First: The Rant

Noël here. My favorite part of delicious blog posts are the pictures. Pictures sell food in print, and great ones make you giddy. Unlike everyone else on the internet (shoutout to my amazing friend Hayley's scone-henges over at Wait...are those...cookies?!) I do not take great pictures. Evidently, light has something to do with it. I did get a better camera though, so that *might* help, but I think it has something to do with me, my kitchen, and my time.

I'm going to take more of an effort to take better pictures, because then maybe I'll actually post more. My posts disappoint me (but let me tell you, the ice cream doesn't!). I so dislike it when things don't turn out as well as I KNOW they could!

Now: The Rave

I nabbed this delectable tome from the bookstore shelf to give to our dear friend for her birthday. It made me so giddy my mother went out and bought me one the next day. And you know what?

SHE HAS A BLOG. (GO READ HER BLOG!)

It is the most scrumptious beautiful amazing blog in the world. It is inspiring and crushing.

It's what I hope all my work will be and know somehow it won't be.

Unless it will!

Yup! Almond paste is just ground-up almonds and sugar. It also has a carbon footprint of a jet-setting yeti. It also costs as much. Look at that. My almonds have traveled from my home state to Denmark and back.

However, while it's possible to make your own, I was concerned about maintaining the correct texture for ice cream, and industrial-ground pastes tend to have much more uniform textures than home-ground, so storebought it was!

And the almonds? The almonds came from a giant box of one-ounce freebies at the office. I let the box sit there all day, then stuffed a pound and a half of samples into a Ziploc bag and scurried home like a paranoid squirrel.

The trick with the almonds, according to my beta-tasters, are to start with slivers or chop them up much smaller (and use less of them) than I had. The constant crunch overpowered the creamy ice creamI tend to overdo the extras, because I always feel storebought ice cream gyps you (unless it's Ben & Jerry's. All hail Ben & Jerry's!)