~"Why are you so heavy?" "Because so much of me has died!"
SO this Easter we decided to have the big family gathering here, and I was tasked with makin a dessert. While pokin through the Gourmet Gaming blog, the Spark Lemon caught my eye. I never played Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep but I do like lemon ice cream and I thought it might be a fun thing to make, and it didn't seem too hard.
SO MY JOURNEY BEGAN
Before we start, this is what a finished Spark Lemon is supposed to look like.
Fix this image in your mind! It'll improve the experience.
So right away I ran into problems, namely the ingredient "1 cup meringue (crushed)". Only being familiar with meringue on top of lemon pies, I went to the store hoping to find a can of meringue which I could then hit with a rolling pin or something. Unfortunately it turns out that that's not how meringue works! I would have to make it myself, adding more work to this than I anticipated, but I'd already committed to it so I GUESS I AM LEARNING HOW TO MAKE MERINGUE
A lot of recipes assume people making them aren't total morons at cooking and know what they're doing. THIS MAKES THINGS DIFFICULT FOR ME
Another problem ingredient was "royal icing". Glancing in the frosting section of the supermarket, I didn't see anything listed as royal, but assumed that would not make much of a difference. SURELY CUPCAKE ICING IS THE SAME THING, ISN'T IT? I MEAN IT'S ALL ICING, RIGHT?
They were supposed to be green and blue but they only had green. WELL SURELY THAT'S NOT A HUGE DEAL, LET'S GO
This is... not working as well as I'd planned.
HMMMMMMMMMM.
Not really sure what else to do, I left the icing bolts out in hopes that maybe airdrying them would stiffen them up a bit. I CAN MAKE THIS WORK, SURELY
around this point i went and looked up how to make royal icing, and it turns out it's entirely different than cupcake frosting. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT. However since I'd already put in the time and materials to make the little gooey bolts I decided to just give it up for loss. The bolts are garnish! If they don't turn out, it's not a big deal! It'll be fine!
Bonus: I looked up royal icing and how to make it and I still don't really get how you're supposed to get it to the point where you can roll it out in a sheet and cut shapes out of it. I feel like I am missing a step somewhere.
Trying in vain to smooth out the edges
WELL WHATEVER LET'S MAKE MERINGUE
For another family gathering, I forget which one, I tried to make some Apple Snow, which was this thing that involved whipping egg whites into something something. While separating egg whites though I accidentally got some yolk in it and it didn't... really work after that point. THIS TIME THAT DID NOT HAPPEN
IT ACTUALLY FOAMED UP LIKE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO
Darn it this reminds me I meant to get more baker's sugar at the store yesterday and I forgot. OH WELL.
Looking sorta thick! One video thing on making meringue said to whip it until it stuck to the bowl but this wasn't doing that and I was impatient. This is pretty syrupey and it'll just get baked anyway, it's probably not important.
My classic cooking motto of "eh, close enough"
'
...huh.
Welp, that doesn't work. I went back and made a SECOND batch of meringue to fill out the pan, something that could have been avoided if I just did four eggs to begin with in the first place arrrgh.
Take note of the rip in the paper, I'm very talented.
Meanwhile, lunch was a bacon and cheese sandwich on olive bread courtesy Nana. Who needs healthy eating
So I threw the two meringues in the oven and got to work on the lemons. The recipe says you gotta gut four lemons but since I doubled it for all the people coming, I gutted eight of them. This took a while and is not as easy as you might assume.
In retrospect, I should have cut the tops off lower to make a wider base at the top to support the second ice cream layer. HINDSIGHT.
They do look so much like little cups though!
Lemon guts everywhere
ARRRGH JUST GUT YOURSELVES BLEEEAH
Fun fact: Gutting lemons will alert you to every small cut you have on your hands! Thankfully, my broken thumbnail has been growing back nicely so that didn't sting at all doing this. Because that would have sucked.
Here's the worst picture in the world of it! At least it's not bright red and near bleeding anymore, right?
Finally got all these lemons hollowed out. Tossed em all in the freezer. This left me with all the lemon guts in the bowl though. Easy answer: lemonade! I decided to make every bad decision possible to make it, although I sadly didn't document most of them here.
But here are the tools! I saw the pile of lemon guts in the bowl and thought, oh, I'll just throw them all in the blender, that way I won't have to juice them just for the juices. So I did that. I ended up with this thick pulpy froth. I then grabbed a jug, then realized I should probably take out the seeds. So I set that sieve over the mouth of the jug and poured the froth on it. I don't say through because it didn't go through... so instead I just picked through it while it sat on the mesh and got the seeds out that way (work I'd been trying to avoid by blending it in the first place! efficiency!). After everything had been mostly deseeded, I dumped it and the juice in there with some sugar and water. After tasting it, the pulpy parts however tasted bitter... and I realized that non-pulp lemonade was a thing for a reason.
