I was delighted to find out that I could find Three Twins lemon cookie ice cream, one of the treats on the 50 Treats list, at my local Whole Foods store. I‘ve never actually had lemon ice cream, only lemon sorbet. The lemon flavor was not too tart and the ice cream was not too sweet. I also really liked the little chunks of lemon cookie in the ice cream. Usually I prefer ice creams that have some chocolate in them, but I was pleasantly surprised by this lemon cookie ice cream. Definitely worth eating again 🙂
More cookies
This week, I made sugar cookies and peanut butter cup cookies. The sugar cookies are not traditional sugar cookies, as they have more sugar in them than usual and the dough is rolled in colored sugar prior to baking. Needless to say, these cookies are VERY sweet.
I found the recipe for the peanut butter cup recipes on allrecipes.com. There is a very similar recipe on the back of the bags of mini Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, which I will probably eventually try. I followed the advice of many reviewers on allrecipes.com and froze the peanut butter cups prior to pushing them into the cookies. I also refrigerated the cookies, for about 10 minutes, after they were baked and the peanut butter cups were inserted. The cookies turned out pretty good, although I feel like I can taste the flour a little too much. Though I do love cookies, in this case, I think I would prefer to just eat the peanut butter cups alone.
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Highly efficient eating
In order to make some more progress on my goal of eating the top 50 treats listed on 7×7.com, I had to do some strategic planning on Saturday when I went to the city. For lunch, my mom and I headed to the Ferry Building. After having a delicious porchetta sandwich from Roli Roti, we ventured inside and I first stopped at Miette for their old fashioned chocolate cake with Italian meringue frosting. You can buy it as an actual cake or as a cupcake. The cake is probably the best chocolate cake I’ve had. It’s really moist and has a very rich chocolate flavor. The frosting wasn’t my favorite, in terms of taste and texture. It is more gooey and less solid than the usual frostings used for cupcakes. I prefer the traditional frostings that go on cake.
Next, I stopped at Michael Recciuti for some truffles. I bought a truffle with jasmine tea infused ganache, one with hazelnut, and one called the Peanut Butter Puck. All three are delicious. I love chocolates that are infused with tea flavor. The peanut butter in the Peanut Butter Puck is not super sweet like in Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
There was also a guy sampling these amazing pretzels that are covered in chocolate and toffee chips. The outside tastes similar to Almond Roca candy. I had to buy a bag because they were that good. Apparently, they have also been featured on the Rachel Ray show. The saltiness of the pretzel and the sweetness of the chocolate and toffee are incredible together.
Finally, for dinner we ate at Townhall. I had two main reasons for eating there, the buttermilk fried chicken and their butterscotch and chocolate pot de crème dessert, which is on the list. I was also pleasantly surprised by one of their appetizers. It is a ham and cheese toast with poached egg. However, what makes it amazing is the cream sauce they pour over the whole sandwich. It is super creamy and slightly spicy from the jalapenos. The butterscotch and chocolate pot de crème is seriously one of the best desserts I have ever eaten and definitely my favorite thing (so far) off the 7×7.com list. They serve it in a bowl and the bottom layer is chocolate and the top layer is butterscotch. The consistency is more dense than mousse but it is not heavy. They serve it with toffee (or maybe butterscotch?) pieces that are covered with chocolate on one side. I could not stop eating the dessert even though I was beyond stuffed at that point. This dessert is definitely meant to be shared, but not with too many 😛
My day in the city was quite successful as I can now check off three more treats from my list of 50 and I had some seriously fantastic food.
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Holiday baking binge
Since it’s December, I have started my holiday baking binge. Christmas is the perfect excuse to bake a ton of cookies for no reason other than the fact that it’s the holidays and you’re supposed to bake cookies at this time of year. I’ve kicked off the baking season with butter cookies with lemon curd, vanilla salted peanut cookies, and white chocolate cookies with raspberry jam. All three recipes came from holiday baking magazines that I can’t stop myself from buying every year, even though they probably recycle the recipes year to year. Of the three cookie recipes, my favorite was the butter cookies with lemon curd. They taste the best and they’re pretty. The cookies alone taste pretty good, but the lemon curd is a great addition.
The vanilla salted peanut cookies turned out really crunchy and brown on the outside. When I pulled the cookies out of the oven when they were lightly golden brown, the middle of the cookies were not done. But leaving them in the oven longer to cook the middle makes the outside of the cookie look darker brown than most cookies. However, this may also be because there is only brown sugar and no granulated sugar in the recipe. They also turned out really crunchy, which is fine with me since I like crunchy cookies, but for others, this may not be so appealing.
The white chocolate cookies with raspberry jam look really festive with the red raspberry jam and white chocolate drizzle. I’m not the biggest fan of white chocolate or raspberry but I thought that they tasted pretty good together.
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