Le Rêve - Dreams & Lavender Honey Icecream

Long before I fell in love with baking and French pastries, I was very much into interior decorating. My childhood home was a single-storey, rather tiny house and I would have these grandiose plans
in my head as to how we could extend the kitchen, add a second level to the house just off of the kitchen and imagined climbing up a spiral staircase each time I walked past the dining area. I still have vivid memories of the time when my parents remodeled the kitchen and dining room - on a very modest budget so they had to take on a lot of DIYs along the process. Barely 7 then, I remember getting so excited over helping mum glue faux parquet tiles on to the floor. Several years later, during third grade, my parents moved into their current home and it was one of the most exciting childhood memories ever. I finally got the two-storey-with-winding-staircase I've always dreamed of. Well, the staircase was less grand than what I had envisioned but oh, the thrill of having to climb a flight of stairs to get to my room,  a room that I could call entirely my own! Oh boy, did I go to town decorating that room. At a mere age of 9, I was sketching out furniture placement, floor plans, scale factors and color schemes on pieces of cardboards. I had a Disney-inspired room, then grew out of the Disney phase into a Japanese-themed interior a couple years later, subsequently switched back-forth between an English-cottagey look vs. laid-back beach cottage theme. My tastes in home and interior decorating have evolved over time and thankfully, we now have a more cohesive theme throughout our current home.

Well, alright, alright. The above aren't exactly pictures of our home but do you recognize this kitchen?

 Or, how about this?

Those of you who are fans of Nancy Meyers would immediately recognize the scenes from the set of the 2009 movie "It's Complicated".  I adore Nancy's movies - Father of the Bride I & II, Something's Gotta Give, The Holiday, What Women Want, etc. long before I knew who she was. The lighting and signature warm tones in her movies really appeal to me. What truly stole my heart was this:

The PERFECT setting for the pâtisserie and gourmet store I dream and hope to will own one day (Faith is the substance of things hoped for......and I choose to have Faith).

The good old Accountant in me is still trying to wrap my brains around the type of volumes, product mix, pricing and margins that a bakery has to sustain for such a setup. If you've seen the movie, you would've noticed the size of Jane's (main character of the movie played by Meryl Streep) bakery - it's a lot of square footage and we all know that real estate in California, especially Santa Barbara (the main setting for the movie) is not cheap. What more, she had a huge number of people on staff and for argument's sake, even if they were grossly underpaid (and just in case you aren't aware, minimum hourly wage in California is $8 an hour), her bakery would need to have turnover of well over half a million dollars to support just the payroll. And her plain croissants were only selling for $2.75? But it is a fantastic Hollywood movie and I've been totally and completely sucked into the notion of THE perfect bakery as portrayed. Let's just say the only unbelievable scene was the croissant-making scene. Even novice bakers know that you don't make croissants from scratch in several hours. And those did look like excellent croissants. How could I tell? Not only from the looks but from the sound of that first bite. 

There was a scene in the movie where Jane served homemade lavender icecream; making icecream was something she'd do when everytime she was insomniac. Now making ice cream? That's believable and perfectly doable. 

The lavenders in our yard are in full bloom this time of the year - bright sea of purple covering our front, side and backyard. Simply gorgeous. While watching the movie for the 1000th time and being right in the middle of summer heat, I thought making lavender honey ice cream would be the perfect ending to the weekend. 

This is, in general, how we learnt to make icecream in school: crème anglaise-based. I personally prefer this method which yields richer , fuller flavors and allow the icecream (not the other accoutrements) to be the star. I still have several jars of excellent, truly excellent Provencal honey that we bought from our summer vacation in Provence last year - another wonderful vacation that D and I took right after my graduation from Basic at LCB, Paris which unfortunately, I've not had the chance to share. One such bottle was this lavender honey which I added to the recipe. You can just use regular honey and still get great flavors.

The amount of lavender flowers to add is subjective but they are quite potent and I probably would use just regular honey the next time round.

Lavender Honey Ice cream (yields ~ 1 pint)

Ingredients:

250 ml milk

250 ml cream

80 g egg yolks (~ 4 yolks)

approx. 90-100 ml honey (taste and adjust according to the level of sweetness desired)

approx 2 Tbsp dried lavender flowers 

pinch of salt

1 tsp lemon juice

Method:

1. In a heavy-based pot, bring milk, salt and dried lavenders to a boil.

2. Warm cream separately.

3. Once milk comes to comes to a boil, remove from heat, add warmed cream and allow lavenders to steep for at least 30 minutes.

4. Strain to remove lavender flowers. Place milk-cream mixture back into pot and bring to a simmer.

5. Whisk yolks and honey in a separate bowl.

6. Pour half of the milk-cream into yolk mixture, whisking constantly to temper the yolks and avoid scrambling them.

7. Pour the yolk-milk-cream mixture back into the pot on medium heat, stirring with a wooden spatula constantly to avoid the bottom and sides from sticking. 

8. Add lemon juice.

9. Once the creme anglaise thickens (~ 170˚F-175˚F) and starts to coat the back of the spatula (if you run your fingers through it, you should see a streak, i.e, the path which you have drawn and the mixture does not run), turn off the heat and strain mixture. By the way, the French culinary term for this stage is "à la nappe" - cook until mixture coats the back of a spoon.

9. Allow to cool, then freeze in ice cream maker according to unit's instructions