(Italian Music)
- Hi, I'm Jerry James Stone
and you're watching Cooking Stone.
And on today's show, I'm gonna make a lavender cream
and strawberry popsicle.
And it's amazing!
It's inspired by this dessert I did,
a while back, which was lavender,
cream cheese stuffed strawberries.
And that combination just works really well together.
The lavender brings this brightness to the strawberry.
It's really complimentary
and, sort of, yeah, you're gonna love it.
So, I highly recommend you make this one.
Let's start by making our strawberry preserves.
So, we have two cups of strawberries,
fresh strawberries, cut in half.
Just loosely packed.
And we're going to add a half cup
of sugar to this.
And then we're just gonna warm this
over a medium-low heat
until the strawberries sort of release their juice
and cook down.
And we want it to cook down
to about just one cup.
In about five to ten minutes,
you should have this wonderful, strawberry,
sort of jam-like ...
I mean you can see that the syrup there
just sticks to the spoon.
So, this is gonna be really, really nice.
It doesn't quite take long at all.
You can mash these if you want
and even make them smaller.
I like the big chunks.
It's just up to you.
It doesn't really matter.
The important part is
at the end of this, you want about a cup left.
So just, you know, measure it as you're going along.
Now, we're gonna create our lavender cream.
We gonna have the heaping half-cup of sugar
and one full cup of milk.
And we're gonna warm that
over a medium-low heat.
While that sugar is dissolving,
we're now gonna add a heaping tablespoon
of fresh, or I shouldn't say fresh,
but culinary lavender.
It's important that you use a culinary lavender for this.
And we just want to melt this, or not melt,
but we just want to dissolve this sugar
into the milk and then steep the lavender
so that that permeates the milk.
And then we're gonna mix this
concoction with some Greek yogurt.
So just, you don't have to bring this to a boil.
You just want to melt the sugar.
And once the sugar is melted,
you can just let it sit for a few minutes on the stove
and let that lavender flavor infuse this.
How great does that look?
Now that that's steeped, we're just gonna go ahead
and strain out the lavender
from the milk.
And let this cool.
And once that milk is cooled,
we're then going to mix it in with the Greek yogurt.
Now we're gonna whisk in our lavender-infused milk
into our Greek yogurt.
Just add a little bit at a time.
At this point, the milk should be room temperature.
And we just want to whisk that in.
You want it to be room temperature
so that way the Greek yogurt does not curdle
because that would be disgusting.
So, add a little bit,
whisk it in.
Don't make a mess like I just did.
Add a little bit more.
And just keep working that into the Greek yogurt
until all of it is worked in.
It's looking really, really nice there.
Yeah, that's gonna be yummy.
So, I'm just gonna do this in layers.
I'm gonna add some of lavender cream
to the mold first.
And then I'm just gonna spoon in
the strawberry preserve.
I'm gonna get this nice,
marbley effect with the lavender cream
and the strawberry preserve.
And then, after I do that,
I'm gonna add another layer of the cream
and just rinse and repeat.
Now, let's add in our popsicle sticks.
Because of the preserve,
it should just hold them in place.
It's nice and gooey.
And then let's just freeze these babies
and let's eat them after that.
I think that the weather's been really nice
here in San Francisco the past week.
And I'm gonna take these to the park,
and hand them out.
There's gonna be some very happy
San Franciscans as a result of that.
Enjoy!
(Italian music)