Happy birthday, Elvis!

While Elvis Presley is not exactly known for being a foodie, we, along with millions of fans worldwide, celebrate his birthday with a few hours of Elvis tunes and his favorite snack food: a fried sandwich filled with peanut butter, sliced bananas and bacon. Here’s the “Elvis Sandwich” recipe.

This year, we’re adding something to the menu courtesy of chef Anthony Zamora of Atrio restaurant, located in the soaring 15-story atrium lobby of the Conrad Hotel in New York City.

While Chef Zamora makes peanut gelato from scratch, you can use peanut or vanilla ice cream (the difference between ice cream and gelato).

Chef Zamora garnishes the sundae with caramelized bananas, peanut brittle, Marshmallow fluff and Nutella. We substituted caramelized (candied) bacon for the Fluff and the Nutella. There’s no reason why you can’t have it all

SALTED PEANUT GELATO RECIPE

Ingredients Per Sundae

Salted peanut gelato. Photo courtesy Conrad Hotel | New York City.

The rich flavors of eggnog in a family-friendly ice cream. Photo courtesy Talenti.

Talenti Gelato has been a NIBBLE Top Pick Of The Week twice—that’s how much we like it.

This superb brand is selling luscious Old World Eggnog Gelato through the end of the year: the flavor of traditional egg nog transformed into rich, creamy gelato.

It’s a perfect, easy New Year’s Eve dessert: served plain; in a parfait layered with chocolate sauce, amaretti or shortbread cookie crumbs; over pound cake or brownies; even atop apple or pecan pie.

There’s no alcohol in this gelato, but you can pour a shot of rum or brandy over it to turn it into a spirited dish.

Old World Eggnog Gelato is made with fine Tahitian vanilla beans, hormone-free cream and milk, fresh egg yolks, pure cane sugar, pure vanilla extract and, of course, nutmeg.

The eggnog gelato is rich and indulgent, but has about 30% less fat than conventional premium ice cream. The suggested retail price is $4.99 to $5.99 per pint.

Old World Eggnog is available in only until the end of the month, so stock up now. Find a Talenti retailer near you: store locator.

Fortunately, there are some 20 other flavors of gelato and sorbetto to keep you happy for the rest of the year.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ICE CREAM AND GELATO

Here’s the scoop.

You may have had a sundae with a side of cookies but in this simple concept, the cookie become the sundae.

A cousin of the ice cream sandwich, a cookie sundae is a lot easier to make. Try it tonight!

COOKIE SUNDAE RECIPE

Ingredients Per Serving

 
VARIATIONS

Easy lusciousness: a cookie sundae. Photo courtesy KodiakCakes.com.

Our Top Pick Of The Week is Adult Chocolate Milk: a pour-and-serve combination that tastes like chocolate milk with a shot of vodka. It rocks!

What if you’re jonesing for a shot or two, but don’t have Adult Chocolate Milk?

If you have chocolate ice cream, coffee liqueur and vodka, you can make this Chocolate Black Russian, a cross between a cocktail and a milkshake.

Serve it for dessert. You can vary the recipe with flavored vodka: cherry, coffee, orange, raspberry and vanilla vodkas work well in this recipe.

Your next “ice cream social” will be a lot more social when you serve this!

Find more of our favorite cocktail and ice cream recipes.

A frozen banana (or your favorite fruit) goes into the machine, banana soft serves comes out in a minute. Photo © Corinna Gissemann | Fotolia.

Are you an ice cream addict but want to give up those refined sugar calories and carbs? Do you want to add more fruit to your diet?

Now, you can make your own 100% fruit soft serve “sorbet” without added sugar, thanks to the Yonanas Frozen Treat Maker.

Yonanas almost instantly transforms your favorite fruits—banana, berries, mango, pineapple, the whole fruit department—into a silky-smooth frozen confection.

The frozen fruit—pre-frozen or frozen by you—goes into the chute (see the photo in the full review). It emerges as thick, creamy soft serve-like “sorbet.”

The compact Yonanas machine is well worth the cost (list $49.99) and the space. It’s not only easy to make, it’s easy to clean the machine. Everything but the motor portion goes right into the dishwasher.

Get yourself a Yonanas machine: You deserve it!

