Ice Tea Granita - Summer on a Spoon

To me, nothing says summer like ice tea.  When I was little, Mom always had a big glass jug of it in the fridge, or out brewing in the sun.  Most people probably have childhood memories of drinking Kool-Aid or even lemonade, but not me.  Ice tea was always my favorite.  Sometimes Mom would make it with lemon, sometimes with mint and lime.  However she made it, I loved it, and still do.  So when I thought of making granita, it was only natural to use ice tea.  When I told Hubby about my idea, he pretty much thought it was lame and wouldn’t look good for my post.  Well, that only made me want to do it even more, of course. 

Here’s what you’ll need:

6 cups water
¾ cups sugar
10 teabags
1 lemon
1 lime

Bring the water to a boil and turn off the heat.  Remove it from the hot burner and add the teabags. 

To make them easy to pull out, just drape the tags over the edges of the pan, just make sure they’re not touching any hot burners. 

So, let’s talk tea.  As you can see, I used Lipton.  If you can find Newman’s Own, it is, in my book, the best there is for ice tea.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any at my local grocery store, and didn’t have time to order some. 

That being said, Lipton will do.  I’ve found most fancy teas don’t make the best ice tea, but I’d stay away from generic brands, as well. 

So, back to our tea.  It needs to steep for 5 minutes.  Set a timer, because if it steeps too long, it will become bitter.  During those 5 minutes, you should be able to juice your lemon and lime.

I just have to rave about my juicer once more.  The first time I used it, I wasn’t sold, but I have really grown to love this thing. 

I was able to get ½ cup of juice out of 1 lemon and 1 lime.  If your limes are small, you may need to use 2. 

Back to our tea again.  After 5 minutes, remove the teabags.  It should be nice and dark.  We need strong flavors that will hold up during the freezing process. 

Pour in your sugar and stir, stir, stir, until it is completely dissolved. 

Now pour in the juice. 

Stir once more and go relax for awhile.  It needs some time to cool down.  When it gets to the point that it no longer steams when you stir it, go ahead and pour it into a glass dish. 

Don’t use a square pan, it’s not big enough.  Go with a 9x13.  Yes, I know I poured it into a square pan, but shortly after that, I realized it would have been much smarter to use a bigger pan because it would freeze faster and more evenly, and would also leave more room for what's to come.  Into the freezer it goes.  It’ll need several hours to freeze.  I actually left mine overnight. 

When it’s completely solid, remove it from the freezer and begin scraping the surface with a fork. 

Keep scraping until you have a nice pile of tea snow.

Spoon it into a dish, and serve immediately.  You can leave it in the freezer in its solid form for a few days, but wait to scrape it until right before eating it. 

So, what did Hubby say when he tried a bite of it this morning?  “That’s really good!”  Not sure which one I savor more… the ice tea granita, or the satisfaction of, once again, being smarter than Hubby thinks I am.  

Oh Chocolate, Hallowed Be Thy Name

Chocolate!  It’s been a while since we had something chocolaty.  What can you make with chocolate that doesn’t involve baking?  Cookies?  Brownies?  Cake?  Nope, they all require turning on the oven, which is something I’d rather not do since I don’t have central air nor do I have an air conditioner in the kitchen.  After much thought, it was a tossup between fudgesicles and mousse.  Well, since I don’t have popsicle molds, I opted for mousse.  Not just regular mousse, though, rocky road mousse.

Here’s what you’ll need:

1 pint heavy cream
14 oz. good dark chocolate
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 pinch salt
¾ cups almonds
¾ cups mini marshmallows

The first thing we need to do is melt the chocolate so that it can be cooling.  In order to do that, we have to chop it. 

That’s a lot of chocolate!  Now for the melting.  I like to use a double boiler for this quantity or chocolate, so move it to a glass bowl and sprinkle it with just a small pinch of salt.  Just put an inch or so of water in the bottom of a saucepan and place the bowl over the top of it.  Bring the water just barely to a simmer. 

 

Now just keep stirring.  Eventually, all of the chocolate will melt into a smooth, silky, pile of decadent deliciousness. 

Seriously, is there anything more beautiful than melted chocolate?  Ok, enough drooling.  So when it looks like this, remove the bowl from the heat and set it aside to cool.  It’ll probably take 30 minutes or so.  Just stir it every 10 minutes.  You’re looking for it to come back down to almost room temperature.  And in the meantime, you can work on chopping.  Chop the almonds pretty coarsely.  You don’t want whole almonds, but you don’t want crumbs either.  I used dry roasted, salted almonds in mine, I like the salt and chocolate thing, but you can use any variety you want.

After the almonds, come the marshmallows.  Sure you can leave them whole, but I wanted them smaller so I cut them all basically in half-ish. 

I also happened to have some meringues on hand. 

Thinking they might give a different texture but similar flavor to the marshmallows, I chopped up a few of them and substituted them for half of the marshmallows.  In the end, I couldn’t decide which I liked better, but since most people (me included) don’t usually have meringues sitting around, marshmallows are just fine. 

When the chocolate is cool, whip up the cream with a tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla.  I just bought some vanilla bean paste and wanted to try it out, but either that or vanilla extract will be just fine. 

When you have stiff peaks, or rather, the cream has stiff peaks, throw a large dollop on top of the chocolate and whisk it in. 

Continue to add the cream in large dollops (4 or 5 parts), but from here on out, you’ll want to fold, being more careful with each addition.  Folding is easy.  Just press your spatula down in the center of the mixture,

then pull it toward you, scraping along the bottom and side of the bowl and fold it over the top.  Continue repeating those steps, turning the bowl with each fold.  Eventually you’ll have a nice, even mixture. 

Throw in the almonds and marshmallows (an meringues in my case) and fold them in carefully. 

 

I decided to pipe the mousse artfully into the dish, but I don’t have a piping bag yet, so I used a ziplock bag.  I just cut off the end, and squeezed it in a nice spiral pattern, into the dish. 

What I ended up with was a nice spiral pile of brown lumpy stuff that would have been more appropriately found on the back lawn.  Yeah, it was that bad.  The only thing missing was the steam.  So, although I had a good laugh, don’t follow my example.  Just dollop or something.  Or serve it in a champagne flute.  Luckily I was able to make mine look edible... tasty even. 

Even like this, though, its appearance doesn’t do it justice.  It is, without doubt, the most amazing chocolate mousse I’ve ever eaten.  And I’ve had way more chocolate mousse in my day than I will ever admit to. 

Update on Friday, August 5, 2011 at 3:37PM by Taneasha

If you refrigerate your mousse, like I did, it needs to come back to room temperature before being served.  When you first pull it out of the fridge, it will be almost crumbly, rather than smooth and creamy.  Give at least an hour, two if you have it, to warm up a little, and it will be perfect again.