Ice Cream and Frozen Desserts
Ooooh, I love this book.
I could quite happily eat my way through each and every one of Peggy Fallon’s
gorgeous desserts! Dan Kartong, 1978 US Olympic Marathon runner said “without
ice cream, there would be darkness and chaos”. That might be a bit of an extreme
view but I understand the sentiment.
Each page is well designed with some
background information, method and a side panel of ingredients. The recipes are
easy to understand and consist of recipes not only for making numerous ice
creams from scratch, but also for constructing gorgeous desserts using
ready-made ice cream. For instance you could make the Warm Chocolate-Espresso
Tart with Espresso Gelato using commercial coffee ice cream. Tiramisu Parfait
also uses the same coffee ice cream. Buy a big box of that!
Manhattan
Float sounds very sophisticated and has a slug of bourbon and vermouth. Or how
about finishing a classy evening with Spiked Espresso. It’s a kind of Irish
Coffee with cooling and melting ice cream instead of the usual collar of cream.
I’ll use this idea in future as I can never get the cream to float in the
original version.
Green Apple Sorbet is light and fresh-tasting. I use
calvados in the mix and serve it in a martini glass with some cinnamon biscuits.
It would make a change from the heavier traditional apple tart at the end of a
French meal.
Frozen Chocolate Dessert Lollies couldn’t be easier. It’s
chocolate custard poured into lolly moulds and frozen. The kids would love to
have a go at this one. Think I would as well!
For those of you with an
ice cream maker you can also have a go at making Frozen Yoghurt. If you haven’t
already tried this I can tell you that it’s a light and tangy version of regular
ice cream and is often less sweet. Peggy has also included several recipes that
use soya milk. Brown Sugar-Pineapple Iced Soya Milk sounds delicious.
Ice
Cream and Frozen Desserts has dolly-mixture pastel summer colours and is
wonderfully photographed. It will encourage you to go out and buy that ice
cream-making machine you have been talking about for ages.
Ice Cream
and Frozen Desserts
Author: Peggy Fallon
Published by: DK
Publishing
Price £ 12.99
ISBN 978-1-4053-2214-0
The Cocktail – 200 Fabulous Drinks
This is Sex in the City
for cocktail sippers! It’s this year’s book for girls to give their girlfriends.
It’s frilly, fluffy, gorgeous and a work of art!
Jane Rocca writes for
the Age, Sydney Sun Herald, West Australian and NW. She has contributed to
Harper’s Bazaar, HQ, Australian Style, The Face, Black + White, The Big Issue
and Cream.
The start of each chapter has a few words from Jane that will
make you either smile or laugh out loud... “Gin is for hopeless romantics,
clinging to the ideal of Heathcliff waiting out yonder to take them
away”......Not for me, it makes me morbid!
You gotta love a book that has
chapters with names like Rum like You Stole Something and Vodka Vixens! All that
said, it’s a book full of the classic cocktails like Singapore Sling but
alongside a Beijing Fling. There’s Long Island Iced Tea paired with Baghdad Iced
Tea!
If you are a lady that likes to launch with Tequila then
this book will spoil you with choice. There are Margaritas for every occasion
and taste: Passion fruit, Mango, Watermelon and Coriander, Peppered Strawberry
and several others.
Perhaps you are a Martini type gal. There is a nice
selection of them in this book. The Martini that Won the 1951 Martini
Competition in Chicago is listed and sounds very nice: dry vermouth, gin,
Cointreau and two anchovy-stuffed olives.
There is a definite Australian
bias to this book with cocktails named for all things Oz. How about an Alice
Springs or a Bush Tuckerman’s Sinus Cleaner?
Kat Macleod works as a
freelance illustrator and graphic designer on fashion and publication projects.
She loves drawing frivolous women in outrageous costumes. The Cocktail contains
some examples of Kat’s typical style of work and complements the text so well.
There are lovely illustrations on every page adding great colour, humour and
sophistication.
I confess that I am not a great cocktail drinker as I
once had a nasty encounter with one...or two. I have stuck to the uncomplicated
Gimlet, but some of the others are very tempting! I’ll give this book to my
girlfriends for Christmas as I know they will enjoy the combination of risqué
fun and exotic drinks.
Jane has obviously made huge personal sacrifices
on our behalf, so the polite thing to do would be to buy the book and .....well,
er, drink the drinks!
The Cocktail – 200 Fabulous Drinks
Author:
Jane Rocca, Illustrator: Kat Macleod
Published by: Apple Press
Price:
£9.99
ISBN 978-1-84543-257-7
500 Barbecue Sizzlers
The weather is getting warmer and a
young man’s fancy turns to...the barbecue! Why should the blokes have all the
fun, so I say this book is equally for the
girls.
This is a chunky book filled with photographs that make you want
to rush out and light the barbecue even if it’s raining. Paul Kirk is a seasoned
(yes, I can say that as it’s a cookbook review) griller who has already written
a few other books on the subject, so you know that the recipes are as good as
the pictures suggest.
Let’s start with the basics. Paul gives us advice
on smoking meat and setting up your smoker as well as tips on marinades and
rubs. There is plenty of information about the cuts of meat that work best on
the barbecue, and I am very pleased to see a table of approximate cooking times.
Undercooked meat is a real hazard for guests at a barbecue so read the table and
follow the cooking times given with each recipe.
The chapter called
Sizzling Appetisers has a good choice of light snacks to nibble whilst waiting
for the serious barbecueing to begin. Cheese-stuffed Mushrooms or even Grilled
Oysters. Now, how posh is that? Each chapter ends with a long list of variations
for each recipe: for example, Grilled Quesadillas has four alternatives to the
basic recipe.
500 Barbecue Sizzlers is divided into chapters by type of
meat to be grilled but there are sections for vegetarians, with some grilled
vegetables and a few salads. There are also lovely fish recipes like Brown
Sugar-cured Salmon, Hot Grilled Trout and Mexican Grilled Red
Snapper.
Ok, OK, boys, let’s talk about the meat!
There is plenty of it as that’s the nature of this type of cooking, but there is
something for every taste. The days of big slabs of chewy protein are gone, to
be replaced by Barbecued Quail, Peach-Ginger Turkey Cutlets and Tandoori Rack of
Lamb. There are still some large cuts of meat to be found but they are given a
lighter presentation. Grilled Top Rump with Aioli and Simply Grilled Sirloin
with Béarnaise Butter would tempt the most committed steak eater, but it
wouldn’t look like a meat fest if served with salads and grilled
veggies.
500 Barbecue Sizzlers has marvellous recipes to suit all
occasions and would be a perfect gift for any outdoor grilling
enthusiast.
500 Barbecue Sizzlers
Author: Paul Kirk
Published
by: Apple Press
Price: £9.99
ISBN 978-1-84543-251-5
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