Today’s tip might be a natural for Valentine’s Day, but we like it even more for the cold drinks of summer.

These chocolate ice cubes are the brainchild of the Parisian chocolatier Jean-Paul Hévin.

His Summer Chocolate Ice Cubes are simply a chocolate ice cream recipe that gets poured into ice cube trays instead of an ice cream churn. Why didn’t we think of this years ago?

While M. Hévin’s recipe is for a family-friendly, gourmet chocolate milk drink, you can also use the chocolate ice cubes in cocktails or with liqueurs.

They keep your drinks cold, as they add chocolate flavor by slowly melting. Use them:

 
 
RECIPE: CHOCOLATE ICE CUBES & VANILLA MILK

The recipe makes enough for one ice cube tray: cubes for 6 rocks glasses or 4 highball glasses. While it goes without saying, we’ll say it: Make the ice cubes 6 hours before you plan to use them, or the night before.

The vanilla milk also needs to chill for several hours. You can make the entire recipe the night before.

You can also enhance the flavor with chocolate-friendly seasonings: cayenne pepper, cinnamon, instant coffee, nutmeg, etc.

 
Hévin’s recipe starts with his homemade ice cream, which is poured into ice cube trays instead of churned into ice cream.

We used Lactaid milk so that all of our crowd, including the lactose sensitive, could have them. Lactose-free milk is virtually like regular milk, but the lactose (milk sugar) that is hard for some people to digest has been de-activated. All the Lactaid products (cottage cheese, ice cream, holiday egg nog) are delish!
 
Ingredients For The Chocolate Ice Cream

 
For The Vanilla Milk

 
Optional

 
Preparation

1. CHOP the chocolate finely and place it in a heat-resistant bowl.

2. COMBINE the milk and water in a saucepan. Add the sugar, cocoa, and coffee and mix thoroughly to avoid lumps. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Then…

3. REMOVE from the heat and pour over the chocolate. Let it melt for 5 minutes; then gently mix with a wooden spoon until it is smooth and creamy. Allow to cool, pour into an ice cube tray and freeze.

4. MAKE the vanilla milk. Pour the milk into a large saucepan, add the sugar, and mix to dissolve.

5. SCRAPE the vanilla bean and add the beans and pod to the pan. Bring to a boil over medium heat and remove from heat. Allow to cool; then refrigerate for several hours or overnight.

6. TO SERVE: Place the chocolate ice cubes in the glasses (depending on the size of the glasses 3 to 4 ice cubes) then pour over the milk to the cold vanilla.
 
 
This recipe by Jean-Paul Hévin appeared in the Elle à Table and appeared on Nordljus.com. We can across it on Sandra Kavital | Blogspot. Thanks also to Keiko of Nordljus.

1] A tall glass with chocolate ice cubes…

[2]….and with the vanilla milk added (photos #1 and #2 © Nordljus)..

[3] Who wouldn’t like a mug of milk with chocolate ice cubes (photo © Oxmoor House)?

[4] Add root beer, cola, or…vodka (photo © Ellen Fork).

[5] Turn them into ice pops (photo © Jean Paul Hevin).

CHECK OUT WHAT’S HAPPENING ON OUR HOME PAGE, THENIBBLE.COM.

[2] The affordable version (photo © Saveur, along with their recipe to make perfect scrambled eggs).

You can pay a supplement of $100, $200 or more, depending on the amount of truffle. After all, for the 2016-2017 winter truffle harvest, white Alba truffles from Italy, considered the zenith of truffles, cost a small fortune:

 
Black Périgord truffles, our personal favorite from France, are a bargain by comparison:

 
If you’re drooling at the prospect but lacking in cash, you can feel better because fresh truffles won’t be back until November.
 
 
TRUFFLES FOR REGULAR FOLKS

We’ve gotten around our challenged purse for years with the following work-arounds. Delicious scrambled eggs can be made with:

And of course, each of these products has uses beyond scrambled eggs.
 
 
GOT TRUFFLES?

If you’ve been saving a jar or can of truffle shavings, it’s time to put them to good use.Another variation of truffled scrambled eggs follows, courtesy of Maille mustard.

Ideally, you need to infuse the eggs the day before.

