocolate and had started to melt almost straight away.

After an hour, I melted 50g of white chocolate and 50g milk chocolate in small bowls, took the ice cream balls out of the freezer and quickly dipped them in the chocolate, decorating them as I have described. Then they went back into the freezer to firm up again!

 

I'm sharing these with Treat Petite, the challenge created by Stuart at Cakeyboi and Kat the Baking Explorer, which is hosted this month by United Cakedom. The theme this month is Like It, Love It, Gotta Have it - which is how my fiancé feels about Haagen-Dazs!

 

 

 I'm also sending this to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen, as these would be lovely for Valentine's Day.

 

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Cow Valentine's Card

A few days ago I shared the Valentine's card I made for my boyfriend last year; as I'm pretty sure he doesn't actually look at my blog much I thought I'd put up the one I made for him this year! It's on a similar theme - cows - which I'm sure I will stop doing at some point but as we are getting marred this year I'm really excited about becoming a cow! Also, I had some cow-related craft bits to use up I'd bought to do with the wedding....

I had some small rectangles of cow print tissue paper that I decided to place in the middle of a square white card blank, leaving white space at each side. I then took a piece of cow print ribbon (which I bought for my wedding invitations then decided not to use) and tied a bow in it and stuck it across the front of the card.

I had a pack of 5 card toppers saying "for my wonderful fiancé" which I'm not going to be able to use again - I put one on his Christmas card and will use one for his birthday card as well! You can't see it too well in this photo due to the silver colour. As it's Valentine's day I put a 'happy Valentine' red outline sticker on the bottom of the card with two sets of lips on either side. I wanted to introduce a little more colour into the card as well so dotted a few mini red heart stickers across the cow print paper. I hope my fiancé doesn't get fed up with cow related things as I certainly haven't yet!

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How to Paint Flowers on a Cake

My so-called intermediate level wedding cake decorating class continued with a session of painting on cakes – or rather on a cake board as we still haven’t used an actual cake (even a dummy). It’s really very straightforward but I thought I’d share a blog post on the topic in case anyone wants to know how to do it.

 

 

 

Get some of the paste colour on the end of a cocktail stick and hold the cocktail stick over the artist’s palette. Pour literally just a drop of alcohol or lemon juice onto the cocktail stick and use the paintbrush to brush the colour downwards into the liquid. This will make sure you don’t have too much liquid as you want the ‘paint’ to be as thick as possible. You need to use clear alcohol or lemon juice so the liquid dries – water would start to melt the fondant that you were painting on.

 

 

Apparently there is no particular technique to the painting – you paint just as if you were painting a picture. We were painting on a covered cake board; most people in the class were using the same board we’d practiced other techniques on, so only had a little space. I had covered a new cake board so I would have a blank ‘canvas’.

 

The tutor knew I was thinking about a lavender design on my wedding cake so brought in a picture of a bunch of lavender for us to copy, which was really nice of her. I started with green to paint the stems as you can see above. Then I painted the flowers, using short brush strokes up and down the stems.

 

After that I got bored waiting for other people to finish and added some bunting as our wedding is going to have a bit of a village fete vibe.

 

 

 

Finally as I still had some extra time I added our wedding date on the bottom. I really like the way this looks and might actually use it at the wedding as a prop!

 

 

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Love Cows Valentine's Card

This is the Valentine's card I made for my boyfriend last year; I didn't want to share it at the time as he hadn't seen the card and by the time Feb 14th had passed I decided it was too late to post this.

The cow motif is because his last name is Cowe - which will be my name too from June!

I started with a square white card blank which I covered with pink paper that had swirly patterns. I cut out a large heart from another patterned pink paper and stuck that on top. The 'love' stickers all come from one sticker pack and the little hearts from another; the 'to my Valentine' sentiment in the top left is from a sheet of outline stickers, which are red rather than the more common silver or gold.

Finally the layered paper cow is a decoupage sticker which I bought in a little pack from Ebay; I often wonder how people make these sorts of thing to sell!

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Fruity Yogurt Brulee Two Ways

The letter for this month's Alphabakes is Y, never an easy one - I've already managed to enter my Yule Log I made after Christmas that I hadn't blogged about until now. I also wanted to make something else, but with wedding planning (four months to go and counting!) I've been far too busy to bake.

So instead I decided to go for an easy dessert involving yogurt. I found a recipe in The Fairtrade Everyday Cookbook for a yogurt fruit brûlée - passion fruit on the bottom topped with Greek yogurt, which you mix with a little pomegranate juice, then top with brown sugar which you caramelise with a cook's blowtorch or under the grill.

