Low Carb S’mores Ice Cream

S’mores are wonderful treats that combine the flavors of chocolate, marshmallow and graham crackers. I was able to get a hold of a marshmallow ice cream flavoring, but you can probably do just as well using marshmallow flavorings from LorAnn Oils or Capella.

Low Carb Roquefort and Honey Ice Cream

When I found this recipe in “The Perfect Scoop” by David Lebovitz, I knew one day I would try to make it low carb. The recipe should work for any kind of blue cheese, but knowing how much thought David puts into his ingredient choices, I made sure to get actual Roquefort. (It’s made from sheep’s milk rather than cow’s milk.) Thankfully I didn’t have to track it down at some hipster-run artisan cheese shop. Trader Joe’s sells Société brand and it’s exquisite! I had to dig through their cheese section to find it.

Low Carb Mexican Spicy Cinnamon Ice Cream

David Lebovitz’s Cinnamon Ice Cream recipe uses real sticks of cinnamon and I assume tastes wonderful. However, I procured a ready-made ice cream flavoring from a distributor called “Mexican Spicy Cinnamon.”

For mix-ins, I decided to toss in half a recipe of Low Carb Cinnamon Sugar Crisps Con Chocolate. These ought to stay crispy in the ice cream and give it a boost of chocolate and cinnamon flavor. Adding additional ground cinnamon right before churning can also help boost the cinnamon experience, but the crisps do a great job of it all by themselves.

I suggest making the crisps smaller. Try not to use giant pork rind pieces. Ensure they’re completely coated in chocolate, too.

This might be a good recipe to add some chile powder, too! Experiment!

Low Carb Cinnamon Sugar Crisps Con Chocolate

Churros are fried-dough pastries smothered in cinnamon and sugar. They’re often served covered in chocolate. I could probably recreate them using Carbalose flour and a deep fryer, but that’s way too much work. I could approximate the flavor without the effort if I baked low carb tortillas basted with butter and dipped in cinnamon and sweetener. However, those are still too carby and requires toasting in the oven.

There’s another low carb staple I can use and doesn’t require toasting at all. PORK RINDS!

Automatically adding captions to images on Blogger

One of the advantages of using the Blogger web interface is that knowledge of HTML isn’t required. Images that get added through the rich text interface are automatically inserted into a “div” container and hyperlinked so that clicking on them starts a slideshow of the page’s images. Captioned images are wrapped in a table. The user doesn’t need to know any of this since it’s done for them behind the scenes.

Good practice dictates that images have “alt” attributes assigned to them. The “alt” attribute is used in HTML and XHTML documents to specify alternative text (a.k.a. alt text) that is to be rendered when the element to which it is applied cannot be rendered. It is also used by “screen reader” software so that a person who is listening to the content of a webpage (for instance, a person who is blind) can interact with this element. Another attribute commonly used is “title.” Assigning this attribute allows for a pop-over to appear when the mouse pointer is hovering over an image. This can be useful way to provide supplemental information or context about the image that the author feels isn’t important enough to include as a caption.

The advent of touch interfaces makes hovering impossible. Mobile devices almost always implement a touch interface, so mobile users cannot access the title attribute of an object. To assist mobile users without putting an additional burden on a blogger, I’ve come up with a way to automatically append the title attribute text as a caption to images for mobile browsers. No intimate knowledge of HTML or JavaScript is necessary; however, this process will require changes to the Blogger template and style sheet.

Low Carb Drunken Parrot Ice Cream

I got a sample of Hawaiian Pineapple ice cream flavoring, but I struggled initially to think of interesting flavor combinations. Fear not, I’ve got some wild ideas for this flavor. This one isn’t too wacky. I found some “pineapple rum long-drink recipes” that inspired this ice cream mix.