RECIPE: TRUFFLED SCRAMBLED EGGS WITH MUSTARD

Ingredients For 4 Servings

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*Espelette, a.k.a. piment d’Espelette, is from the Basque area of France and Spain. Substitute Aleppo pepper if you can find it: It has the smoky sweetness that espelette brings to the table. Otherwise use cayenne, but the heat and flavor profiles are quite different. Cayenne is much hotter (30,000 to 50,000 SHU) so use less. It is much more neutral in taste, without the smokiness.

Preparation

1. BREAK the eggs into a large bowl at least 1 hour in advance, or overnight. Add the truffle shavings and mix gently. Place in the fridge in a tightly sealed container to infuse. The next day…

2. BEAT the eggs, seasoning them with a pinch of salt and the espelette, add the sweet almond oil and the mustard.

3. ROAST the almonds in an anti-adhesive frying pan until golden, then chop them. Melt the butter in a casserole dish. Add the eggs and cook slowly with a wooden spatula or spoon, so that the eggs do not stick to the pan. When the eggs are scrambled…

4. STOP the cooking with the liquid cream and add the slivered almonds.

5. SLICE the bread into fingers and toast in a non-stick pan with a drizzle of almond oil. Coat slightly with some mustard and sprinkle with black truffle shavings. (Note: We simply made toast, understanding that a short cut means shorter flavor.)

6. ASSEMBLE in the dishes of choice, with the toasted bread fingers.
 
 
MORE TRUFFLES

What Are Truffles

Types Of Truffles

D’Artagnan Truffle Butter

[4] Maille Chablis Mustard With Truffle (photo © Not Quite Nigella).

[5] Espelette pepper from a chile grown in the Basque region (photo © Pepperscale).

Carpaccio (beef) and crudo (seafood) are easy to make, and present themselves as a sophisticated dish that took you a lot longer to prepare. If you eat sushi, sashimi, steak tartare and other raw preparations, it’s a dish you can easily make at home.

From the earliest times, fishermen have eaten their catch onboard, without cooking it.

Before man learned to make fire, some 350,000 years ago, the catch was de facto eaten raw.

The tradition continues today. Fishermen bring a bit of salt and/or citrus, and enjoy the rustic version of carpaccio, crudo, poke, or sashimi: brethren raw fish dishes.

While crudo has been eaten for millennia, carpaccio is a modern dish, created in Venice in 1963, at the time of an exhibition dedicated to Venetian painter Vittore Carpaccio (1465-1526).

> Here’s a list of raw fish dishes.

A recipe for a crudo of tuna or salmon (or other seafood) is below.
 

CARPACCIO VS. CRUDO & OTHER RAW FISH DISHES

 
Don’t worry if you can’t keep these straight: We saw a dish called carpaccio at New York City’s top seafood restaurant, which was clearly tiradito (with sauce and chile garnishes).
 
 
RECIPE: CRUDO OF TUNA, SALMON, OR OTHER SEAFOOD

Tailor this recipe to your preferences. For example, you can replace the conventional olive oil drizzle with flavored olive oil, add the Italian-style shavings of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, add balsamic vinegar, use a Dijon vinaigrette, etc.

You can add as much salad on top as you like…or none at all. If adding a mound of salad, dress it very lightly (we like lemon vinaigrette—half vinegar, half lemon [or lime] juice) before topping the fish.

Ingredients For 4 Servings

 
Preparation

1. Combine vinegar and mustard in small bowl; whisk in 4 tablespoons olive oil. Season dressing to taste with sea salt and pepper. DO AHEAD: Can be made 1 day ahead. Cover; chill.

2. Place a sheet of plastic wrap on a damp work surface (the moisture prevents the plastic from slipping).

Arrange the tuna slices on the plastic as you would like them to be on the plate (this makes plating them easy). Cover with a second sheet of plastic wrap.

3. USING the flat side of a mallet, gently pound the fish slices until they are to your desired thinness. Do this in batches as necessary.

Refrigerate the fish in the plastic for at least 30 minutes, and up to 4 hours.

3. ASSEMBLE: Remove the top plastic sheet from each serving of fish and place a plate upside-down on top of the fish.

Invert the fish onto the plate and peel off the remaining plastic. Drizzle with olive oil, then sprinkle with a bit of sea salt, chives and pepper.

Toss watercress and 2 tablespoons dressing in medium bowl; season to taste with sea salt and pepper.

4. MOUND the salad greens on top and serve.
 
 
WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE BEEF CARPACCIO?

