Roasted banana ice cream with poppy seeds

Mayhaps you too went to search for some good bursting red tomatoes this one morning and encountered a bunch of blackened bananas instead. No bursting red tomatoes. Sad moment. The bananas looked kinda scary as well. Another sad moment.

But the thing with bananas is that they tend to be villainy. I mean, scaring me like that and then turning out to be perfectly lovely on the inside.

Makes me think I never really cared about the tomatoes anyway.


This is my first attempt at cooking a recipe from apparently the Bible of ice cream, David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop. But still I couldn't help but mess with it, dear me.


Roasted banana ice cream with poppy seeds
(adapted from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop, via butter sugar flour)

3 medium ripe bananas (totally ripe suits as well;))
75 g brown sugar
3 dl milk
1 dl curd cheese (using cream cheese would also be good)
2 tbsp caster sugar
2 tsp lime juice
vanilla (1/2 tsp extract)
1/4 tsp salt
at least 1 tbsp of poppy seeds

1. Preheat the oven to 200C.
2. Slice the bananas and place into a small baking dish together with the brown sugar. Bake for about 40 minutes, until the bananas are caramelized. Turn once during cooking.
3. With the help of a food processor, blender or immersion blender, puree the bananas together with the syrup from the baking dish, milk, curd cheese, sugar, lime juice, vanilla and salt until smooth. Add poppy seeds.
   
4. Chill the mixture in the fridge until cold.
5. Churn in an ice-cream machine until thick or place in a plastic container, pop it in the freezer and give it a good whip every hour or every few hours, depending on the temperature of your freezer.
   

The words banana ice cream never make me drool, actually, as I tend to think of store-bought ice cream pops that carry the same unmistakable banana essence flavour that all banana-FLAVOURED sweets have in them.
Maybe you've seen yellow banana-shaped jellybeans. Well, there must be a reason to their shape. Nobody would understand they're supposed to taste like bananas, is what I'd reckon.

But roasting really intensifies the taste of the bananas. It's not just banana-flavoured ice cream, it's actually banana ice cream. Which, you know, is a totally drool-worthy dish. The poppy seeds? They were the only thing I felt was missing from the ice cream, that's it.

The recipe will also be taking part of the fab event Frozen Desserts, hosted by Mike of Mike's Table.

Poppy addicts! You wouldn't want to get caught after eating this cake.

Many drug tests would actually turn out positive after eating cake that's got poppy seeds in it. Even after eating one slice. And even if the test is done two days later. So imagine - this cake was my lunch on Thursday or rather quite a lot of this cake. Must I feel guilty now? I did read about a baker who ate 2 litres of tea made of poppy seeds every day (made from 4 kg of seeds) and that didn't end well for him. If the World Wide Web says so...it must be true. But please let me introduce my guilty pleasure before I promise never to go near poppy seeds again.


I had this craving for poppy seeds actually (already sounding like addiction, uh?) and tried to find a recipe that would have at least a whole pile of them in it. Well I didn't (or are these maybe illegal?). Had to come up with everything all by myself again! It's a warning - this cake has a lot of poppy seeds. I'm not talking about drug tests anymore, I'm talking about taste and if you don't like the taste of poppy seeds, you shouldn't read any further.


Poppy seed cake with curd cheese

400 g curd cheese
300 g unflavoured yoghurt
2 tbsp semolina
3 eggs
1 1/2 dl + 3 tbsp sugar
100 g poppy seeds (ground)
1/2 tbsp lemon juice
vanilla

1. If you have ground poppy seeds already, there's no problem. If not, grind them - I used a coffee grinder for that.
2. Mix together curd cheese, yoghurt, 1 1/2 dl sugar, vanilla, lemon juice and semolina. Add eggs one by one.
3. Pour 1/3 of the mixture into another bowl and mix with ground poppy seeds and additional 3 tbsp sugar.
4. Cover the bottom of a greased baking mold with the poppy seed mixture and then pour the curd cheese mixture over it. Bake at 175C for about 1 hour.
5. If you're patient, serve the cake when it's completely cooled or even on the next day. But eating it warm from the oven is good too, although I'd recommend being patient.



As I said - a lot of poppy in the taste. My mother complained about it being a bit too bitter, but in my opinion it wasn't. At all. There's a slight taste of lemon and the cake is really moist, especially on the next day (which would explain me having it for lunch on Thursday). The quantity of poppy seeds may be reduced, the quantity of lemon juice raised - but that's already a question of taste. When served warm, I'd pour some cold milk over it or serve with ice cream.

Actually I'd promise to go near poppy seeds again and again. It's the taste, not the opium.