Moon Mist

This week's ice cream flavour is Moon Mist. It's a swirled mix of banana, grape and bubble gum flavoured ice creams. We couldn't come up with any recipes that combined those three ingredients, and we thought the name sounded like the title of a painting or photograph, so that's what we decided we'd give you this week: a photo blog.

Cinnamon Buns

Ok, this flavour by Brusters is definitely one I haven’t tried before, but I love the flavour...cinnamon bun. You don’t really think of ice cream when you think of cinnamon buns. I mean sometimes you can imagine how things would translate into an ice cream flavour but I wasn’t quite sure about this one anyways, it’s the perfect excuse to make some warm gooey icing topped cinnamon buns in the middle of July!

I love this recipe because the buns are super fluffy and you don’t need any yeast to make them.

For the dough you will need:

2 cups of flour

2 Tbsp. of sugar

4 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. of salt

3 Tbsp. of butter

¾ cup of milk

I always double up the recipe because I tend to bake for a lot of people so that’s why it looks like a lot.

In a large bowl, mix all of your dry ingredients.

Cut in the butter. I use my hands.

Then stir in the milk to form a soft dough.

On a floured surface, roll the dough into a ¼ inch thick rectangle.

For the filling, you don’t have to be exact. I just wing it. Melt some butter and brush a nice layer over the dough. Be sure to leave a little bit of a border with no butter around the outside of the dough rectangle.

Sprinkle on however much brown sugar and cinnamon that you like (I like lots) and then this is the point where you would sprinkle in raisins if you want them.

Roll and cut and then place them in a buttered 9x9 inch pan if you are making a single recipe, but use a larger pan if you double it.

Now lightly butter the tops of the buns and sprinkle on more brown sugar and cinnamon.

Bake in a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes.

While the buns are baking, you can make a frosting. You will need 4 ounces of cream cheese, beaten. Then add ¼ cup of butter, 1 ½ cups of powdered sugar, 1 ½ tsp. of milk, ½ tsp. of vanilla. Whip it all up so that everything is mixed and there are no lumps and put in the fridge until you are ready to eat.

After the buns come out of the oven, let them cool slightly and then cover with glaze or icing and serve warm!

*We were all wrapped up in making the buns that we forgot to take a photo of the finished product so next time we make them, we’ll do that!

Pirate Bounty - DIY Scavenger Hunt

The ice cream of the week is Pirate's Bounty. This is a flavour by Island Farms. It is a rich licorice flavoured ice cream with a black licorice flavoured ribbon and crunchy butter toffee pieces. When we think of pirates, we think of treasure maps and hunting for that treasure so we thought that a fun DIY craft would be making up a scavenger hunt. Growing up you’d have scavenger hunts at school and often at birthday parties. Everyone had their own ways of doing them so we are going to share with you some ideas and a couple tutorials. We’re gearing our ideas towards kids and teens, but I also think that doing a scavenger hunt as an adult would be loads of fun too. You can tweak the ideas that we are sharing to make it fit your type of scavenger hunt.

Ideas:

The most obvious way to set up the scavenger hunt is by making up a map of the location that you are going to have your hunt in. Whether it is outside or in, you can draw up a map and mark a big X where the treasure is. Depending on how creative you are, you can make it as detailed or as simple as you’d like.

Another way to do a scavenger hunt is to give picture clues that will lead to the big treat or treasure at the end. For younger children you can take an obvious picture of the place/item where the next clue is hidden, but for older kids and adults, take more close up and obscure pictures so they’re harder to find. You can draw these clues or take photos and print them out.

We took a picture as an example...this is 

A common scavenger hunt idea is to write riddle like clues which lead to more clues which will eventually lead to the treasure at the end. Think up easy clues for the young ones and harder more difficult clues for older hunters.

We made clues out of cardstock and we made them little envelopes with pirate shapes on them.

one is a bit more fun and there’s more to it. Make up a list of items, maybe a few different lists (you can give everyone the same list, everyone can have different ones, or some have the same and some different) and then get all the participants to find these items. It’s fine to do this one indoors (collecting things like pencils, forks, cotton balls, fruit or something blue), but it might be a more exciting outdoor scavenger hunt idea (collecting things like rocks, shells, leaves, pine cones or something soft). Give everyone buckets or bags or something to collect everything in. Whoever finds everything on the list first, wins the prize/treasure.

A cool more inventive idea for a hunt would be to make you own puzzle. You would collect puzzle pieces at each location after you solve the clues and then once you have all of the pieces, you’d put the puzzle together which would show you the location of the treasure. You can buy a make your own puzzle kit online or you can take a photo of the location of the treasure, print it on thick paper or cardboard, and then cut it into puzzle pieces.

