Tres Leches Ice Cream (and college-student pizza)

You know how I said I found the perfect way to recycle leftover Tres Leches milk mixture?

Behold! Tres Leches ice cream!

I don't have an ice cream maker (yet) so I put the leftover milk mixture (with just a bit of vanilla extract added) into an empty coffee container, put that in a tupperare container of ice with salt, and tossed/shook it around the living room for a while. That got old after about two food network shows, so I gave up and put it in the freezer, taking it out every now and then to stir it. The ice crystals were a bit bigger than I would have liked, but it was still delicious! Perfectly sweet, but not too sweet, just a hint of vanilla...I can't wait to get a real ice-cream maker to make more!

If you want to make Tres Leches ice cream without the cake, here's the recipe:

1 can evaporated milk

1 can sweetened condensed milk

1 cup half n half (I used fat free)

1 tsp vanilla extract

Use an ice cream maker, or just mix and freeze for a few hours. Another thing you could try is freezing cubes of cake and mixing them in about halfway through the freezing process - this would give you little bites of frozen tres leches cake! Top with whipped cream and whatever else you like on ice cream.

Also, Mikal insisted that I post some of our regular meal recipes. One of our favorite things to make, being college students, is pizza.

With the budget we have (I get $20 per week for groceries) we've got a pretty cheap but delicious recipe. We recently switched from using the $0.45 pizza dough mix to a giant box of bisquick, which I use for biscuits, dumplings, and now pizza crust. The recipe for the crust is simple enough:

1 1/2 cups bisquick

1/3 cup water

It doesn't have to be hot water, and it doesn't take at least 20 minutes to rise (like the stuff we used to use did). It results in a slightly flaky, buttery crust that bakes up thick no matter how thin you roll it, and, amazingly, it can stand up to all the stuff we put on our pizzas, which typically includes:

1/3 of a large bell pepper, thinly sliced

1/4 onion, also thinly sliced

2-3 mushrooms, you know...

and whatever else I may have lying around, or whatever he brought from the school's Dining Hall (he has a meal plan since he lives in the barracks; I don't, so we trade off between cooking together and him bringing food. It works out nicely!)

My "sauce" is always a mix of whatever I have on hand...generally, I'll have a starter jar of the last batch and will mix it with a jar of the cheapest spaghetti sauce, some fresh chopped tomatoes cooked in a pan with some garlic, italian seasonings, etc. The nice thing about the bisquick crust is that no matter how soupy my sauce turns out, it never gets too soggy. The best trick to this is to always pre-bake the crust; I usually roll it out as thin as possible, prick it all over with a fork, then bake it at around 400 degrees for about 8-15 minutes depending on how thick the crust is. Then, we pile on the sauce, just enough fat-free cheese to barely cover it, all our toppings, then another very thin layer of cheddar to add flavor and hold all the veggies together. The whole thing goes back into the oven for another 8-10 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and the exposed crust is golden-brown. So far, we haven't had any leftovers.

That's all for today; more recipes to come!

Recent Bakes!

I've been a slacker for baking, and even worse for keeping track of recipes. I made cookie-dough cupcakes using the recipe from How to Eat a Cupcake around Valentine's day in February (I just used chocolate cake instead of yellow). The actual cookie-dough cupcakes are still my absolute favorite among what I've baked this semester; there's just something special about biting through cold buttercream and soft, chocolate cupcake, then getting a bite of chewy cookie dough.

The first picture is of the batch I made after the first batch of cookie-dough cupcakes. In my infinite wisdom, I only froze a dozen balls of cookie dough overnight. When I realized my recipe was going to give me more than a dozen cupcakes, I hastily rolled and froze another dozen balls and put them in the freezer. Unfortunately, 20 minutes is not long enough for cookie dough to freeze, so I ended up with a dozen hard, crunchy-topped cookie cupcakes instead of gooey, delicious cookie dough cupcakes. I really can't stand the cookies that come out from refrigerated, store-bought cookie dough, so they were a complete miss for me. I didn't even bother to waste icing on them.

I finally got around to baking Tres Leches cupcakes, too! They turned out FANTASTIC!!! Using iheartcuppcakes' recipe, except that I doubled the milk mixture and ended up making around 10 cupcakes and put the rest in an actual cake (I ran out of my favorite PNC cupcake cups...must find more someday!). Still topped with home-made whipped cream (in my top 2 favorite cupcake frostings, along with SMBC), Mikal and I had a hard time keeping from eating a huge slice with every meal. Next time I make it, though, I'll have to make a half-batch; we're the only two who love it enough to eat it all the time, and some of the cake ended up going to waste. I'll still double the milk mixture, though, 1) because i can't seem to find half-cans of evaporated or sweetened-condensed milk, and 2) I found the PERFECT way to use the leftovers.

(soaking up the milk mixture while we head to the gym)

Frosted! Happy boyfriend!

That's all through March 11th (told you I'm slacking...) - I'm catching up slowly!