And, you may become more popular as people begin to invite themselves over for some Yonanas. Tell them to BYOFF: bring your own frozen fruit.

Read the full review.

Find more of our favorite frozen desserts and recipes.

Get a Yonanas Frozen Treat Maker. You deserve it! Photo courtesy Yonanas.

In no more than five minutes, you can make a drinkable dessert for grown-ups: espresso shooters with ice cream. This recipe comes from Starbucks, which has easy recipe ideas on its ice cream website.

Serves 4.

ESPRESSO SHOOTERS RECIPE

Ingredients

Ready in five minutes! Photo courtesy
Starbucks Ice Cream.

Preparation

1. Add four teaspoons of liqueur to espresso. Pour chilled espresso into 4 chilled shot glasses.

2. If you are not using the liqueur, no sweetener is necessary. But if your preference is for sweet coffee, pre-sweeten the cup of coffee before pouring into shot glasses.

3. Top with a cookie scoop’s worth of coffee ice cream. Garnish, if desired, with cinnamon and serve with cut straws and/or espresso spoons.

Find more of our favorite ice cream desserts.

An easy ice cream mini bombe. Photo
courtesy Starbucks.

The earliest known recipe for a frozen dessert bombe comes from the great Italian confectioner, G.A. Jarrin. In the first Italian cookbook published in English—The Italian Confectioner or Complete Economy of Desserts according to the Most Modern and Approved Practices (London: 1820—today, you can get the Kindle edition). It was a success: At the time in England, the finest cuisine was considered to be prepared by a French cook and an Italian confectioner (pastry chef).

Jarrin’s “Bomba Ice” was molded in a sorbetière, an ice cream/sorbet mold, with a maraschino- or almond-liqueur-flavored ice. The ice could be hollowed out to fill the cavity with a second flavor.

Sometime after 1840, French recipes appear for the bombe glacée (ice cream bomb), using copper ice cream molds. The molds could be domes or half-rounds; the half-rounds could be joined to create a round (bomb-shaped) dessert. Recipes show that spun sugar was sometimes used as a wick, and brandy was poured onto the plate and lit to create a flaming bombe.

Different flavors could be layered and frozen, one at a time; sorbet layers could be alternated with ice cream. The bombe’s center could be filled with dried and/or fresh fruits, depending on season: berries and grapes, raisins and sultanas. A ladyfinger or thin cake layer could be added. When unmolded, the bombe could be iced and decorated.

Today’s basic bombes are less elaborate so they’re accessible to the home cook. They look like this, a combination of three or four flavors.

We have an even easier variation for you: a one-layer individual bombe. The recipe is courtesy of Starbucks and is made with their new Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino Ice Cream. The mascarpone frosting provides a tiramisu effect when used with coffee ice cream, but complements any flavor of ice cream.

Since this recipe is made in individual portions, you don’t even have to worry about neatly slicing a conventional bombe. Serves 4.

RECIPE FOR INDIVIDUAL ICE CREAM BOMBES

 
Preparation

1. Line 4 six-ounce ramekins or custard cups with plastic wrap. (Custard cups provide a more bombe-like slope.) Evenly divide ice cream into ramekins, pressing firmly.

2. Arrange 4 lady finger halves onto the top of each ramekin, which will become the bottom layer when the bombe is unmolded. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap. Freeze at least 2 hours.

3. Meanwhile, beat the heavy cream, mascarpone and confectioners’ sugar with an electric mixer in medium bowl until soft peaks form. Place in refrigerator until ready to serve.

4. Remove ice cream bombes from freezer and unwrap. Invert onto dessert plates. Frost top and sides with mascarpone mixture, making decorative peaks. Dust with cocoa powder.

 
Find more of our favorite ice cream and sorbet recipes.

Check out all the different ice cream desserts in our Ice Cream Glossary.

We enjoy making ice cream sandwiches with chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies.

But we’ve grown to prefer brownie ice cream sandwiches. They become more of an ice cream cake experience, and ice cream cake (or ice cream and cake) just might be our favorite comfort food.

Brownie ice cream sandwiches will be a hit at your next party or special event; or keep them in the freezer as a regular treat. Either way, make them in advance (see note below for a party activity); then wrap in plastic (individually or the whole tray/sheet) and freeze.