So, with a great sigh, I moved the in-progress lemonade to other containers, reset the mesh over it, then poured it through AGAIN and got rid of all the pulp and seeds I'd missed. However THIS lemonade, with some more sugar and adjustment, was pretty good and not bitter at all! There were probably like eighty ways I could have avoided doing have this work, christ.
THE FINISHED PRODUCT
So, lemon guts taken care of, I decide to get zesting to get ready for the next parts. Zesting sucks. I thought this would be a way to put those chopped off tops to use, but zesting those also sucked because they were tiny and slippery, and also did not yield much zest. Six tops for that one tablespoon back there and I needed two, arrgh
OL HALF NAKED LEMON, HOW YOU DOIN
Alright, meringue been in there for two hours, time to bust it out! The top is all nice and crispy...
On moving it though I realized that the crispy part was more like a crust sitting on a gooey bottom. OOPS.
I was tired at this point and didn't want to wait for it to cook anymore and my reasoning basically was well it's going to get mixed into ice cream anyway, does it matter if it's all crispy? EH, CLOSE ENOUGH.
SO LET'S DO THIS THING
First half of the ice cream went smoothly where I tossed in the lemon zest and lemon curd and it all blended up.
I took a big ol globful of that curd in that spoon measure there, I wish I'd gotten a shot of it because it was huge. IT WAS MORE THAN ONE TABLESPOON... PROBABLY TWO LIKE IT SAID. EH, CLOSE ENOUGH.
Mixing the meringue ice cream however proved more tricky since no matter how hard I banged at it, some parts of it refused to break up into bits. WHY DO YOU DEFY ME
well someone will just get chunky ice cream, them's the breaks
SO after mixin the ice creams I let em freeze for two hours or so, because at this point it was getting pretty late and I wanted to get this done. Time to do the first part! Those tiny lemon sorbets were the only ones available at the store. LEMON SORBET IS BIG AT EASTER I GUESS
just shovel some chunks in there
And voila! Hey, this doesn't look so bad! Maybe I can pull this off after all.
scoop scoop scoop
And I got them in there with a minimum of mess! Applause all around!
you just gotta be creative with your freezer space
By the end of it though the meringue ice cream was pretty melted, and also I had extra. Darn it! Tho come to think of it, I probably have enough left over to make one more spark lemon. I may do that later.
I should have remembered how quickly the ice cream melted here but I did not. Insert stab chord.
I let the filled up lemons sit for another two hours. I'M A CHILD OF THE INTERNET I CAN'T WAIT THIS LONG TO FINISH SOMETHING AAAAAAA
I BET IT'S FINE i mean this ice cream's been chillin four hours, that's probably pretty solid
the recipe said piping bags but i didn't get any either time I went to the store (why!) BUT YOU CAN ALWAYS IMPROVISE
Meanwhile, here's Loki, who kept me company as I worked on this late into the night. WE SHAVED HIM UP ALL PRETTY
So this is... not as pretty as I'd thought. Also, I had trouble getting the ice cream to flow easily out of the bag since my hands were weak tired. BUT THAT'S, THAT'S GOOD ENOUGH, RIGHT?
so did you know lemon curd will slide off of soft ice cream
because i didn't know that
V-voila!
I quickly crammed the lemon in the fridge so I didn't have to look at it anymore. In the process I found out that boy my right hand sure shakes a lot when I'm carrying something delicate.
The second try, after widening the cut off corner of the ziploc, is looking better! That looks kind of like the picture! Maybe the first one was just a bad run, I can do this!
That's... not a perfect spiral, but it's better than the first one! Yeah, we're doing this!
AWRIGHT I'M FEELING MORE CONFIDENT NOW
Note the increasing softness of the ice cream, because I sure didn't.
