My friend Irina has great taste in cake. For my birthday, she found the above caramel pear mousse torte at Athans, which wins the award for Best Place in Boston to Get a Birthday Cake for People Who Like Delicious Things. Then she put cute little candles that were wrapped in foil kind of like peanut butter cups.

OH and then there was this nice note on the cake box.

Beau-u-u-tiful!

The "Amendoa" from Athan's, featuring alternating layers of vanilla sponge cake and vanilla mousse finished with chantilly cream and toasted almonds. Both lovely and delicious. My dad liked it, which means that it was a good choice.

It's 90 degrees in my house, my car is in the shop until tomorrow, and it's a little late to be waiting outside for a bus to the nearest ice cream place. I searched through my fridge to see what I have to make it myself. I found a carton of heavy whipping cream that was 90% empty. I just made ice cream out of about 2 ounces of heavy whipping cream, 3 ounces of whole milk, a teaspoon of sugar, and a couple drops of vanilla. Total yield was about 3 tablespoons of ice cream, not counting the stuff that was frozen to the ice cream maker bowl. Better than nothing.

Yesterday my lovely friend Mariah and I made our own version of the famous and beloved Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream. We used the same simple ingredient proportions as the brown sugar peach ice cream I made a couple days ago - it was super easy, no cookbooks required!

Homemade Chunky Monkey Ice Cream

Ingredients
2 ripe bananas
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup whole milk
1 cup whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup halved walnuts
1/3 cup dark chocolate pieces*

Tools
Ice cream maker

Mash the bananas (peel first, please) in a bowl until they are a just little chunkier than a puree. Add the brown sugar and blend thoroughly. Add the milk, cream, and vanilla, and mix well. Pour into your ice cream maker and follow the manufacturer's directions. After the mixture is partially frozen (around 10 minutes into the process), add walnuts and chocolate pieces (while the ice cream maker is still going) and allow the ice cream maker to run its course to complete the process.

Also note - for the chocolate pieces, we used Cote d'Or Orange for an added orange twist.

*For this recipe, we used untempered chocolate pieces. To make it, we melted the chocolate bars, poured the liquid chocolate onto parchment and spread it into a thin slab, stuck it in the freezer to harden, and then broke the untempered chocolate into pieces to add to the ice cream base. The reason we did it that way is that tempered chocolate is very hard at room temperature, and considerably more so when frozen. Untempered chocolate is much softer at room temperature, and when it's frozen, is about as hard as room temperature tempered chocolate. Chocolate pieces that are put into ice cream are often untempered so that they are a little less brittle in their frozen state.

My nice friend Aaron emailed me this New York Times article that came out today about miracle fruit parties ("Flavor Tripping") in New York.

I have never tried miracle fruit - but have been dreaming of hosting my own miracle fruit parties ever since I saw this blog post around a year and a half ago. I obsessed about it and told everyone in my office about my plans to have the most awesome miracle fruit party ever. At that point, however, miracle fruit was not available online, and after trying to call some farm in Florida more than thirty times over the course of a week, I finally searched on eBay and found a miracle fruit plant that I purchased immediately. I waited on edge until it arrived in the mail, only to learn that it would take a short six years for the damn thing to produce berries. . . and then everyone in my office made fun of me (especially you, Eric, and you're still on my shit list). Traumatic, I know.

How many parties do I have to have until I'm satisfied? Last week it was a chocomusic party, then I wanted to have another cupcake week, and now it's miracle fruit parties?

I'm so mad that I haven't tried miracle fruit yet. I'm in a jealous rage. I have to go make some lists of things now. It's the only thing that calms me down.

The above image signifies the utter agony I feel that I have not yet hosted a miracle fruit party. It was taken by my friend Dan Reed.

Cupcake lovers can continue rejoicing ... a new cupcake bakery called Sweet is now open near Newbury Street. And here's a story I found about the owner.

Is it time for another Cupcake Week at the Tasty Show?

When I was making brown sugar peach ice cream earlier this afternoon, I envisioned the title of this post as "The Day Ice Cream Saved Me From Boredom," but then I texted my friend Jeff and asked him if I could swing by and deliver some 'awesome' (which, in this case, was ice cream) and the whole focus of the post shifted. (Either way, the ice cream recipe is at the bottom of this post.) Delivering awesome to your friends can be done in many ways. I chose to do it with homemade ice cream. The parameters of such deliveries are as follows:

• It has to be awesome and enjoyable.
  
• It has to be spontaneous.
  
• You must bring everything with you so that your friends don't have to do anything or supply anything in order to take part in the awesome.

Here are some pics:

Lovely white peaches

The two main flavors in the ice cream - mashed up peaches and brown sugar

Tiny heart-shaped (or bum-shaped, depending on which way you look at it) spoons, colored bowls, a mini ice cream scooper, and orange napkins, and a basket to put them all in.

Happy friends.

Brown Sugar Peach Ice Cream

I adapted the recipe after looking at a bunch of fruit ice cream recipes online. I used white peaches because of they have a delicate flavor that I love, but you can also use regular ones.

Ingredients
5 ripe medium white peaches
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup whole milk
1 cup whipping cream
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Tools
Ice cream maker

Peel the peaches and remove the pits. Then mash them up with a food processor or just put them in a bowl and mash them up with your hands or some sort of tool that mashes. The end result should be a little chunkier than a puree. Add the brown sugar and blend thoroughly. Add the milk, cream, and vanilla, and mix well. Pour into your ice cream maker and follow the manufacturer's directions.