Take a look at:

[2] Octopus crudo (photo © Katsuya | Los Angeles).

[3] Salmon crudo (photo © Mihoko’s 21 Grams | NYC).

[4] Squid crudo (photo © Njam! TV).

[5] You can top carpaccio or crudo with as much salad as you like (photo © Cooking Channel TAV).

[6] Wagyu carpaccio, simply dressed with truffles and garlic potato chips (photo © Catch NYC).

[2] You can buy strawberries year-round, but summer strawberries are (no surprise) the sweetest (photo courtesy California Strawberries).

A traditional strawberry shortcake combines strawberry, whipped cream and biscuits. It might have been a way to use leftover biscuits (photo courtesy Driscoll’s Berries).

[4] Trade the whipped cream for ice cream, on a biscuit or in a layer cake (photo courtesy Nestlé).

[5] This is what a tart looks like: It stands free of the tart pan (photo courtesy Chilean Blueberry Committee).

[6] This is what a pie looks like: It needs to remain in the pie plate (photo courtesy Taste Of Home).

[7] A tart has a solid filling (photo courtesy Butter Flour Sugar).

But first, a request that you not name your recipes with the name of a different recipe. We mean no disrespect to anyone involved with naming a recipe: It’s a teaching moment for everyone.

In fact, yesterday we received a recipe for a banana cream pie, that is clearly a tart. Here are all the differences; the first is that the crusts and fillings are different.

 
See photos #5, #6 and #7.

Now onto today’s misnomer. The recipe below (in photo #1) is called a Berry Tiramisu Cake by its creator, a professional baker. The name follows the downward slope of appending the name of a well-known, popular food to something new.

Hence, for example, there are hundreds of cocktail recipes called a [add a modifier, e.g. cherry] Margarita or [chocolate] Martini, because the name “sells.” But it dowesn’t track: The ingredients do not build on the essential ingredients of the recipe they claim to represent.
 
WHAT’S THE BEEF?

You can build on a basic recipe—for example, make a flavored Martini. But if it doesn’t have vermouth plus gin or vodka in addition to the fruit, chocolate, coffee or whatever, it isn’t a Martini. Simply adding vodka (or tequila) to a recipe does not a Martini (or Margarita) make.

See our rant on this topic.
 
ON TO DESSERT!

Following the beef above, we now comment on the concept of “Berry Tiramisu.”

Tiramisu is a recipe that comprises sponge cake or ladyfingers (sponge fingers), soaked in espresso liqueur or a coffee syrup (for a non-alcoholic version), and layered with a mascarpone cheese and custard mixture. It is garnished with a dusting of cocoa powder or shaved chocolate.

To build on it and still call it tiramisu:

 
But you can’t get rid of the coffee.

Coffee is an indispensable ingredient in tiramisu: The name means “pick me up,” referring to the caffeine in coffee.
 
WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Why does accuracy in anything matter?

End of teachable moment.

RECIPE: ITALIAN-STYLE STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE

This recipe, developed by MaryJane Robbins of King Arthur Flour, is called Berry Tiramisu by its creator. You can watch the step-by-step production here.

We have renamed it Italian-Style Strawberry Shortcake. Here’s the history of shortcake; you’ll see why shortcake is an apt description.

As for “Italian-style,” the shortcake uses mascarpone instead of whipped cream, and soaks the sponge layers in syrup.

Whatever you wish to call it, prep time is 35 to 45 minutes; bake time is 20 to 23 minutes.

The syrup and cream can be made up to 3 days ahead of time and held in the refrigerator until the cake is ready to assemble.
 
Ingredients For A 9-Inch Cake

For The Sponge Cake

 
For The Citrus Soaking Syrup

 
For The Citrus Cream Filling

 
Preparation

1. PREHEAT the oven to 350°F. Lightly grease and line with parchment two 9″ square* pans. Combine the eggs, sugar and almond extract in a mixing bowl. Beat on high speed until the eggs thicken and lighten in color, about 5 minutes.

3. POUR the batter into the prepared pans. Bake the cake for 20 to 23 minutes, or until the top is lightly browned and the edges begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. Remove from the oven and place on racks to cool in the pan completely.

4. MAKE the syrup: Combine all of the syrup ingredients in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Simmer for one minute, or until the sugar dissolves. Remove from the heat, strain, and set aside to cool.

