Earl Grey Tea Ice Cream

Earl Grey Tea Ice Cream is something that I've been thinking of trying for a little while now. It just seemed to me to be a flavor that should work... And what do you know, I was actually right!

Bergamot tea, with a hint of lemon, in a smooth ice cream, turns out to be really great. Just strange enough to make it interesting, but not so strange that it no longer corresponds to our idea of what ice cream is.

This is the first time I've used both glucose syrup and gelatin in ice cream as well. Neither is strictly necessary, but they really does give the ice cream a better texture.

Earl grey tea flavored ice cream

Ingredients
3,5 dl Milk
1,5 dl Whipping cream
1 tbsp Glucose syrup
6 Egg yolks
1,25 dl Sugar
5 tsp Earl grey tea
1 Lemon
1 Gelatin sheet


Place the gelatin sheet in a bowl of cold water to soften.

Peel the rind of the lemon, using a vegetable peeler or similar. It needs to be thin enough that you don't get the white stuff.

Pour the cream, milk and glucose syrup into a pot and mix. Bring it to a boil, while stirring, as soon as it starts boiling, take it off the heat. Add the tea and lemon rind, give it a stir, and let it sit for 5 minutes to infuse.

Whisk the egg yolks and sugar together in a bowl.

Once the 5 minutes are up, strain the milk-mixture through a fine sieve. I found that I still had some small bits of tea leaf at this point, so I recommend straining it through a piece of muslin (or if you're REALLY patient, and/or don't have muslin, a coffee filter).

Whisk the milk-mixture into the eggs, and pour into a clean pot. Heat, while constantly stirring, until it thickens and the froth on top disappears (80-85°C, no higher).

Take the pot of the heat, and dunk the bottom of the pot into a bowl of cold water (or just fill your sink to 10cm or so with cold water, and use that). The point is to take the heat out of the pot so that the custard doesn't keep cooking.

Take the gelatin sheet out of the cold water, and squeeze it so get rid of as much water as you can. Add it to the custard and whisk it in.

Strain the custard into a clean bowl, and set in the fridge to cool.

Once it's cooled, at least to room temperature, churn in the ice cream machine.

Uncooked custard

Cooked custard

Starting to churn

Almost done

BankID with card reader on LMDE

Update: This no longer works. It seems that the changes done for BankID have now gotten to the point that banks etc have upgraded and this old version no longer works...

I've previously made guides for doing this on Ubuntu 13.04 and 13.10. Today I installed LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition), and getting BankID to work there had some additional difficulties.

I know... BankID is very soon ending the support for Linux completely, but for now I want to be able to use it. So here's how.

The main problems under Debian, is that nspluginwrapper and one if the dependencies of the driver for the card reader (the i386 version) have been removed from the repositories. That means that there are a couple of fairly "ugly" tricks that I had to do in order to get this to work. Doing this means that some packages will not be updated, so if you don't feel comfortable with that, don't do this.

There is a lot of good information on the Ubuntu wiki for Nexus Personal, but since it tries to encompass everything, I find it a little difficult to follow. It's a good resource for debugging though.

The card reader that I have is a Digipass 920, so if you are using something else, you may need to change out the driver for the one appropriate for you device.

Do keep in mind that the BankID application will not be automatically updated. If you need to update to a new version you'll have to download and install it again as described below.

• Get the BankID application from https://install.bankid.com/Download?defaultFileId=Linux (the website blocks 64-bit Linux from the "regular" download procedure, so if you're downloading from that you need to use this direct link)
• Unzip the application
• Open a terminal and go to the directory that you unzipped the application to, and type in the following command (Please note that the version number will change):
• sudo ./install.4.19.1.11663.sh i
•  Enable multiarch support
• sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
  sudo apt-get update
• Install some needed packages
• sudo apt-get install pkcs11-data:i386 libstdc++6:i386 libidn11:i386
• Next we need to install nspluginwrapper, as I stated above, this is no longer part of the standard repositories, so it requires a bit more work. Basically we are adding an older repository in order to install it. You could also install it from source, but that would probably leave you with some problems with regards to dependencies, this is (in my opinion) the easiest way
• open the config file for your repositories
• sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list 
• Add the following line to it
• deb http://ftp.au.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free
• Save and close
• We can now install nspluginwrapper with its dependencies
• sudo apt-get update
• sudo apt-get install nspluginwrapper
• Now to install the driver for the card reader. The actual driver is still there, but not one of its dependencies, so we will need to install that manually first
• Download and install init-system-helpers
• Now we can install the driver
• sudo apt-get install pcscd:i386
• The repository that we added in order to install nspluginwrapper conflicts with Linux Mints repository, so we need to remove it
• Open /etc/apt/sources.list, in the same as as above, and remove the line that we added to it
• Go back to the terminal and give the following command:
• sudo nspluginwrapper -i /usr/local/lib/personal/libplugins.so
• Start/restart Firefox, go to Tools -> Addons and check that you can see Nexus Personal under Plugins
• Give it a try, it should now work

Strawberry Pie

This is probably my favorite thing to eat in the world. It's my grandmothers recipe, and it is the taste of summer to me.

Strawberry pie

Ingredients - Pastry
100g Butter
1,5 dl Sugar
1 Egg
3 dl Flour

Ingredients - Filling
1 dl Sugar
2 tsp Vanilla sugar
1 Egg
3 dl Creame fraiche
300-350g Strawberries


Start with the pastry. Whisk room temperature butter and sugar until fully incorporated. Whisk in the egg. Add the flour and mix with your hands to an even dough. Wrap in plastic foil and place in the fridge for about 30 minutes.

Butter and flour a pie mold (Smear the inside with butter, then shake some flour around inside it so that it covers everything). If you have one, you can use a "proper" one, here I'm using the disposable aluminium kind (23cm).

Place the pastry dough in the mold, and use your hand to press it into and even sheet, covering both the bottom and the sides. Make sure that the dough goes up over the edges a little, since it tends to slip down during the blind baking.

Bake in the middle of the oven, at 200°C, for 10 minutes. If the sides do sag a bit, don't panic, it's not the end of the world, it'll still taste nice.

For the filling, mix the sugar and vanilla sugar, then whisk in the egg, and finally the creame fraiche. Pour the filling into the mold, then add the strawberries. If the strawberries are small, you can use them whole, otherwise cut them in half. Dot them throughout the pie, basically as many as you can fit without placing them on top of each other.

Bake in the middle of the oven, at 200°C, for 20-25 minutes, until the edges of the filling just starts to color. It'll still be rather liquid in the middle, don't worry, it'll firm up as it cools.

Let the pie cool a little, then place in the fridge to cool completely. This pie should be enjoyed cold.

Butter and sugar, a good start

Add an egg

Finished pastry dough

Buttered and floured

Dough in mold

After blind baking

Filling

Added filling

Added strawberries

Just needs to cool