Yummy: a chocolate chip brownie ice cream sandwich. Photo courtesy Beverly Hills Ice Cream Company.

 
Have fun mixing and matching brownie and ice cream flavors: a chocolate chip brownie with chocolate chip mint ice cream, a peanut butter brownie with peanut butter ice cream, a raspberry brownie with raspberry ice cream, and so forth.

You can add an extra layer of “inclusions”: chopped nuts, chocolate chips, coconut, crushed toffee, mini M&Ms and so forth.

As an alternative, dip the edges of the ice cream in them. But while the dipped edges look more exciting, when you layer the extras you won’t have bits of them falling onto the floor.

PARTY DESSERT: Set up a brownie ice cream sandwich bar with halved brownies, pre-cut ice cream rectangles (place the tray of ice cream atop a tray of ice) and bowls of inclusions. It can get messy, but it’s fun.

Find more of our favorite brownie recipes in our Cookies & Brownies Section.

Matcha green tea is used in the Japanese tea ceremony. The tender, shade-grown leaves, known as tencha, are stone-ground to a fine powder (here’s a kit to make your own). Whisked into a bowl of hot water, it produces a bright, grassy brew.

But Americans are more familiar with green tea ice cream is made with matcha tea, one of the finest Japanese teas.

It’s not just delicious: It’s full of antioxidants. Matcha delivers much more of them: 1385 ORAC units per gram, compared to 253 for goji berries, 105 for pomegranate, 93 for wild blueberries and 60 for açaí (details).

RECIPE: MATCHA ICE CREAM

Here’s a super-easy recipe to make green tea ice cream at home, no ice cream maker required:

1. Soften a pint of high-quality vanilla ice cream until it is malleable.

2. Place the ice cream in a large mixing bowl. Stir in two tablespoons of matcha tea and blend well with a large spoon.

3. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or refill the carton.

4. Return to the freezer and chill until set.

Mmm: matcha ice cream. Photo courtesy Republic Of Tea.

MORE TO DO WITH MATCHA TEA

To cut back on expense, matcha can be
purchased in tins one-third this size. Photo
courtesy Republic Of Tea.

You can enjoy cup after cup of hot or iced matcha tea, or use it in these everyday foods:

WHY IS MATCHA SO EXPENSIVE?

Matcha tea is expensive, but worth it if you love the flavor of green tea.

According to MatchaSource.com, Japanese tea, in general, tends to be more expensive than teas produced in other countries. It’s the rule of supply and demand: Japan is a small country (think of how much agricultural land there is in China and India, by comparison). The country only exports about one percent of its teas.

Production is also more expensive. Only the youngest, sweetest leaves are used. Covering the fields with bamboo mats (tarps) to create the shade-grown tea weakens the tea plants, and a longer recovery period is needed before they can be harvested again.

And at the factory, the stone grinders work slowly in order to maintain the nutrients in the tea, including the amino acid, L-theanine, which focuses the brain; ir may help the body’s immune response to infection. Each grinder produces only about 40 grams of matcha in an hour.

We’ve been enjoying more than a few ice cream cones this month, National Ice Cream Month.

But what if you have gluten sensitivities. Where’s your cone?

Goldbaum’s, a natural food company based in Brooklyn, New York, is at the ready with two different cones that crunch as nicely as the “real thing.”

In the shape of waffle/cake cones, their texture is more like the lighter style wafer/cake cones (here’s the difference between the two types).

So what’s in a gluten-free cone? Instead of wheat, there’s a mix of potato starch and tapioca starch, plus other ingredients including sugar, salt and vanilla.

The gluten-free cones don’t have the flavor of wheat-based cones, but when ice cream is added, you won’t notice the difference—you’ll just enjoy the crunch.

The regular Goldbaum’s cones have just 11 calories apiece, so they’re a boon for calorie counters as well. The sugar cones have 41 calories, are an inch or so taller, and weigh in at 41 calories. Conventional ice cream cones have up to 20% more calories.

The line is certified kosher by OU. Find out more at Goldbaums.com.

Gluten-free fun. Photo by Elvira Kalviste | THE NIBBLE.

Ice cream was invented many centuries before the ice cream cone. Check out the history of ice cream cones.