a giveaway of dried sour cherry ice cream, coconut sugar threads and a pastry for your search engine fun

Have I ever told you how much I hate SEO (search engine optimization) well I do. Every blogger and their granny (yup she blogs too now) are desperately trying to get their piece of the pie and in order to do that you need to use key words so when people are using search engines (like google for example) they will land on your site first, ideally. Not only are people following along like turkeys to the slaughter house with this blatant use of keywords they are often hogging prime space with their drivel, well today my drivel is gunning for space. Dried sour cherry ice cream with a cream cheese tart and coconut sugar threads and if I had a giveaway I would be giving that away too.

I dont mean to sound so bitter because I am really not - I am more peeved than anything else. Creativity is flushed in favor of what is common and banal. Typically when I am searching for something I want to find what is more unique than what is regular so thats maybe where the differences lie. Its precisely this uniqueness that I am fighting against with this post. I whipped some cream I froze it into ice cream how unique can that be? I am even going to post the very common recipe.

Vanilla Ice Cream with Dried Sour Cherries

1/2 cup sugar

dash of salt

2 cups half and half

1 egg, beaten

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

20 dried cherries that have soaked over night in warm water

Combine sugar salt and 1/2 the milk in a saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally until mixture almost boils then reduce heat to low.

Gradually stir about half of this hot mixture into the beaten eggs to temper then incorporate all together and heat until it thickens stirring constantly, remove from heat and refrigerate 2 hours.

Whip the other cup of milk with the vanilla flavoring until soft peaks form and fold this into the chilled mixture and pour this along with the cherries into your ice cream maker and proceed as per its instructions. The cherries will color the ice cream slightly pink.

I made two batches - one like this with the reconstituted cherries and another smaller batch of plain vanilla (that I couldnt keep my spoon out of and almost ate all of it before creating this post) that I mixed in some chopped up dried cherries after the ice cream was made and frozen.

Did I forget to mention that this is for the MarxFoods Ridiculously Delicious Challenge? Oh, well it is. All the contestants received 8 mystery ingredients (the same ones) and we were to use two of them to complete this challenge. I chose the dried sour cherries and the coconut sugar resisting all temptation to make something using every single one. I made ice cream and tarts and I spun the sugar into threads.

The tarts are simply puff pastry folded artistically with a filling of cream cheese, coconut sugar and dried sour cherries then baked at 400 until puffy golden and delicious.

The coconut sugar was heated on a very low flame until hotter than lava and then whipped and drizzled and teased into threads.

Two scoops, one of each of the cherry vanilla and vanilla cherry, a tart and some sugar threads. I used my very antique ice cream scoop but you can easily make quenelles using two spoons. March 1-4 I will be annoyingly asking for your votes so gear up.