WHY DIDN'T ANYONE MENTION THAT LEMON CURD SWIRLS JUST SLIDE OFF WHEN YOU'RE NOT LOOKING
the lemon slice fell off once SHH IT'S FINE
interesting looking shape here
Here you can see the glove I was wearing, since the ice cream bag was so cold it was hurting my hands. I am a delicate snowflake. :B
YEAH, FLOPPY LEMONS, I
I MEANT IT TO LOOK LIKE THAT
A little lopsided but hey, still a better shape than the first one!
this ice cream is sorta melting
but i bet it's fine, that'll just make it easier to squeeze out!
uh oh, uh oh
UH, UH GREAT THIS ONE'S GREAT QUICK RAM IT IN THE FREEZER
OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
TA... TA DAH!!!!
an intelligent person at some point might have thought, hey, i can just put the ice cream bag back in the freezer for thirty minutes and come back
BUT NOT ME
I'M DOING THIS RIGHT NOW
the bag was now a total loss, so for this one i just scooped up the mostly solid remains in the bowl with a spoon (there was not a lot) and just plopped it on top. YEAH, IT'S... IT'S LOOKING GOOD
NO IT'S SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE THAT I SWEAR
RECIPE RESULTS MAY DIFFER
The whole motley crew. I even managed to jam the top of the one good looking one on the top rack there trying to squeeze it in like an idiot AWESOME. Squeezing each one inside without knocking one of the other ones over or making them look worse again alerted me to how shaky my hands are nowadays jesus.
This one glopped everywhere so I thought I might as well use a napkin. BE COURTEOUS.
OH NOOOO
UH
NO ONE SAW THAT
THAT LEMON SLICE STAYED ON THE WHOLE TIME
I ended up with leftover ice cream here too! Again I could probably make another one out of these. I have one whole lemon left, maybe I should go for it.
the remaining carnage
Came down in the morning to see how they looked. They'd hardened up a lot! They look much better now. I really should have had more frozen ice cream doing this probably. MY MISTAKES NOW PRESERVED
volcano lemon
the lemon slice fell off again! But I stuck it back on, it was easier to do when both were much less sloppy.
I also checked the bolts and they were still too soft, so in the end I just gave up on those. I have no idea what to do with them now.
SO, WHAT WERE THE RESULTS FROM THE FAMILY?? Everyone really liked them, haha. Without the original Spark Lemon to compare, everyone thought they looked super fancy. :B So even though they looked terrible, they tasted good! I had one and it was pretty tasty, there was a lot of variants on lemony flavors in it, and it was an interesting progression since it was lemony, then sweet, then tart at the bottom. So it was tasty, even though it looked like an ice cream monster vomited in a lemon. IN THE FUTURE, PERHAPS I COULD MAKE A BETTER ONE IF I FOLLOWED DIRECTIONS
BUT WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF THAT HAPPENING
I also posted this at dreamwidth with reluctant ambivalence. Comment here or there, don't matter to me!
SO MY JOURNEY BEGAN
Before we start, this is what a finished Spark Lemon is supposed to look like.
Fix this image in your mind! It'll improve the experience.
So right away I ran into problems, namely the ingredient "1 cup meringue (crushed)". Only being familiar with meringue on top of lemon pies, I went to the store hoping to find a can of meringue which I could then hit with a rolling pin or something. Unfortunately it turns out that that's not how meringue works! I would have to make it myself, adding more work to this than I anticipated, but I'd already committed to it so I GUESS I AM LEARNING HOW TO MAKE MERINGUE
A lot of recipes assume people making them aren't total morons at cooking and know what they're doing. THIS MAKES THINGS DIFFICULT FOR ME
Another problem ingredient was "royal icing". Glancing in the frosting section of the supermarket, I didn't see anything listed as royal, but assumed that would not make much of a difference. SURELY CUPCAKE ICING IS THE SAME THING, ISN'T IT? I MEAN IT'S ALL ICING, RIGHT?
They were supposed to be green and blue but they only had green. WELL SURELY THAT'S NOT A HUGE DEAL, LET'S GO
This is... not working as well as I'd planned.
HMMMMMMMMMM.
Not really sure what else to do, I left the icing bolts out in hopes that maybe airdrying them would stiffen them up a bit. I CAN MAKE THIS WORK, SURELY
around this point i went and looked up how to make royal icing, and it turns out it's entirely different than cupcake frosting. WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT. However since I'd already put in the time and materials to make the little gooey bolts I decided to just give it up for loss. The bolts are garnish! If they don't turn out, it's not a big deal! It'll be fine!
Bonus: I looked up royal icing and how to make it and I still don't really get how you're supposed to get it to the point where you can roll it out in a sheet and cut shapes out of it. I feel like I am missing a step somewhere.
Trying in vain to smooth out the edges
WELL WHATEVER LET'S MAKE MERINGUE
For another family gathering, I forget which one, I tried to make some Apple Snow, which was this thing that involved whipping egg whites into something something. While separating egg whites though I accidentally got some yolk in it and it didn't... really work after that point. THIS TIME THAT DID NOT HAPPEN
IT ACTUALLY FOAMED UP LIKE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO
Darn it this reminds me I meant to get more baker's sugar at the store yesterday and I forgot. OH WELL.
