Village Ice Cream Calgary, AB - I'm screaming for locally made, artisanal, small batch homemade icecream! Yum!!

Posted by Billy, the founder of Village Ice Cream was inspired after sitting on his grandmother's porch and eating some locally made huckleberry icecream after a failed motorbike trip from Calgary to Rio de Janeiro.  They're dead set on creating the best tasting ice creams with locally sourced and seasonal ingredients, and using organic ingredients when possible. Floods and -40C weather won't stop us from this ice creaaaaaam! :D

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Hunger Games Cheese stuffed cheese buns recipe.. the hunt is on for the perfect cheese bun recipe!

Posted by I crave cheese buns from my childhood.. super light fluffy bread with streaks of cheesey goodness rolled up into them and covered in more cheese... like a cinnamon bun, but replace out all that cinnamon brown sugar goodness with ooey gooey fragrant awesome cheese! So, I'm on the hunt for the recipe that would best reflect my childhood memories of sinking your teeth into the perfect cheese bun... and get some calcium along the way hahaha!I adapted this recipe from Yammie's Noshery mainly cuz I had no idea where to start, and it was the first website that popped up that looked promising after I typed in "cheese stuffed cheese buns" into Google. Thanks Google!  I normally put more research into recipes, but hey, it was a spur of the moment thing, and the cheese buns turned out good - not what I was looking for, but if you imagine the Red Lobster biscuits flavor and stuff it with cheese, you essentially have these cheese stuffed cheese bun flavor profile down pat.  Bonus - it doesn't take forever, though the dough does need proofing time... total prep+baking time.. just over an hour for cheesey stuffed garlic cheese buns!

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Villa Maria Italian Ristorante, Calgary, AB - Taste of Italy and you feel like famiglia!

Posted by For a recent birthday, we headed to Villa Maria Italian Ristorante as we had heard not only their food was a taste of Italy, the service was phenomenal and you get treated like family... and we weren't disappointed!  This little gem is tucked away on 17th Ave, and they even have free parking *gasp* in the back of the restaurant! (I had to do a double take when I heard they had parking. On 17th Ave! We were greeted (as was anyone) coming into the restaurant by Danny, the owner of Villa Maria, who seems to know all the regulars by name.  Be prepared to laugh, joke and get hugged by Danny.. we happened to come on his birthday and the entire restaurant burst into song for him.

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Frankfurt in a day - Apfelwein (apple wine) house and delicious eats at Zum Gemalten Haus vs Apfelwein Wagner Part 4

Posted by We started off our walking tour of Frankfurt by fueling up at the best (award 2013) bakery in Germany -  Bäckerei HansS (see previous post with bakery goodies here), continued on with the top Aldstalt (Old Town) sites, churches and Frankfruters (see previous post with what to look for, do and eat), hit up Frankfurt's largest indoor farmer's market: Kleinmarkthalle (see the delicious sausages and eats and more sites here)... and after navigating thru their train, metro and bus system, we rested at the hotel for a bit and then headed off to try out a Apfelwein (apple wine) house!

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How to crumb coat, make butter cream white and super fluffy recipe for a 3 layered cake! :D

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Super white buttercream! Pic taken in an afternoon sunbeam

I've had lots of folks ask me to make a super fluffy butter cream, and since I'm not a huge fan of putting in vegetable shortening, I usually make mine with 100% butter.  Normally I use un-salted butter so I can control the amount of salt going into my baking, but as I thought about it.. there is soooooo much sugar in icing/frosting, the amount of salt in salted butter is negligible, and salted butter is waaay easier on the wallet (I always use Lactancia cultured butter as it has better flavor so not that much less pricey lol) and so since I was test baking cakes for an upcoming girlfriend's baby shower, what better way than to test some versions of buttercream while I'm at it?  And since I didn't have pictures of how to properly crumb coat and cover a cake in buttercream when I made a LEGO minifigure head cake last time, I took pictures along the way!  I'll post the recipe for the white/chocolate cake in a later post as this one will be long cuz I'll be pretty detailed!

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