Happy Birthday, Guinness! (Guinness Dark Chocolate Ice Cream)

Guinness turns 250 years old this week!  Hurray!  So, since I need no better excuse, Desserts for Breakfast here is taking a break from the scheduled programming and turning to a week of celebrating this awesome dark beer.  So, welcome to Guinness Week!

Okay, so it actually started out very serendipitously.  I had planned to get back to ice cream making after a month or so of being away from it (due to traveling and catering orders), and I'd decided to make chocolate ice cream.  But, right as I flipped open David Lebovitz's awesome ice cream book, the book fell open to Guinness-Milk Chocolate Ice Cream, and I *had* to try it.  It was only later that night once my custard was cooling in the fridge did I find out that it's Guinness's birthday this week--hence, perfect timing!  This has spurred quite a Guinness obsession in the house, and there's more Guinness goodness to come.

Guinness-dark chocolate ice cream

But, as much as I <3 David Lebovitz's book, I do prefer dark chocolate to milk chocolate.  And the ice cream came out great despite the substitution.  This was such a rich, creamy ice cream with a great added depth from the Guinness.  Definitely something worth having around for Guinness week!  (btw, I also made a vanilla bean ice cream later that day to go with the Guinness-chocolate. It's a perfect companion and helps mild out some of the alcoholic flavor, if that's not your cup of tea.)

Read on for the recipe....

PotW: Whole wheat pancakes with almond fruit and mascarpone cream

I don't know if anyone else gets this, but sometimes, there are just certain foods that you tend to cook with certain people.  And, for my awesome Icelandic roommate, Maria, and I, it's grilled cheese sandwiches and pancakes.  We've gone through several incarnations of pancakes already, and there's nothing more I look forward to on a Saturday morning than to wake up to the newest version of pancakes that we can think and cook up.  So, I'm starting a new weekly feature here on Desserts for Breakfast: the Pancake of the Week  (aka: PotW), since pancakes are, after all, a dessert.  :-).

[last week's PotW: vanilla pancakes with white peaches, caramelized brown sugar, and ricotta cheese]

This week, we had some leftover almond-berry-stone fruit mix from the night before, so we decided to concoct something that would complement this last hurrah of summer fruits:

Whole wheat pancakes

with summer fruit - almond mix

and almond mascarpone whipped cream

The whole wheat pancakes here aren't very sweet, so they were the perfect accompaniment to the summer fruits and mascarpone whipped cream.  And, the slight almond flavoring in the whipped cream went well with the slivered almonds in the fruit.  All in all, definitely a good send-off of summer fruits... looking forward to fall!

For the recipe, read on.