Booze blogging

Many thanks to Culinary Communion for the following recipe:

Island Rum Cream (makes about 1 quart)

• 1 can (14 oz) sweetened Condensed milk
• 1.5 cups dark rum
• 4 tsp instant coffee (there must be a better way! how about a shot or two of espresso?)
• 1/2 tsp coconut extract (I’d vote for coconut milk instead)
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 3 T chocolate syrup
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

Whisk all ingredients together until thoroughly mixed. Bottle and store in the refrigerator. Keeps for up to one month.

I made this the other night at a singles holiday booze-making party; it turned out to be my favorite recipe of the dozen or so that we made. It’s really thick, chocolatey and boozy. You can’t taste the coconut, and that’s a plus in my book. I want to try making it again sometime with the ingredient changes I mentioned above. Come to think of it, I’m not sure what this has to do with Islands (the rum, I guess?) or holidays (uh, the cinnamon?) but who cares?! It’s delicious.

Federico baking the stracchino thingie

Federico baking the stracchino thingie, originally uploaded by UncleVinny.

Strecchino? Google says ’stracchino’, maybe I learned something over there after all.

Anyhoo, this photo is of our cooking teacher, Federico, getting *very* excited about the cheese-and-crust thing he’s baking. He’d been going on about this all day. Head over to my Flickr site to see how it turned out…