5. MAKE the filling: In a small bowl, combine the mascarpone and orange zest. Gradually stir in the heavy cream until the mixture is smooth and thick. Stir in the confectioners’ sugar.

6. ASSEMBLE the cake: Place one cake layer on a serving platter and brush it with syrup. Allow the syrup to soak in, then apply more. You’ll use about half of the syrup for the first layer.

7. SPREAD half of the sliced berries over the moist cake. Dollop on half of the cream filling, and spread in an even layer. Top with the second layer of cake, repeating the soaking process. Spread with the remaining cream filling, then top with the last of the berries. Refrigerate the cake for at least an hour (or up to overnight) before serving.

Store any leftover cake in the fridge for up to 2 days. Freezing is not recommended.

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*If you don’t have two 9″ square pans, you can bake in two 9″ round pans. The layers will be slightly thicker, and will take a few extra minutes to bake.

MORE SHORTCAKE RECIPES

Everything is cyclical, even mundane household appliances like the coffee grinder.

In centuries past, coffee beans were ground manually. Depending on your age, your great-grandmother ground beans in a rectangular wood or metal mill (or combination)
with a ceramic burr. The grains fell into a drawer underneath the mechanism.

But technology marches on: first to pre-ground coffee from supermarket brands, and then, by having your beans freshly ground at the market.

By the early 1970s, the movement to buying premium beans from different terroirs around the world had begun. Shops sprang up* that sold only beans. A cup of coffee was no longer just a cup of coffee.

The first electric grinder was invented in 1930, but was cumbersome and shortly discontinued. In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of engineers took up the challenge [source]. Slowly, they made their way across Europe, and then across the pond.

By the 1980s, most households that ground their beans at home had moved on to the new, small electric grinders that ground the beans with stainless steel blades. The result was quicker ground coffee with little or no no effort.

But purists complained that the friction and waste heat from the motor impacted the flavor. Some of them stuck with the manual mill and ceramic burr, which has never gone out of style. And commercial use grinders use only ceramic burrs, never metal blades.

There’s more coffee grinder history below. But since everything old is new again, we’d like to present old-school grinding technology with a new-school upgrade.
 
 
THE NEW BIALETTI HAND-GRINDER WITH A CERAMIC BURR

The Bialetti Manual Coffee Grinder (photo #1) incorporates an easy-to-adjust ceramic burr grinder designed to utilize less effort, while creating more output (46%-165% depending on the coarseness of the grind).

A conical ceramic burr grinder crushes whole coffee beans into the desired coarseness, achieved with an easy-to-adjust wheel.

Eating The Coffee Beans

The beans—actually they’re cherries with the beans inside—were first chewed for energy.

Some time later, when monks got hold of beans, they began experimenting with them, first creating a coffee-derived wine.

In fact, the word coffee derives from the Arabic qahwah, a type of wine, which became kahve in Turkish, then koffie in Dutch. “Coffee” entered the English language in 1582, via Dutch.

Long before there was anything we’d recognize as a cup of hot coffee, Ethiopians would crush up the fresh berries and wrap them with fat, possibly as an energy food.

The cherry fruit was eaten fresh or dried; but while looking for other uses, the seeds (what we know as the coffee beans) were pulverized in a mortar and pestle of stone or wood, then cooked or roasted.

By the 14th century, coffee beans reached the city of Harrar, the center of trade for Ethiopia. From there it traveled to Mocca, the trading port of Yemen in the 14th century, then up through the Ottoman Empire and on to Europe.

In the 17th an 18th centuries, Dutch, French and British traders introduced coffee throughout the world.

The First Coffee Grinders

The first grinding technique for coffee comprised pulverizing the beans with a mortar and pestle made of stone or wood.

The mill itself is much older than the coffee trade. It was developed by the Greeks around 1350 B.C.E., to crush a substance (grains, e.g.) down into a fine powder.

It took a while, but he first spice grinder was invented in the 15th century in Persia or Turkey. Like a tall, slender brass pepper mill, it also was used to grind coffee beans [source].
 
 
ARE YOU A COFFEE LOVER?

Take a look at our:

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*If coffee connoisseurs were lucky, they lived in a town with a specialty coffee shop, with loose beans and packaged coffee from around the world. We were lucky: We lived in New York City, which had McNulty’s Tea & Coffee, established in 1895. It’s still located at 109 Christopher Street in the West Village (and still not open on Sundays).