Few weeks ago, when I was on my regular grocery shopping ritual, I bought some rice flour. I have never experimented with this flour, and thought it would be nice to use it somewhere, and if I am gluten-intolerant, it would be nice to experiment it before. Here are the two recipes that use rice flour. The first one is “banana cocoa rice flour pudding”, and the other one is an unbelievably tasty impromptu dessert that I want to talk about. I call it simply rice pudding cake, but there’s more than that.

Yesterday, my mum and my sister wanted some pudding. I, as usual thought that  is a boring idea and told them that we should make some more interesting dessert. Then mum said “I bought peaches, and you can make some peach pudding”. Then the idea developed, and by the end of the next ten minutes, we agreed on making some sponge cake, on top of that some pudding, and on top of that, peaches and leftover bananas.

In short, I made a cake (not gluten-free!!) Then, I made rice flour pudding and poured it over the cake. After that, I cooked some peaches and bananas with little butter and sugar, and put it over the top of my dessert. Result? I wasn’t expecting such a good taste (because it somewhat looked boring and tasteless to me), and when we tasted it we were literally shocked. It was unbelievably good!. I mean, really good! And the good thing is, it can be modified easily. Actually the next thing I’m planning to do is making some carrot cake and pudding and using apples on top. Well, I don’t know, there are hundreds of options. Enjoy!

Rice Flour Pudding

Ingredients:

• 500 ml low-fat milk
• 35 gr rice flour
• 40-50 gr sugar
• 1 small banana
• 1 teaspoon cocoa powder
• some diet cookies (or gluten-free, if you wish) for serving
• coconut flakes for serving

Directions:

Mix milk, rice flour, sugar and cocoa powder in a bowl and heat them while stirring.

When the heated mixture thickens, add mashed bananas and stir for a minute or two.

Pour the pudding in cups filled with some diet cookies. Sprinkle coconut flakes on tops.

Impromptu Rice Pudding Cake

Ingredients:

Cake

• 2 large eggs
• ¾ cup sugar
• ½ cup low-fat milk
• 1 ½ – 2 cups flour (depends on the thickness of the batter)
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• pinch of salt

Rice Pudding

• 750 ml milk
• 80-100 gr sugar
• 35 gr rice flour
• 10 gr starch

Fruits

• 2 peaches
• 1 large banana
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 2-3 tablespoons sugar

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C.

First, prepare the cake batter. Mix the eggs, milk and olive oil. Add the dry ingredients and pour them in a small/medium pan. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes.

For rice pudding, mix all the ingredients and cook until the mixture thickens.

And for cooked fruits, simply sautee the sliced fruits with butter and sugar.

Now, assemble the dessert. Pour the pudding over the cake. Then, spread the fruits on top. Finished!

(And I said I will try to post twice a week… Well, I’ll try next time…)

The second best thing about summer for me is definitely ice cream (The first one is summer vacations, of course). And when we have a lot of fresh sour cherries the garden, it would be shame not to use them in a recipe. So, I decided to make some ice cream with them. But sour cherries, as you know, are a bit “sour”, and I didn’t want to use a lot of sugar to make them eatable, so instead, adding some peaches not only made me put less sugar in it, but also gave a distinct taste to the ice cream. I also drizzled some homemade sour cherry jam before serving.

This is a very easy recipe, and I don’t remember the exact measurements. But it was roughly as follows: I pitted a cup of cherries and mashed them along with two peaches. Then I pureed them using a strainer and chilled the puree in the freezer for two hours. At the same time, I heated 1 ½ cups of half-and-half with half cup of sugar and let it cool in the refrigerator. Then what I did was to put the puree and milky mixture in an ice-cream maker! Actually, what I should do was to mix the puree with ¼ cup of icing sugar at the beginning and after that mix it with half-and-half, but we have no icing sugar left in the country house, so instead I used half cup of regular sugar and since it hs big grains that cannot dissolve in fruit puree, I heated it with half-and-half.

OK, though I love only “real” ice cream (I don’t like frozen yogurt, milkshake, etc.), but there’s something that changed my mind. Now, I have a new favorite ice cream, which is not really ice cream at all. It is the recipe I found in Choosing Raw. It is “Banana Soft Serve”, but I call it “Fake Super Ice Cream”. It is simply made by putting frozen banana slices in a food processor (not in a blender, it won’t give the same results, as Gena says) and wait until you get a smooth cream, and that’s it. What you get is like banana ice cream, and I added a bit more taste by mixing it with some chocolate chips and honey. Try this, I swear it will be the healthiest and yummiest solution to your ice cream cravings!!

]]> http://kitchenimpromptu.com/sour-cherry-peach-ice-cream-and-my-new-favorite/feed/ 0 http://kitchenimpromptu.com/chocolate-eclairs-with-banana-and-honey-cream/ http://kitchenimpromptu.com/chocolate-eclairs-with-banana-and-honey-cream/#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:27:58 +0000 ulya http://kitchenimpromptu.com/?p=465

Well, I know the eclairs in the photo do not look nice and cool, but their taste is inversely proportional to how they look.. Really.. The reason for their bad appearance is due to a little accident. After I finished making my tiny eclairs, the plate they’re on fell off to the kitchen table and their chocolate glaze was all over the place.. I think I’m never going to make some good looking food..

In fact, nothing can make me sad about these eclairs, because it’s my third trial so far, and the first two were a complete disaster. I tried to play with the “choux” pastry recipe, put whole-wheat flour instead of all-purpose flour, tried to change the amount of butter, and the dough didn’t rise. So, this time I didn’t take any risk and made my “pâte à choux” directly from here. The directions there were also very useful.

Anyway, after making my little choux pastries, I filled them with pastry cream. Well, I cannot give you the recipe, because I took it from a pastry chef, but you can use this recipe, which I used before. The tricky part is, when I was making the cream, I added 2 tablespoons of honey by decreasing the amount of sugar, and after the cream is chilled, I added 2 mashed bananas into it.

Finally, I poured chocolate glaze on them. The glaze is very simple to make, melt the chocolate and add some melted butter (If you melt 2 units of chocolate, add 1 unit of melted butter).

This is another impromptu cake I just made up and it didn’t disappoint me. I came by some ripe bananas in the kitchen the other day, and decided to use them in what I do best: muffins! I also added the chocolate chips I’ve recently bought from the coffee shop (I usually use chopped chocolate instead of chocolate-chips, but the girl in the coffee shop insisted me to buy them and I gave it a try). I didn’t want to add sugar to the cake, so I used honey. I don’t usually use honey in my cakes, but this time it really worked and the muffins were neither too sweet nor vapid. This has become one my favorite muffin recipes.

Chocolate-Chip Banana Muffins with Honey

makes 20-24 muffins

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs
• 2 cups whole-wheat flour
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 3-4 tablespoons honey
• 4 tablespoons yogurt
• 3 (200 gr. – 7 oz.) bananas, mashed
• 50 gr (1.7 oz.) bittersweet chocolate, chopped (or chocolate chips)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon
• 4 teaspoons baking soda
• pinch of salt

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C (350 degrees F).

Mix together eggs, honey, olive oil, yogurt and vanilla in a bowl.

Add flour, cinnamon, salt and baking soda, and mix well.

Finally add the bananas and chocolate chips, and mix until you have an even mixture.

Pour the mixture into muffin cups, and bake for about 30 minutes, or until cooked.