Apple Brown Betty For Lunch

    You may recall me mentioning the fact that my family just went apple picking on Sunday.  We picked 20 pounds of beautiful red Mcintosh and Empire apples.  It is tradition that on the evening we pick apples I make a brown betty.  History has taught me that one brown betty is never enough.  I made two big apple brown bettys and a batch of homemade vanilla ice-cream to go with it.  

    While I was making my brown betty I thought that I should pack the kids a bit of brown betty for their lunch dessert.  The problem is that it always looks so pretty in the casserole dish, but loses that pretty when it's dished out in a bowl, or lunch container.  I wondered how I could pack the kid's brown betty, but keep as much of the sweet, crusty top intact.  That was when I had my big idea.  I don't want to sound too full of myself, but I feel safe in calling myself a genius on this one.  O.K., genius may be stretching, but I have to say it's pretty clever.  I made apple brown betty in my muffin tins.  They are the perfect size for my new favourite ziploc lunch storage containers.

    It only took two apples to make 6 mini apple brown bettys.  I cut them extra small to fit them into the cupcake papers.  

    I then topped the sliced apples with my brown betty mix (1 1/2 cups flour, 3/4 cup brown sugar, 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 tsp of salt).  I baked them for 20 minutes at 350 degrees. 

Oh they looked pretty and smelled even prettier after they were finished.

    It's funny when I cracked open my cookbook.  You can easily tell my family's favourite recipes without even having to ask.  Just look through my cookbooks.  The pages that are pristine, are not our favourites.  It's the ones that are barely legible, covered in grease marks, and food splatter.  

    At the end of the night I had packed 4 lunches.  The brown bettys were the perfect size for the compartment, easy peasy.

Watermelon Sorbet

    I love to make ice-cream.  I think I may have shared this fact before.  I am a regular Ben and Jerry.  I love to experiment with different types of ice-creams, the kids like me to also.  Rowan has been bugging me for a while now to make watermelon ice-cream (Rowan LOVES watermelon).  I have been mulling this one around, trying to decide the best way to make watermelon ice-cream.

    This afternoon I had that light bulb moment as I was slicing up watermelon wedges for the kids to snack on, not watermelon ice-cream, watermelon sorbet!  The first thing I did was too pour through my ice-cream making cookbooks (hard to believe but there are actually lots of ice-cream cookbooks out there).  None of them had a recipe for watermelon sorbet, that's weird.  I would create a recipe on my own, heaven help us all.  I took 1/4 of a watermelon and but it into small pieces.  I then put this into my blender.  It did not blend.  I then poured all of the chunks into my food processor.  It blended perfectly, but it also splashed out of the food processor and down the side of my stove and onto the floor.  I am not sure what genius created the prototype for my food processor, but I don't think he should be employed by Black and Decker any more.

After it was all blended I took my sieve and put a coffee filter into the bottom of it, and placed it into a bowl. I then poured the contents of the food processor into the sieve.  It took a long time to strain.

    While the watermelon puree was straining, I poured 2 cups of water and 1/2 of a cup of white sugar into a small sauce pan.  I cooked it until it was almost boiled, and then added an envelope of Knox gelatine (1 tbsp or 15 ml) and whisked it.  When that was all cool I added the watermelon juice to the mix.  I think I now know why they call it "watermelon".  It is pretty much all water.  There was maybe an eighth of a cup of pulp left from 1/4 of a watermelon.  When it was all stirred in I put it into a jug and refrigerated it... it's a good thing that I own a dishwasher!

    While we were eating dinner I poured the jug of watermelon mixture into the ice-cream maker.  It took about 25 minutes to freeze up.  It turned out pretty good.  It had a nice light fresh taste to it.  Christopher suggested that it would taste really nice mixed with some vodka, I agree with my husband on this one.

    I think that I know have sorbets under my belt, I think I might try lemon sorbet next.  Wish me luck!

Ice- Cream Cone Cupcakes

The Ice-Cream Cone Cupcakes ...

    I have had a lot of people asking me how I made the ice-cream cone cupcakes.  It made me decide that I would do a step- by -step for anyone who wanted the instructions.

Step #1  Make your cake batter (although in almost every instance I prefer scratch above mix, this is not the case for cake.  I think that cake mix is so much more moist than any scratch cake I have ever made).

Step #2 Take ice-cream cones and put them into a 9X13 baking dish ( I used a 9x9 for this batch).

Step #3 Fill the ice-cream cones with cake batter.  You don't want to over fill them, I know this from experience, what a mess!  Fill them to about 3/4 of the way up to the top of the cone.

Step #4 Cook the cup cakes for about half an hour at 350 degrees on the centre rack.   Let them cool.

Step #5 To get the rainbow effect, take a Q-tip and dip it into food colour gel.  I then ran stripes of food colour up the sides of the icing bag.  It helps to put the icing bag into a large cup to stabilize it.     

                   

Step #6  I start the icing around the outside of the cupcake.  I then circle around to the inside.  I put  pressure on the icing bag when I finish and then pull up, to make the ice-cream swirl.

Step #7 Eat and enjoy!