bLIMEy...

Although I was fully aware that milk curdles when an acid is introduced, I still thought that it was a good idea to mix 250 ml of milk with 100 ml of freshly squeezed lime juice and its zest. I told myself that I was going to make lime pie filling. No, not key lime pie filling, because I don't have key limes, but just lime pie filling... the delicious, gooey, jammy-pudding filling.

Since I've never made lime pie filling/lime curd before, I thought it'd be an absolutely greatly stupid idea to use artificial sweetener instead of sugar for the lime pie filling. My mum bought a huge pack of artificial sweetener because she thought that it was sucrose :( So now I'm stuck with a lot of artificial sweetener and I'm not sure I want to use it, since it is obviously less superior than sucrose. :(

So, I don't really want to explain how I messed up making lime pie filling, but I basically mixed fresh lime juice (2 limes) with zest, milk and an egg. Then, while the milk was curdling, I added in artificial sweetener. After baking at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, and seeing that everything was still liquidy (and smelled nice), I figured I should just freeze the thin liquid product and make crushed ice.

It then smelled weird and tasted terrible. Oh gosh. b-LIME-y. It was. Atrocious. The texture was gritty, thanks to the milk. There was a millisecond of sweetness and limey-ness. And then, for the next 4 minutes, there was a putrid artificial aftertaste.

Bleh.

So. I mixed liquid with brown sugar, added stuff, and ended up with lime muffin-gluteny-somethings. They're not cookies or cakes or muffins... the texture is slightly rubbery and gluteny. They're not crumbly but there is a neat whole-wheatish-lime flavour and they're really moist... It actually is like a steamed cake! So if anyone wants to try these weird muffin things...

Ingredients

250 g whole wheat flour

250 ml milk

100 g brown sugar

24 packets of artificial sweetener (ew.) OR 200 g caster sugar

Juice of two limes

Zest of two limes

1 egg

1 cup shredded zucchini

2 tsp baking powder

Method

1. Mix all ingredients.

2. Bake at 190 degrees C/380 degrees F for 15 minutes.

Coffee Ice [or...Granita?]

I'm technically not supposed to have much caffeinated stuff anymore due to the fact that it apparently interferes with methimazole efficacy, but this was made with decaf coffee [so, it has 2% of the caffeine it otherwise would have] which means that it probably has the same caffeine power [if not less] as some chocolate. I started off with coffee, fat free milk, some honey, and some saccharin. I froze it for an hour, and it looked like the image above.

An hour later, a layer of ice had formed on the inside sides of the plastic container, but the centre was still liquidy [or, slushy, after I mixed it]. The whole point of making this is to chop up the ice crystals every hour or so. I actually should've used a shallow container, since it was more difficult to reach the bottom parts which were frozen.

In total, six hours later, this is what I ended up with. Granules of frozen coffee and milk! The volume had [evidently, due to not only the lattice structure of ice, but also to the air between each crystal] increased to... about 157% its original liquidy volume.

I'm not sure whether this is "Italian Ice", "ice" or "granita". When I was younger, my brother and I used to make watermelon granita, which I recall included 150g of caster sugar dissolved in water, a lot of watermelon juice, and lemon juice. It was made in the same way as this, and did NOT taste like artificial watermelon flavour. It used to be such a big deal! Today, I felt like making this since it's too humid to drink hot coffee [even though it was pouring with rain all afternoon] and I felt like this would be yummy. Before freezing, the slurry tasted like normal sweet coffee with way too much milk [I tend to like coffee without milk]. After freezing, I feel as though it tastes even more watery than originally... which means that next time, I have to brew super-strong coffee. This is saying something, since I generally make really strong coffee. However, it isn't super sweet, which is great. I'm just worried that it's going to freeze into one huge mass by tomorrow morning, since I probably didn't add enough sweeteners to keep the ice not-that-frozen, since adding sweeteners means that the freezing point of the solution increases, which means that, in theory, the granita would freeze at a higher temperature [because the sweetener molecules prevent the water molecules from bonding to each other as efficiently].