Looking sorta thick! One video thing on making meringue said to whip it until it stuck to the bowl but this wasn't doing that and I was impatient. This is pretty syrupey and it'll just get baked anyway, it's probably not important.
My classic cooking motto of "eh, close enough"
'
...huh.
Welp, that doesn't work. I went back and made a SECOND batch of meringue to fill out the pan, something that could have been avoided if I just did four eggs to begin with in the first place arrrgh.
Take note of the rip in the paper, I'm very talented.
Meanwhile, lunch was a bacon and cheese sandwich on olive bread courtesy Nana. Who needs healthy eating
So I threw the two meringues in the oven and got to work on the lemons. The recipe says you gotta gut four lemons but since I doubled it for all the people coming, I gutted eight of them. This took a while and is not as easy as you might assume.
In retrospect, I should have cut the tops off lower to make a wider base at the top to support the second ice cream layer. HINDSIGHT.
They do look so much like little cups though!
Lemon guts everywhere
ARRRGH JUST GUT YOURSELVES BLEEEAH
Fun fact: Gutting lemons will alert you to every small cut you have on your hands! Thankfully, my broken thumbnail has been growing back nicely so that didn't sting at all doing this. Because that would have sucked.
Here's the worst picture in the world of it! At least it's not bright red and near bleeding anymore, right?
Finally got all these lemons hollowed out. Tossed em all in the freezer. This left me with all the lemon guts in the bowl though. Easy answer: lemonade! I decided to make every bad decision possible to make it, although I sadly didn't document most of them here.
But here are the tools! I saw the pile of lemon guts in the bowl and thought, oh, I'll just throw them all in the blender, that way I won't have to juice them just for the juices. So I did that. I ended up with this thick pulpy froth. I then grabbed a jug, then realized I should probably take out the seeds. So I set that sieve over the mouth of the jug and poured the froth on it. I don't say through because it didn't go through... so instead I just picked through it while it sat on the mesh and got the seeds out that way (work I'd been trying to avoid by blending it in the first place! efficiency!). After everything had been mostly deseeded, I dumped it and the juice in there with some sugar and water. After tasting it, the pulpy parts however tasted bitter... and I realized that non-pulp lemonade was a thing for a reason.
So, with a great sigh, I moved the in-progress lemonade to other containers, reset the mesh over it, then poured it through AGAIN and got rid of all the pulp and seeds I'd missed. However THIS lemonade, with some more sugar and adjustment, was pretty good and not bitter at all! There were probably like eighty ways I could have avoided doing have this work, christ.
THE FINISHED PRODUCT
So, lemon guts taken care of, I decide to get zesting to get ready for the next parts. Zesting sucks. I thought this would be a way to put those chopped off tops to use, but zesting those also sucked because they were tiny and slippery, and also did not yield much zest. Six tops for that one tablespoon back there and I needed two, arrgh
OL HALF NAKED LEMON, HOW YOU DOIN
Alright, meringue been in there for two hours, time to bust it out! The top is all nice and crispy...
On moving it though I realized that the crispy part was more like a crust sitting on a gooey bottom. OOPS.
I was tired at this point and didn't want to wait for it to cook anymore and my reasoning basically was well it's going to get mixed into ice cream anyway, does it matter if it's all crispy? EH, CLOSE ENOUGH.
SO LET'S DO THIS THING
First half of the ice cream went smoothly where I tossed in the lemon zest and lemon curd and it all blended up.
I took a big ol globful of that curd in that spoon measure there, I wish I'd gotten a shot of it because it was huge. IT WAS MORE THAN ONE TABLESPOON... PROBABLY TWO LIKE IT SAID. EH, CLOSE ENOUGH.
Mixing the meringue ice cream however proved more tricky since no matter how hard I banged at it, some parts of it refused to break up into bits. WHY DO YOU DEFY ME
well someone will just get chunky ice cream, them's the breaks
SO after mixin the ice creams I let em freeze for two hours or so, because at this point it was getting pretty late and I wanted to get this done. Time to do the first part! Those tiny lemon sorbets were the only ones available at the store. LEMON SORBET IS BIG AT EASTER I GUESS
just shovel some chunks in there
And voila! Hey, this doesn't look so bad! Maybe I can pull this off after all.
scoop scoop scoop
And I got them in there with a minimum of mess! Applause all around!
you just gotta be creative with your freezer space
By the end of it though the meringue ice cream was pretty melted, and also I had extra. Darn it! Tho come to think of it, I probably have enough left over to make one more spark lemon. I may do that later.