In preparation for The Tasty Show Birthday Party, a small crew of us got together for two pairing sessions - one to figure out which beers should be paired with which cupcake flavors, and one to match particular beers with 4 different artisanal cheeses. A lot of people I talked to over the past few weeks found the concept of pairing beer with cupcakes & cheeses hard to imagine - until they tested out our pairing menu with their very own tastebuds.

That said, below you'll find the entire pairing menu from the Tasty Show Bday last week along with notes about how we came up with each one. Or if you'd like to see the actual menu that our guests were given when they arrived to the party, you can see it here.

Beer + Cupcakes:

Stone Cat Blueberry Ale + Kickass Blueberry Crumbly Cupcake: This medium bodied fruit beer has a slight blueberry essence and pairs perfectly with a light, fruity dessert. The blueberry crumbly cupcake, which was a topped with a bit of mascarpone, was a nice and simple pairing with the mascarpone adding a little twist. Flavored beers can be really simple to pair with awesome results.

Stone Cat Blonde Ale + Kickass Vanilla Cupcake with Herbed Topping: The blonde ale is light and crisp with inherent herbal notes. For the pairing, Kickass Cupcakes came up with the brilliant idea to top a light vanilla cupcake with a vanilla buttercream frosting and a piece of caramelized sugar with a tiny sprig of thyme in it. I think this one won as the favorite pairing of the evening. And the favorite cupcake too. The vanilla cake was pristine.

Ipswich IPA + Kickass Cinnamon Caramel Cupcake: The IPA has a strong, dry bitterness balanced with a slight malty sweetness. The malty notes made a smooth pairing with the caramel flavors in the cupcake, and the spice warmed things up a bit.

Ipswich Oatmeal Stout + Kickass Maple Chocolate Cupcake: The oatmeal stout is a great dessert on its own; this rich, smooth stout works best with chocolate and was paired with the most curious cupcake on the menu - a maple-based chocolate cupcake sprinkled with smoked salt. The maple balanced the rich sweetness of the beer, and both elements were then heightened by the smoked salt.

Beer + Cheese

Ipswich Summer Ale + Hannahbells Classic: This light-bodied, crisp unfiltered blonde ale matches the creaminess of the Hannahbells classic cow's milk cheese without overpowering the flavor. A nice, even pairing.

Stone Cat Hefeweizen + Hannahbells Lavender: The floral notes that this unfiltered German-style wheat beer possesses are a wonderful match for the lavender flavor of the cheese. This was one of the evening's favorite cheese pairings.

Ipswich Original Ale + Hannahbells Rosemary: We tasted the rosemary over and over again until we finally went for the Original Ale. The smooth, malty flavor of the unfiltered English-style pale ale compliments the rosemary accent in the cheese.

Stone Cat ESB + Hannahbells Chipotle: The spicy chipotle was definitely the favorite cheese flavor of the night. Our biggest challenge with this one was to pair a beer that enhances and not flattens its spicy, smoky elements. The ESB, which stands for "extra special bitter" has a smooth malty sweetness and is not bitter at all. It was an excellent complement to the spiciness of the chipotle flavor.

Photos by Eric Scott Photography.

In Part II of the pre-Tasty Show B-Day party beer pairing sessions (here's Part I) that have been taking place these past few weeks, five of us congregated at Kickass Cupcakes to determine which brews and which cheeses we're going to pair up at the April 16 event. I can wholeheartedly say that I have never seen anything quite like the tiny, thimble-shaped artisanal cheeses that we've lined up to be part of the pairing. These little cheeses, which are called Hannahbells and are made by Shy Brothers Farm in Westport, MA, are made according to a traditional recipe that the Shy Brothers (two sets of very shy twins) discovered in the Burgundy region of France.

Once again, I'm not going to be all giving away all our party secrets (at least not until after the Tasty Show beercupcakechocolatecheese evening of tasty deliciousness next week), but I will say that after an exhausting evening of rigorous tasting, we came up with some wonderful pairings! Here is a bit of pairing wisdom that I was lucky enough to pick up last week:

Barbara from Shy Brother Farms has a fabulous way of articulating what makes a good food pairing (of any kind) that she shared with me ~ it's when 1 + 1 = 3. Or, translated into the context of beer & cheese, it's when Beer + Cheese = Delicious Enhancement of Both Beer and Cheese That Becomes a Wholly New BeerCheese Entity.

Last week I enjoyed a delightful evening with a couple friends during which we 'tested out' various pairing beer & cupcakes pairings. We sipped several brews ranging from the lightest blonde ale to a deep, dark oatmeal stout, and experimented with various cupcakes and pairing ideas. Rough times here at the Tasty Show, I know.

That said, I don't have a grand lesson or extravagant pairing idea to share in this post - mostly because our tests results are secret. The evening, which was hosted by the illustrious and creative Kickass Cupcakes in Somerville and featured artisan brews from Stone Cat and Ipswich Ale made by Mercury Brewing Co. in Ipswich, MA, was held in preparation for a very special Tasty Show event that is happening on April 16. I'm thrilled to report that with Sara from Kickass Cupcakes and Caitlin from Mercury Brewing Co. as our guides, we came up with some fabulous ideas! And Kickass Cupcakes will be developing cupcake recipes especially for the beer pairing. Details on the event will be posted here shortly.

The only conclusion that I am willing to share is:

The right beer & the right cupcake can make an incredible pairing, and while I'm not going to tell you what our star pairings were, there is absolutely no harm in running some tests on your own. If you're not sure where to start, go for tastes that usually match (a citrusy or fruity brew with a citrusy or fruity cupcake, a honey brew with a spiced cupcake, and so on).