"ice cream sundae" news and stories

AOL Food has a slideshow at their site, with ideas on how to add bacon to, well... pretty much everything. No, not your typical breafast dishes. That's too obvious. We're talking about putting bacon on hot apple pie, in oatmeal, in an ice cream sundae, and in chocolate chip cookies. Someone is even trying to get the smoky flavor of bacon inside a glass of whiskey.

A lot of these ideas are too out there for me, but I think I'd try bacon in popcorn.

It has been a while since A Passion for Ice Cream was our cookbook of the day, but this post marks the second time that a recipe from it has been featured here, providing ample evidence that the recipes in the book come out looking as fantastic at home as they do in the book, not to mention that its continued popularity among other food bloggers seems to indicate that the recipes taste as good as they look. This is the Cho Cho Cho brownie sundae, as constructed by Anita of Dessert First. The recipe calls for a fudgy chocolate brownie to be topped with a scoop of white chocolate ice cream and drizzled with chocolate sauce. The presentation is simple and elegant, an easy one to recreate at home and a nice way to spruce up some brownies. If the triple chocolate combination sounds a bit too rich, you can do what Anita did and substitute vanilla ice cream for the white chocolate.

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A battle over where and when the ice cream sundae originated is heating up. The two American cities fighting to lay claim to inventing the treat have taken out ads in each other's local newspapers. One resident even mailed an inflatable cow to the mayor of his rival city.

Two Rivers, Wis., says that it concocted the sundae first in 1881 after a customer asked Edward C. Berners, the owner of a downtown soda fountain, to spoon a little chocolate sauce over ice cream. According to local lore, Berners began selling the new treat on Sundays.

Ithaca, N.Y., for its part, says it invented the sundae in 1892. Naturally, the city has its own folksy myth, too. As the story goes, the syrup covering the first sundae was not chocolate, but cherry. A local priest asked for vanilla ice cream with cherry syrup capped with a dark candied cherry and suggested that the dessert be named after the day.

Each town has historical markers devoted to the sundae. Two Rivers seem most passionate about the cause though. It was one of that city's residents who mailed the inflatable cow. Ithaca, for its part, said in a proclamation that people in Two Rivers are "great storytellers." As the cheeseheads like to say, "Uff da!"

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 This recipe from Real Simple turned out cookies that had only a minimal resemblance to the ones in their photograph. I wanted to make them because "Raspberry Puffs" sounded as though the cookies would be soft and fluffy, rather like angel food cake. They turned out to be quite crisp and much more similar to a wafer type of cookie than to any sort of cake. I was pleased to find, however, that the cookies still tasted delicious, especially once I had replaced the sour cream filling called for in the original recipe with ice cream. The result of this substitution was a finger food that tasted like a little ice cream sundae with raspberry topping.

Frankly, it would be easier to simply buy a package of vanilla wafers to make these, which is what I'll do next time. If you pick up jam, ice cream and a package of cookies, you can easily put together these last-minute munchies for your Valentine today.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]