Ono Ice Creams !

Ono means "tastes good" in hawaiian, and Dave's hawaiian ice creams are a good example of what ono means. Made locally, the ice creams comes in unique flavors like haupia (coconut pudding), macademia nuts, ube (sweet potato), lychee, coconut macademia, hawaiian mud pie...the list goes on.
Today I made a special detour to the shop in Waimanolo, HI, to try three flavors (picture below). In purple blue is ube, made from the purple sweet potato. It has a sweet taste, but not too strong, and the flavor is truly unique to Hawaii. A must try ! In white is lychee sherbert, too sugary for my taste. Underneath is toasted macademia nut. Very good mac ice cream with lots of toasted nut chunks, highly recommended.

Aloha !

My posting of personal recipes will be on hold until I return from a Christmas vacation in Honolulu, Hawaii. But it does not mean I would let you down ! Hawaiians love to eat. Honolulu is full of restaurants, from the hawaiian plate hole-in-the-wall to the newest trendy (and crowded) places. The islands are literally at the forefront of asian cuisines with major exposure from China, Japan, Korea, Thailand or the Philipines. It's a smorgasbord of flavors !

Here is a list of my personal favorites, in no special order:

• any poke with ahi tuna, smoked octopus, mussels, or smoked marlin (I can just eat that day and night, who needs vegetables ?)
  
• seaweed salad (I guess that would make that my vegetables, right ?)
  
• an pan (chinese brioche filled with red bean paste, great for breakfast and the after-beach snack)
  
• Ted's haupia cream pie from Ted's bakery. Huge (at least two knuckles) layer of coconut pudding crowned with whipped cream. It's rapture on a thin layer of dough!
  
• Dave's hawaiian ice creams (taro, haupia, sweet potato especially!). Too bad the Honolulu store I knew closed.
  
• Dole plantation's pineapple ice cream. No travel on Oahu is complete without a trip to the Dole plantation. Not for the maze, the garden, the koi pond, or the store (all tourist traps imo), but for the absolutely delicious pineapple ice milk. Forget the sugar, it's pure pineapple flavor, period.
  
• mochi ice cream (just had a taste of a good one at Shirokiya today, cherry-blossom flavor!)
  
• and my latest discovery, huge cream puffs from Beard Papa's ! The chocolate cream reminds me of a mild chocolate mousse. What's more fun than linking the oozing cream off your fingers (or someone else's !!!! wink, wink).
  

And for the little time left when I don't eat, I go snorkeling. Enjoy the picture !

Parrotfish at the spa, curtesy of a cleaner wrasse

Flan can be a great dessert too !

Flan aux Oeufs (egg flan)

I love flan ! It's that light sweet texture that dissolves in your mouth, leaving an eggy-milky taste behind. It does not make you full, yet it satisfies your sugar craving. Perfect! Add some caramel and maybe a light biscuit soaked with extra flavors and you just made a great dessert to top a heavy meal. I recently discovered the mexican version at the local mexican store. Texture is much heavier, likely from flour or corn starch. It's delicious but this one will fill you up !

My recipe is quick and easy. Never one to waste, I usually make flan to use up leftover milk before it gets bad. Either that or I make crepes :) I added some lady fingers to it to spruce it up a bit, both visually and for taste. By the way, here are, in my opinion, the three wonders of lady fingers: you can buy them cheap, they are small and easy to arrange, they will soak up anything you throw at them. Don't be surprised if you see more of them in my recipes, I always have a box handy at home! Here, I used diluted Grand Marnier to flavor the lady fingers. During baking, the alcohol dissipated but it left behind a faint orangy taste that I love. And the lady fingers were all soft and moist from absorbing the cream. Pure Heaven!

Ingredients:

• 4 cups of whole milk
• 5 eggs
• 1/2 cup of sugar
• vanilla extract (1/4 teaspoon)
• 8-10 lady fingers
• 1 teaspoon of your favorite liquor (optional)

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven at 320F.
2. Beat the eggs with vanilla extract.
3. Boil the milk with sugar.
4. Add the hot milk to the eggs in small portions (to avoid curling) while stirring with a whisk.
5. Dilute the liquor with water (to your liking!) and quickly dip the lady fingers. Don't soak them or they won't absorb the cream anymore.
6. Place the lady fingers in a pan made of porcelain or pyrex and pour the warm cream on top. Let the lady fingers absorb the liquid for 15 minutes, then bake at 320F in the oven for 45 minutes.
7. Serve warm or cold. Fresh berries are great accompaniments.

Chocolate Cake Pudding...

...or How to Recover from a Kitchen Accident and Look Fabulous !


Don't you hate it when you make your best cake ever, right on time so it will be slightly warm when served, and kaboooom ! You drop it ! We all have those horror stories. They are all too real, unfortunately. But I find that's in the face of adversity that we can make huge leaps in creativity. Let me share my story, which happened this past week-end...


I was pumped, ready to make my sin-delicious chocolate cake for the ceramics studio opening, Clay Associates. I stopped at the grocery store on my way from work to stock up on eggs (good thinking in retrospect!), and once home I started at once. Cake batter was ready in 20 minutes following the recipe on my previous post. I even added some clementine rind (out of oranges) for extra flavor (great combo !). I baked the cake for 30 minutes, it looked good, it smelled good, I was on a roll. I took it out of the oven, the kitchen towel I used to grab the pan slipped thus exposing my ring finger to the hot pan. Surprised, I screamed well-placed expletives while dropping my creation upside down on the lowered oven door! Followed by 10 seconds of silence, a minute of self-cursing, then heavy sweat. "What am I going to do ?" I could easily salvage the cake but it was in no shape presentable anymore.

What ensued was the longest 5 minutes in my life. I was processing thousands of ideas in my mind to turn my proverbial lemons into lemonade. I settled for the quick and easy, as I was running out of time. I made my first pudding !

You see, pudding originally is recycled bread, old bread that's too hard to eat. It is crumbled and soaked in a sweet egg-based cream to find new life as a warm dessert, excellent with ice-cream. Suddenly, it was the perfect solution for my problems.

Here is what I did.

1) I boiled a pint of half and half with a pint of fat-free milk (normally I would simply boil whole milk but I was out) and 1/2 cup sugar.

2) I beat 4 eggs and slowly added the warm milk to it while turning.

3) I added some vanilla flavor (1/8 teaspon) (it's optional and can be substituted with your favorite flavoring including alcohols!)

4) I crumbled the chocolate cake in small pieces and let them soak in the egg cream for 20 minutes

5) I transfered the mixture into a greased loaf pan and baked at 320F for 45 minutes.

The pudding was still warm when I brought it to the studio. It was an instant hit and disappeared quickly ! Light, soft, chocolatey with a smooth orangy flavor, not too sweet, it was divine, or as one guest told me "one bite and I went to Heaven!". Best compliment ever !