#21 Are You Still Watching? Rom-Com Recipes 💘
Get in the mood for Valentine's Day with these sweet rom-com treats... or break your heart and revisit Blue Valentine. Plus, we reveal the lineup for our Issue 9 launch party!
Lineup Reveal: Issue 9 Launch Party 🏙️
There’s no place like home... so join us in our hometown of Toronto for a night of film & pop culture readings to celebrate the launch of Issue 9: HOMETOWN!
March 14th ◦ 7:00pm
Tammy’s Wine Bar (1662 Queen St W) ◦ $10/PWYC
FEATURING:
Alex Mooney
Cason Sharpe
Cleo Sood
Miles Forrester
Winnie Wang
Hosted by Gabrielle Marceau & Sennah Yee
Rom-Com Recipes 💘
by Michelle Shreeve
Get in the mood for Valentine’s Day with these sweet treats from iconic rom-coms…
Lavender Honey Ice Cream from It’s Complicated
Ingredients
½ cup honey
1 cup whole milk
2 tbs. dried lavender
Pinch of salt
2 cups heavy cream
Instructions
On low, simmer the whole milk, honey, and heavy cream
Add the pinch of salt and lavender and continue to simmer for an additional 10 minutes
Strain out lavender
Allow the cream mixture to cool in the refrigerator for 1 hour
Add the cream mixture to an ice cream maker and freeze for 15-20 minutes. Enjoy!
Tips: If you don’t have an ice cream maker, place 1 tbs. of salt and 1 cup of ice cubes in a freezer bag. Take another freezer bag and add the ingredients together, placing the ingredients bag within the salt and ice bag. Shake both bags until well mixed. Strain the ingredients bag to get out the lavender. Pour ice cream into a bowl and freeze for at least 2 hours before enjoying.
Caramel Éclairs from Simply Irresistible
Ingredients
Pastry Dough:
1 cup water
1 cup flour
4 eggs
8 tbs. unsalted butter
½ tsp. salt
Pastry Cream:
¼ cup sugar
¼ cup corn starch
2 ¼ cups whole milk
4 egg yolks
Pinch of salt
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Salted Caramel Sauce:
½ cup heavy cream
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup sugar
½ tsp. sea salt
¼ cup unsalted butter
Instructions
Pastry Cream:
Add the sugar, egg yolks, cornstarch, milk, pinch of salt, and vanilla extract and bring up to medium heat
Whisk the mixture together until smooth and thick
Once it's thick, grab a strainer to remove any lumps
Wrap the cream in foil or plastic wrap and chill for 4 hours
Pastry Dough:
Pre-heat the oven to 425 degrees
Line two baking sheets with parchment paper
In a medium-sized pot, melt the butter, salt, and water together over medium-low heat
Add the flour and stir until mixed well into dough form
Add the eggs in one at a time and continue mixing until dough pulls away from the side
Remove the dough from the heat and transfer to a piping bag or resealable plastic bag. Fill the bag ¾ of the way full and cut a whole in one of the corners.
Pipe the pastry cream onto the baking sheet, about 4-5 inches long (you should be able to fit 10-12 on each baking sheet)
Bake the dough at 425 degrees for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat to 250 degrees for 20 minutes (or until the dough is golden brown)
Place on racks to cool
Caramel Sauce:
Cook the sugar on low heat until it is smooth and starts to turn light brown
Stir in the heavy cream, butter, pinch of sea salt, and vanilla
Turn off the heat but continue to mix the sauce until thickened
To Put The Éclairs Together
Use a skewer or chopstick to make a small holed tunnel in the pastry dough
Fill the tunnel with the pastry cream (don’t overfill)
Dip one side of the éclair into the caramel sauce
Garnish with more sea salt or sprinkles
Tip: Remember to make the pastry cream first and well ahead of time, as it takes 4 hours to chill. Also give yourself enough time for everything to properly cool before you put the éclairs together. Enjoy!
Tiramisu from No Reservations
Ingredients
⅔ cup milk
1 ¼ cup heavy whipping cream
6 large egg yolks
1 lb. mascarpone cheese
1 ½ tsp. baking cocoa
¾ cup sugar
½ tsp. vanilla extract
2 packages ladyfingers
¼ chilled brewed coffee
Instructions
Beat egg yolks and sugar together in a saucepan
Add in milk and mix well
Bring to medium heat and keep stirring for 5 minutes
Reduce heat to low for 1 minute while continually stirring
Remove from heat
Pour mixture into bowl and cover with foil or plastic wrap to chill in the refrigerator for 1 hour
While waiting, add cheese in a separate bowl and mix well until smooth, then set aside
Once chilled bowl is ready from the refrigerator, mix vanilla extract and the whipping cream together until stiff, then set aside
Lay out ladyfingers horizontally and lightly brush each one with coffee
In an ungreased 11 x 7-inch glass baking dish, place half of the ladyfingers in a single layer and spread half of the cheese mixture over the ladyfingers, then spread with half of the whipped cream
Repeat the layers with the remaining ladyfingers, whipped cream, and cheese mixture
Sprinkle with cocoa
Refrigerate at least 4-6 hours and enjoy!
Tips: If you don’t have mascarpone cheese, you can substitute it for two 8 oz. packages of softened cream cheese instead. Make sure not to soak the ladyfingers in coffee, just lightly brush them.
Michelle Shreeve enjoys cooking and watching movies and often combines the two.
Sour Candy Hearts: on Blue Valentine
by Alex Manley
Maybe you can picture it. Ryan Gosling’s strumming a dinky ukulele. He’s standing in front of an empty storefront, serenading a dancing Michelle Williams, mannequins in wedding dresses arrayed in the windows. You always hurt the ones you love, he sings, his tone a mash-up of falsetto and croon. It’s all one take. She’s falling for him, and so is the audience. The ones you shouldn’t hurt at all.
In this case, he meant me—I was hurting myself, enacting a form of cinematic emotional self-flagellation, catching the film alone in theatres not long after its release in the bleak midwinter of 2011, a few months after what was then—and still is—the toughest breakup of my life, a year-and-change relationship that was my first love, full of self-consciously cutesy gestures and the mythologizing that poets engage in when under the influence.
I knew, going in, that the movie would wreck me, on some level. So why watch it? What was I after? I still have the texts from my ex that I got when I told her what I was doing. They’re the last four messages in a TextEdit document where I collected the texts from her that felt the most meaningful, the most redolent of emotion, because my then cellphone, a Motorola Razr, only held 50 texts at a time. Looking at them now, the lacunae of my replies make it a kind of erasure poem, the time stamps telling a little story of their own:
I hope you didnt
Feb 4, 11:29 pm
You are the least smart!
Feb 4, 11:31 pm
Hope you at least saw it
with someone comforting.
Good luck.
Feb 4, 11:34 pm
Ugh. Im sorry.
Feb 4, 11:42 pm
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