I should have remembered how quickly the ice cream melted here but I did not. Insert stab chord.
I let the filled up lemons sit for another two hours. I'M A CHILD OF THE INTERNET I CAN'T WAIT THIS LONG TO FINISH SOMETHING AAAAAAA
I BET IT'S FINE i mean this ice cream's been chillin four hours, that's probably pretty solid
the recipe said piping bags but i didn't get any either time I went to the store (why!) BUT YOU CAN ALWAYS IMPROVISE
Meanwhile, here's Loki, who kept me company as I worked on this late into the night. WE SHAVED HIM UP ALL PRETTY
So this is... not as pretty as I'd thought. Also, I had trouble getting the ice cream to flow easily out of the bag since my hands were weak tired. BUT THAT'S, THAT'S GOOD ENOUGH, RIGHT?
so did you know lemon curd will slide off of soft ice cream
because i didn't know that
V-voila!
I quickly crammed the lemon in the fridge so I didn't have to look at it anymore. In the process I found out that boy my right hand sure shakes a lot when I'm carrying something delicate.
The second try, after widening the cut off corner of the ziploc, is looking better! That looks kind of like the picture! Maybe the first one was just a bad run, I can do this!
That's... not a perfect spiral, but it's better than the first one! Yeah, we're doing this!
AWRIGHT I'M FEELING MORE CONFIDENT NOW
Note the increasing softness of the ice cream, because I sure didn't.
WHY DIDN'T ANYONE MENTION THAT LEMON CURD SWIRLS JUST SLIDE OFF WHEN YOU'RE NOT LOOKING
the lemon slice fell off once SHH IT'S FINE
interesting looking shape here
Here you can see the glove I was wearing, since the ice cream bag was so cold it was hurting my hands. I am a delicate snowflake. :B
YEAH, FLOPPY LEMONS, I
I MEANT IT TO LOOK LIKE THAT
A little lopsided but hey, still a better shape than the first one!
this ice cream is sorta melting
but i bet it's fine, that'll just make it easier to squeeze out!
uh oh, uh oh
UH, UH GREAT THIS ONE'S GREAT QUICK RAM IT IN THE FREEZER
OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
TA... TA DAH!!!!
an intelligent person at some point might have thought, hey, i can just put the ice cream bag back in the freezer for thirty minutes and come back
BUT NOT ME
I'M DOING THIS RIGHT NOW
the bag was now a total loss, so for this one i just scooped up the mostly solid remains in the bowl with a spoon (there was not a lot) and just plopped it on top. YEAH, IT'S... IT'S LOOKING GOOD
NO IT'S SUPPOSED TO LOOK LIKE THAT I SWEAR
RECIPE RESULTS MAY DIFFER
The whole motley crew. I even managed to jam the top of the one good looking one on the top rack there trying to squeeze it in like an idiot AWESOME. Squeezing each one inside without knocking one of the other ones over or making them look worse again alerted me to how shaky my hands are nowadays jesus.
This one glopped everywhere so I thought I might as well use a napkin. BE COURTEOUS.
OH NOOOO
UH
NO ONE SAW THAT
THAT LEMON SLICE STAYED ON THE WHOLE TIME
I ended up with leftover ice cream here too! Again I could probably make another one out of these. I have one whole lemon left, maybe I should go for it.
the remaining carnage
Came down in the morning to see how they looked. They'd hardened up a lot! They look much better now. I really should have had more frozen ice cream doing this probably. MY MISTAKES NOW PRESERVED
volcano lemon
the lemon slice fell off again! But I stuck it back on, it was easier to do when both were much less sloppy.
I also checked the bolts and they were still too soft, so in the end I just gave up on those. I have no idea what to do with them now.
SO, WHAT WERE THE RESULTS FROM THE FAMILY?? Everyone really liked them, haha. Without the original Spark Lemon to compare, everyone thought they looked super fancy. :B So even though they looked terrible, they tasted good! I had one and it was pretty tasty, there was a lot of variants on lemony flavors in it, and it was an interesting progression since it was lemony, then sweet, then tart at the bottom. So it was tasty, even though it looked like an ice cream monster vomited in a lemon. IN THE FUTURE, PERHAPS I COULD MAKE A BETTER ONE IF I FOLLOWED DIRECTIONS
BUT WHAT ARE THE ODDS OF THAT HAPPENING
I also posted this at dreamwidth with reluctant ambivalence. Comment here or there, don't matter to me!