I had some pomegranate to use up so didn't want to buy passion fruit as well - I'm terrible at buying fruit and not using it before it goes off. I did have the pomegranate juice as I had just been sent vouchers to buy some POM Wonderful pomegranate juice to review. It's made from 100% pomegranate (made from concentrate) - did you know that pomegranates are a good source of all of these?:

• Vitamin C
• Vitamin K
• Fiber
• Potassium
• Folate
• Copper
• 
  I mixed a dash of pomegranate juice with fat free Greek style yogurt and spooned it into a ramekin on top of some pomegranate seeds.
  
  

I sprinkled a generous coating of brown sugar on the top but using my blowtorch didn't make the sugar caramelise, just burn in places- as you can see it was literally on fire at one point!

Once I'd stopped and scraped off the burnt bits, and added some more pomegranate seeds on top, it did taste quite good, but I decided I needed to make this again using caster sugar, which I know does caramelise properly with a blowtorch.

This time I cut up a ripe pear and placed pieces of it in the bottom of a ramekin and topped it with some flavoured yogurt - Onken's mango, papaya and passion fruit flavour.



I sprinkled caster sugar on top and caramelised it - properly this time - with my cook's blowtorch. It tasted delicious and would be great as a dessert or even breakfast!

I'm sharing my yogurt brûlée with Alphabakes, the challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter this month is Y.

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Meal Planning Monday: Week 7

 

I started following DietPlan.co.uk's 'feel fuller' diet plan which claims to increase the amount of protein versus carbs, and yet every day it seems to recommend I have porridge for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch, which is very odd! So now on my personal trainer's advice I'm going to eat more protein - eggs for breakfast if I have time, and chicken breast and prawns or smoked salmon for lunch with salad.

 

Monday

Dinner- was going to make vegetable or Quorn curry but got home late so did pasta instead.

 

Tuesday

Dinner- stuffed chicken with pesto and cream cheese. Followed by pancakes for dessert as it's Shrove Tuesday

 

Wednesday

Lunch- leftover pasta from Monday

Dinner – sandwich, at cake decorating class

 

Thursday

Dinner- balsamic pork steak

 

Friday

Dinner- burger and chips for him, with salad for me

 

Saturday

Lunch- soup and fresh bread

Dinner- will invite my fiancé's mum around and do Pad Thai for us, pizza for him. Followed by sticky mango rice for pudding perhaps.

 

Sunday

Valentine’s day

Lunch- bacon sandwich as that is definitely the way to his heart!

Dinner- not sure yet if we are going out (I suspect not at this late stage) or I will cook steak as that's his favourite.

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Snapfish Personalised Photo Placemats for Valentine's Day

We weren’t going to do Valentine’s presents this year, as we have a wedding to pay for – which seems rather more important! But when I was asked by Snapfish, the photo prints and photo gifts website, to see if there was anything I liked on their site I jumped at the chance.

 

I did some crafting with Snapfish products last year and was really pleased; I noticed then that they had a huge range of ready made gifts which could be personalised with photos, which would be ideal for Valentine’s day. You could do a photo book or a canvas print for your Valentine, or a mug and key ring. I love the photo cushions as well – my sister got my mum one of these with a picture of her dog on it for Christmas and my mum said it was her favourite present!

 

As we are getting married in June I didn’t want to do a photo book or canvas print yet as we will hopefully have some amazing pictures from the professional photographer and there seemed no point using holiday snaps now. I didn’t think my fiancé would appreciate a picture of my cat on a cushion (even though I’d love it!) and we have far too many mugs in the cupboard already – so I wanted something we would actually be able to use and enjoy.

 

Snapfish offers photo personalised coasters and placemats which isn’t something I’ve seen on many photo sites and I thought it was a brilliant idea – something you might use every day or keep for special occasions, that can be a real talking point around the dinner table. Also, they do a set of 6 placemats for £24.99 which I think is quite good value, but also handy – the placemats I’ve already got came in a set of 4 and I often find I need one or two more. You can also buy individual placemats for £8.99 or a pair for £14.99 – just right for a Valentine’s gift.

 

I decided to get the full set of 6 and knew straight away I wanted to use photos of holidays my fiancé and I have taken together. It was hard to choose which pictures so I decided to narrow it down – he loves to visit the US, and we’ve been there three times in the five and a bit years we’ve been together. I thought he would really like the gift if I chose a set of 6 pictures from our favourite USA destinations – you can put the same picture on all the placemats if you like, or a different one on each, which is what I did.

The top photo in this pile was taken when we went to dinner at a restaurant on the banks of the Mississippi in Natchez.
 

The top two you can see here are Chicago by night, taken from the balcony of our hotel, and Monument Valley at sunrise.

 

 The placemats aren't huge but there is plenty of room for a dinner plate and they look really good quality - robust with a glossy finish. I'm looking forward to using them!
If you order from Snapfish before February 9 your order should reach you in time for Valentine's Day :-)

Thanks to Snapfish for the voucher towards the products I chose. All opinions are my own etc.

 

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