dulce de leche Archives - The White Ramekins

With winters on full bloom, and with holiday season on, it’s time to spend sweet moments with family and friends. This is the season of spreading love and joy, of indulging into all your sweet desires. And not at all a time to worry about anything. Winters to me is not just about those chilling days and nights when sun doesn’t show up for days, but it is more than that. It’s about getting cuddled under the warmth of quilt, munching onto peanuts, carrot halwa and sipping into hot comforting soups. It’s also about chit chatting with family and friends for hours, when most of us have taken off from work, just to be with each other. And when we chat for long long hours, it has to be accompanied with some great food and quick munchies. And to me, cookies are the best things to be traveled and shared and I have been on a cookie baking spree this month. I baked some brownie cookies with festive season cut outs, like gingerbread men, snowflakes, pine trees and stars {will share the recipe sometime soon}. And I also baked some easy quick shortbread cookies and sandwiched them with the leftover dulce de leche from roasted banana ice cream, I made during fall. These kind of sandwich cookies are known as Alfajores, and are particularly from the region of Latin America. As dry fruits and nuts mark become essential for the winters, I rolled the edges of cookies into some finely chopped toasted almonds, to make them more festive. They taste better the next day, they are made as the cookies become softer with dulce de leche sandwiched in between.

Ingredients

260 grams all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp salt
200 grams unsalted butter, room temperature
60 grams confectioners (powdered or icing) sugar
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
Around 1 1/2 cup dulce de leche {click here for homemade recipe}
Around 1/2 cup finely chopped almonds, toasted

Directions

In a bowl, whisk the flour and salt and keep aside. In a separate bowl, beat the butter until smooth and creamy. Beat in the sugar and vanilla extract. Gently beat in the flour, until incorporated.
Wrap the dough into a cling film and flatten and chill for an hour, until firm.
Preheat the oven to 180 degree C and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
On a lightly floured surface roll out the dough until 1/4 inch thick. Using the lightly floured 2 inched round cookie cutter, cut out the cookies and place on baking sheet. Bake for 7 – 10 minutes, until browned on the edges. Let cool completely on a wire rack.
Take two cookies and sandwich them with heaping tablespoon of dulce de leche such that dulce the leche oozes out slightly from the edges. Roll the cookie edges into toasted nuts and store in an airtight container in fridge.

An extra spoon of caramel drizzled over vanilla ice cream, milk shakes, brownies, cakes etc. sure does make better things best. And all you sweet tooth junkies would know that how hard it is to resist the caramel temptation. Thank you God for making us a big bowl of this sweet confection of such greatness! Oops…sorry, for being so melodramatic here 😛 . But this is, how it is!

I have had made salted butter caramel sauce, and since then it’s been my favorite sauce to drizzle over ice cream besides homemade chocolate fudge sauce. But this time, I made this all the more decadent sweet thing called dulce de leche {pronounced dool-say-day-lay-chay}. Basically a caramelized sweetened milk candy, you could eat straight out of a condensed milk jar.

This is traditionally made from goat’s milk in Latin American countries, but can be easily made from sweetened condensed milk, which is readily available in grocery stores here. There are ways to make it in microwave, stove top or pressure cooker. And out of all the ways, the pressure cooker one appealed to me more because of the lesser time it needs. But was unsure of it, mainly because I wasn’t brave enough to boil an unopened can of condensed milk in a pressure cooker, until recently, when I saw this recipe on blogger friend Suma’s space. So, I decided to take my own chance too. I don’t mean to scare you here at all. It actually is quite simple, all you need is to follow the instructions diligently. And you are ready with a jar full of flavor fantasy! It goes amazingly well with anything you could think of…or like me, you could enjoy this straight out of the jar. Caramel and bananas make a heavenly pair. I thought of making banoffee pie initially, but I ended up making this wonderful roasted banana ice cream with swirls of dulce de leche, only because I wanted to seize the last of opportunity to make an ice cream, before it gets colder. Before I can give some rest to my small ice cream maker. And again David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop didn’t disappoint me at all and me and my friends licked the bowl clean.

Dulce De Leche

Ingredients/Apparatus

An Unopened can of Sweetend Condensed Milk, 400 gm
A pressure cooker
Water to boil

Directions

Fill the pressure cooker, halfway through with water. Remove the plastic encasing from the jar of condensed milk, if the jar has any, make sure you do not open the jar.
Fully submerge the unopened jar of condensed milk in the water. Put the lid and the weight on the cooker lid, on medium heat, pressure cook for one whistle. This took about 25-30 minutes.
After one whistle, lower the heat to low and cook (still with the weight on) for 20-30 minutes. The longer you cook, the dark and intense the color and flavor of dulce de leche will be.
Once you turn off the heat, allow the pressure to drop. Open the lid of the cooker, carefully remove the jar and allow it to cool completely, again about an hour. Do not try to open it when hot as it could be dangerous.
It can be refrigerated up to one month.

Roasted Banana Ice Cream

Ingredients

3 medium-sized ripe bananas, peeled
1/3 cup light brown sugar
1 tbsp butter (salted or unsalted), cut into small pieces
1½ cups whole milk
3 tbsp granulated sugar
½ tsp vanilla extract
1½ tsp lemon juice
¼ tsp coarse salt
1/2 cup dulce de leche

Directions

Preheat the oven to 200 degree C.
Slice the bananas and toss them with the brown sugar and butter in a baking dish.
Bake for 40 minutes, stirring once during baking, until the bananas are browned and cooked through.
Scrape the bananas and the thick syrup in the baking dish into a blender or food processor. Add the milk, granulated sugar, vanilla, lemon juice and salt, and purée until smooth.
Chill the mixture for at least 8 hour (or overnight) in the refrigerator, then freeze it in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
Drizzle half of the warmed dulce de leche into the empty ice cream container, in which you wish to freeze the ice cream in fridge {i used a piping bag and a nozzle for this, as my dulce de leche was quite thick}.
Spoon half of the ice cream into the container. Drizzle remaining half of the dule de leche over the ice cream in container. Top with remaining ice cream and freeze, until ready to serve.

Alfajores, Dulce De Leche Sandwich Shortbread Cookies

Roasted Banana & Dulce De Leche Swirl Ice Cream {Egg Free}