This is a family holiday tradition food gift. You can freeze the cake and serve it on Christmas but it is hard to resist for that long. I baked the one in the photograph in a Bundt cake pan with no middle section out of it. It baked at 325F for about 50 minutes instead of an hour. It came out perfectly! The versions below are some we’ve made in the past with regular Bundt cake pans.
There is an art to planning a menu for a great dinner party. It can be more doable when each guest is given a recipe to make and bring to share. Of course, these have to be good friends in order for you to feel alright about assigning them a recipe versus telling them to bring a salad so this is more of a Gourmet club style dinner. This Rustic Italian menu was very well planned not only because each recipe fit well with the theme but because each recipe was recommended fairly well by online reviews. One of our friends even made his dish the week before to test it out. Then he perfected the dish he made for our dinner night, seriously impressive!
We made the Rustic Nectarine and Blackberry Crostata with Cornmeal Crust and we served it with ice cream and apple brandy (as an after dinner drink). This is a great dessert and we non-bakers even pulled it off!
Rustic Italian Dinner Party Menu:
Appetizer: Olives & Classic Tuscan Flatbread w/ Olive Oil & Balsamic
This is an impressive recipe because of the combination of the lime flavor and the moist carrot cake. Either I dined with polite folks or they really liked this cake and wanted the recipe. This sparked a conversation about cooks who don’t like to share their recipes. I told them it was fine with me to share this carrot cake recipe because Jamie Oliver had shared it with me!
Jamie Oliver and Sunset Magazine are two that I trust for solid recipes that will succeed on the first try!
Carrot Cake with Lime Mascarpone Icing Recipe from Jamie Oliver
After frequenting great, creative ice cream shops across the country such as Jeni’s in Columbus, OH, Sweet Action in Denver, and Humphrey Slocombe in SF we are so glad to have The Penny Ice Creamery in Santa Cruz and we look forward to evolving with them.
The Penny Ice Creamery is a great addition to the very limited Santa Cruz-specific ice cream scene. Yes, we have Dairy Queen, Cold Stone Creamery, and numerous frozen yogurt shops (I feel embarrassed for even mentioning those at all in the same article) in SC but there is really only one other ice cream shop that is worth writing home about (there is another in downtown SC that I haven’t tried yet). This of course is the fifty-year old landmark ice cream shop near the boardwalk known as Marianne’s (Macapuno: Creamy baby coconut ice cream is a great flavor). The Penny is a nice contrast to the famous standard Marianne’s and is completely an artisan shop, home-made and seasonal from scratch. They currently use about 2,000 organic eggs a week and organic milk in contrast to most ice cream base which is actually almost always purchased from an outside source (there may only be one other ice creamery in CA that makes their own base as well – Sweet rose in Brentwood – don’t quote me on that). Their flavors are more and more intriguing to me each time I stop in the shop (5 Spice with Fried Peanuts, Banana Toffee, Kiwi Sorbet). Flavors often incorporate other great local goods such as coffee from Verve and Santa Cruz Mountain Stout. Online and on facebook you can check out their daily menu of flavors (a flavor is around no longer than six days but usually lasts 4 days) which means they can offer creative and new concoctions all the time and then once you find one you love … let’s hope they bring it back. They even make their own cones! I am looking forward to some creative sundaes in the future (such as the seasonal classic Spice Tower from Graeter’s Ice Cream).
The chef and co-owner, Kendra, has been a pastry chef for ten years and worked as a Pastry Chef at Manresa in Los Gatos and Bar Tartine in SF before opening Penny Ice Creamery last year.
In addition, The Penny owners were recently in the news for being personally invited to the White House for making a video entitled “How Recovery Act boosted small biz, an ice cream case study”:
The balsamic glaze looks like chocolate syrup and the cheese is a bit disguised amongst the fruit and ice cream in this recipe. The disguised ingredients make this dessert feel like a new discovery for the palette!
Grilled Fruit Kabobs with Balsamic Glaze and Manchego Recipe Click to continue »
What you will need for your Cast Iron Dessert Crisp with any fruit combination:
Various Seasonal Fruit Combinations:
Blueberry-Nectarine Crisp Recipe
Recipe from Vegetarian Fresh Food Fast Cookbook
For this dessert, start at least two days before you want to server it! AND, don’t take it to a friend’s home who has a freezer powered by solar. You need a normal to powerful freezer to freeze the dessert properly or should I say thoroughly. So basically, I wouldn’t recommend ice cream cake, where you make the ice cream yourself for the dessert, without a few days to prep it to make sure it’s a “solid” dessert for the party.
This is a whammy of a labor-intensive dessert because you will be making the ice cream, with your ice cream maker, and create the cake part too. However, the flavors in this dessert are worth the work because it is a unique flavor combo! Thanks ReadyMade magazine for your creative Spice Cream Recipes!
Tips for making Ice Cream & Ice Cream Cake: