With so much hot weather in Southern California these first three weeks of autumn, I'm feeling frustrated that it's too hot to curl up with a good book and blanket and sip on pumpkin spice lattes. What's this fall-loving girl supposed to do when I have to endure the opposite of fall weather every day...Well here it is! The perfect compromise of warm weather relief with fall flavor. Pumpkin Spice Latte Ice Cream! This has got to be the best find of the year. I saw this recipe for three-ingredient ice cream on Facebook and it inspired me to try it at home with one of my favorite seasonal instant coffees, Maxwell House's Pumpkin Spice Latte. I know it may not be a Starbucks Latte but for this girl on a budget and no time to wait for thirty minutes for a fancy coffee...this is the next best thing!
This is an insanely easy and delicious Pumpkin Spiced Latte Ice Cream! It contains no eggs, so it's lighter tasting. Which I find refreshing, especially with all this hot weather. Just to put it in prespective how hot it got in the Los Angeles area yesterday, it was 102 degrees in my neck of the woods. We were hotter than Las Vegas and Dallas! It was ridiculous! Anyway, back to the ice cream...It's delicious all by itself or topped with your favorite sauce. I drizzled mine with caramel but you can skip the caramel sauce and serve it a la mode with pumpkin pie. Can you imagine...pumpkin pie with pumpkin spice latte ice cream? Yummy. Another great thing about this recipe is that it's versatile. You can use just about any flavored coffee...mocha latte, vanilla, peppermint spice and even hazelnut coffee. The combinations are endless. Stay cool and enjoy!
Pumpkin Spice Latte Ice Cream
Adapted recipe from Tip Hero via Facebook Serves 4-6 2 1/2 cups Whipping Cream 1 can of Sweetened Condensed Milk
5-6 t. Maxwell House International Pumpkin Spice Latte Instant Coffee/Creamer, dissolved in 1/2 cup of regular coffee and then cooled to room temperature. Mix 5-6 heaping teaspoons of Maxwell House International Pumpkin Spice Latte instant coffee into 1/2 cup regular hot coffee. Stir until fully dissolved. Place coffee in refrigerator to cool about 20 minutes. (I made my instant coffee mixture the night before so it would be ready in the morning.) In a large bowl add condensed milk and coffee and whipping cream. Using a hand mixer, whip ice cream mixture until fluffy peaks are stiff. ~5 minutes.
Pour mixture into a freezer safe dish and cover with plastic wrap and freeze 8 hours or overnight. Scoop, top with your favorite sauce, and Enjoy!
I know I probably say this every time I make a dessert for the blog, but I'm not much of a dessert person. I used to be when I was in my teens and twenties but sometime in the last 20 years, I've lost my taste for the sweet stuff. Give me a meal with salad and I'm good, but occasionally I do crave a little something sweet, like chocolate or cheesecake, but my favorite cookie would have to be SHORTBREAD, hands down! Buttery, delicious and not too sweet! This is definitely my kind of dessert! I seriously could eat these little morsels every morning with a cup of coffee. If I hadn't taken these little bites of wonderful to school for a PTA meeting, I would of eaten every single last one all by myself. I already ate two dozen right out of the oven! Make a big batch of them and watch your little monsters devour them!
Makes ~9 dozen bite-sized cookies 1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature 1/2 cup granulated sugar 1/2 t vanilla extract 2 1/2 cup all purpose flour 1/2 t salt 2 T nonpareils Halloween sprinkles
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Cream together butter and sugar and add vanilla. Add flour and salt to stand mixer and mix on low until incorporated. Stir in the Halloween sprinkles by hand until evenly distributed.
On parchment paper, form dough into a rectangle. I used the edge of a spatula to square off the edges. Then I used a regular rolling pin to smooth out the surface of the dough.
I decided to fancy up
this deliciously simple cookie recipe by using my super cool engraved rolling pin
that my mom gave me last year. I think they turned out pretty neat. Don't you? (Thanks mom! XO)
Use a pizza cutter to cut the dough into 1 inch cookies. Place cookies one inch apart on parchment lined cookie sheet and bake for 13-15 minutes at 325 degree oven. Cool and enjoy!
I had this idea to make a Halloween inspired dish from cauliflower because lets face it, it looks like brains. Perfect Halloween material right? I figured there's a great side dish or salad in the making. The problem is, cauliflower pretty much tastes like water. Not much flavor going on. It's like chunky H2O. Unless you smother it in a cheese sauce or salad dressing it's pretty bland. This recipe however is the farthest thing from bland-ville.
The cauliflower is roasted and basted in a sweet, spicy, and garlicky sauce that's so delicious that even my husband loved it and he is NOT a fan of cauliflower...he had two servings.
Slicing the cauliflower into flat patties does a few things. One it makes them look like cross-sections of cerebrums. Which is way cool and creepy for a Halloween inspired side dish. Two, it helps infuse the sauce better because the florets are smaller bites of cauliflower. And three, it makes for quick, easy, and even roasting.
This recipe was so yummy and the pictures turned out so beautiful that the plating doesn't look much like a Halloween dish. But like all my Halloween recipes, they can be made any time of the year, not just for Halloween, just change up the plating to de-Halloween-ify it. This would be a perfect side dish with my Midnight Sushi with Wasabi Skulls and a cool Fangtini. Enjoy!
Roasted Brains (Spicy Roasted Cauliflower)
Serves 4
1 head of Cauliflower, florets cut into thin flats of cauliflower
1/4 cup vegetable oil 1 T toasted sesame oil 3 T soy sauce 3-4 T sriracha (to taste) 1 clove garlic, finely minced (I used Dorot garlic cubes) juice of one lime 2 T honey green onions (garnish) black sesame seeds(garnish)
Preheat oven to 450 degrees.
In a small bowl, mix vegetable and sesame oils, soy sauce, sriracha, garlic, and lime juice and give a quick stir. Note: The honey is not added at this point to prevent the sauce from burning during roasting. The honey will be added to the leftover sauce after basting the cauliflower.
On a parchment lined cookie sheet, place cauliflower florets in a single layer. Baste one side of cauliflower flats with spicy sauce (with no honey added). Set leftover sauce aside.
Roast 450 degrees for 20-25 minutes.
Add the honey to the leftover sauce and mix well. Add additional sriracha if desired. Or if you didn't have much remaining, make a new batch of sauce, this time adding all the ingredients at one time.
Remove cauliflower from the oven and baste generously with the spicy sauce with honey. Transfer to a bowl or platter garnish with green onions and black sesame seeds and Enjoy!
