The above picture is lemon Italian Ice from Libby's Italian Pastry Shop. In my last blog post, among other things, I wrote about attempts at making lemon Italian ice (a.k.a. water ice, if you're from Philadelphia), using this recipe. The recipe says to "pour mixture into a 10 by 12-inch baking dish that's sitting on a sheet tray and put in the freezer." While I did find a glass baking dish of comparable dimensions, I didn't use the sheet tray at first. I wondered how big of a difference it would make to put a sheet tray underneath it. After the mixture was still in a liquid state after one day, I put my metal cookie tray right underneath the baking dish and continued waiting for it to freeze.
Two days after I had originally put the baking dish in the freezer, the liquid was ... still a liquid! The recipe had made it sound like the whole thing would freeze after 1.5 hours! I wonder where I went wrong ... or if the recipe is wrong. The liquid is rather thick, so maybe I shouldn't expect it to freeze so fast in this massive container Speaking of container, I wonder how deep was Sunny Anderson's baking dish; if hers wasn't very deep, maybe her ice froze faster? Also, perhaps her freezer was much stronger than my dormitory's one.
Fortunately for me (and the freezer's door), I could take a break from obsessively checking the lemon Italian ice. I went home on Monday and came back to my dormitory on Thursday. It was nice to see my family and get home-cooked meals (hello, boeuf bourguignon!). However, I had to deal with allergies-related sore throat, cough, snuffy nose, and sneezing the whole time. I even squeezed in a doctor's appointment, where I was prescribed three medicines. "Yay" me.
Today, I'm still dealing with these symptoms. One bright spot about my return to San Jose on Thursday, though, was that my lemon Italian ice was totally ... frozen! I "scrape(d) the ice with a fork, being sure to mix the softer center with the more frozen outer edges":
The yellow specks underneath the scraped ice are little pieces of lemon zest. For some reason, all of the lemon zest ended up at one end of the baking dish (the relatively gooey, softer-yet-icy side), while the other end of the tray was more clear and seemed more like ice (you know, hard) -- all the more reason to mix everything together. Here's a close-up picture:
After all the scraping and mixing, I definitely wanted to try my handiwork. Verdict: It makes a refreshing, summer treat! It wasn't too sweet, and the zest added some nice texture to it, too. I let two other people try some, and they also responded positively with words like "nice," "it tastes like frozen lemonade" and "great." I definitely want my boyfriend to try some, too. I was told by one of my taste testers that it's not good to eat cold stuff in my current health condition -- hmm, I wonder if that's true.
All in all, it was a success, though it took much longer than expected for it to freeze (I wonder on which day it finished freezing during my home visit). There's still a nice amount still freezing in the freezer, now in scraped form instead of one solid block, so I wonder if that will change the texture even more.
No comments:
Post a Comment