Tips:

Give your scavenger hunt a theme. A popular one is pirates of course, so if you go with this you can get the kids to dress up, have decorations around all to do with pirates, have pirate “snacks,” and print all of your clues on pirate colours of paper with pirate embellishments.

Figure out how you are going to do your treasure. You could arrange it so that everyone gets some treasure at the end. If it is at birthday party, have goody bags as your treasure. Or if want everyone to go hunting solo with their own clues, you can have a big prize for the first one to find the treasure, and if you’re super nice, little treats for the ones that follow.

Something to keep in mind when planning your scavenger hunt is to decide where the treasure is going to be and then work backwards hiding everything else and coming up with the clues.

Make sure you take into consideration the age of the children or people hunting. Don’t make it too difficult if it’s a scavenger hunt is for five year olds!

Make sure that your clues aren’t too vague. For instance if you’re giving a hint about a great place to find a snack, then that could mean the fridge or the pantry so try and be specific with your clue.

Boston Cream Cupcakes

The flavour of the day today is Boston Cream by Baskin Robbins. This would be a very interesting flavour of ice cream to try out one day. However, we are making Boston Cream cupcakes today. It’s a slightly different take on the Boston Cream Pie and it’s absolutely delicious.

We’ve made these cupcakes a couple of times before. They do take some time so they are a treat to have for sure.

You will need:

Pastry Cream

1 ½ cups of heavy cream

3 large egg yolks

1/3 cup of sugar

4 tsp. of cornstarch

2 tbsp. of butter

1 ½ tsp. of vanilla

Cupcakes

1 ¾ cups of flour

1 cup of sugar

1 ½ tsp. of baking powder

¾ tsp. of salt

12 tbsp. of butter softened

3 large eggs

¾ cup of whole milk

1 ½ tsp. of vanilla extract

Glaze

1 cup of semisweet chocolate

2/3 cup of heavy cream

¼ cup of light corn syrup

½ tsp. of vanilla

Make the pastry cream first so that it can set and cool down in the fridge. Start off by bringing the cream to a simmer over medium heat. Meanwhile, whisk the yolks, sugar, and the salt in a large bowl until well mixed and then whisk in the cornstarch until pale yellow and thick.

Add the hot cream slowly into the yolk mixture and return immediately to the pan and cook at medium heat until glossy and thickened, about 1 minute. Whisk in the butter and the vanilla and then sir and transfer to a bowl. Press plastic wrap on the surface of the cream mix and chill for about 2 hours.

Now it’s time to make the cakes!

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Line your muffin tins with liners; we ended up using two muffin tins because we probably didn’t fill up the cups as much as we should.

Whisk the dry ingredients together (flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt) in your mixer’s bowl. Use your mixer to beat the cut up butter into the flour mix. Chop it into 12 pieces and add in 30 second intervals. Beat until it looks like moist crumbs.

Beat in the eggs one at a time. Then beat in the milk and vanilla and increase the speed to medium and beat the batter until light and fluffy.

Now fill up your muffin cups about three quarters full; you don’t want it to be too full looking though. They aren’t meant to be tall fluffy cupcakes.

Bake for 18 to 20 minutes until the center comes out clean when a toothpick is inserted. Cool the cupcakes in the tin for 10 minutes before putting them all on a rack to cool even more.

It’s all about timing for these last few steps. When the cupcakes feel all cooled down, then make your glaze because it needs about 20 minutes to “set” and that will give you time to carve your cupcakes.

For the glaze, microwave the chocolate, cream, corn syrup, and vanilla all together in a heatproof bowl. Stir every 30 seconds for 1-2 minutes until all of the ingredients are melted and smooth. Let it thicken for about 20 minutes.

While the glaze is thickening, you can carve your cupcakes. Basically you want to make a hollow in the center of you cupcake for the cream to go into so cut around the inside edge of the top of your cupcake. Cut downward and at an angle towards the center but make sure you don’t go too deep that you cut through the bottom. You should remove an upside down cone if you did it right.

Cut the pointed end of the cone off so that you have a flat “lid” left. Put the extra cake bits aside for nibbling on later.

Take the pastry cream out of the fridge and fill all of the hollowed out cupcakes and then put their lids back on.

This is the point where you ca decide if you want to take all of the cupcakes liners off of the cupcakes or not. We left them on, but realized that after we put the glaze on, it was really messy because glaze was all over the liners and it was hard to take them off.

Ok, so once you have the cupcakes the way you want them and all filled, pour that glaze over the tops of all of them so that it dribbles down the sides and completely covers the top. You will probably have glaze leftover, but not to worry, it’s good to put on ice cream so it won’t go to waste. Something to remember to save yourself from a big huge mess, keep the cupcakes on the wire rack and line a cookie sheet with parchment so that it catches all of the excess glaze.

Let the glaze set so put the cupcakes in the fridge for about 10 minutes or so and then it’s time to enjoy them.