Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day on March 17th with the help of your iSi Creative Whip and make desserts and treats that are an ode to Irish beer and spirits. Mix a wee bit of Baileys Irish Cream into your basic whipped cream for a simple way to add a dash of cheer.

Baileys is a liqueur, 17% alcohol by volume, made from Irish whiskey, milk from Irish farms, cocoa nibs, vanilla, and sugar. Using the Creative Whip, top hot coffee with Baileys Whipped Cream for a festive version of an Irish coffee or cap a Guinness float (stout beer and vanilla ice cream) for a quick St. Patrick’s Day dessert that is far too much fun. But for a truly rich treat, try a chocolate stout cupcake frosted with this decadent whipped cream.

There are many delicious variations of chocolate stout cake but all involve adding a dark beer, such as Guinness, to the cake batter. The result is a dense rich cake just begging to be topped with a frothy light cream. With a touch of cocoa powder, powdered sugar, and Baileys, you have a frosting for a very grown up cupcake with a whole lot of Irish spirit.

Sláinte!

Recipe for Chocolate Stout Cake

The Creative Whip has always been a perfect tool for entertaining at home. Whip up delicious dips to start off a party or have a festive carbonated cocktail ready to go as your guests arrive. And of course there is dessert! Nothing tops a homemade pie like fresh whipped cream or wows your guests like a classic Tiramisu. The ingredients are simple, the prep a snap, and clean-up is next to nothing. Let the Creative Whip do the work for you and just enjoy the party!

But the fun shouldn’t be limited to your own kitchen. While the pint-sized Creative Whip is easily portable (smaller than a wine bottle!), the half-pint size was made to go. With its compact dimensions, only 3-inches in diameter and 8-inches tall, it can easily be tucked into just about any purse or bag. So for that next dinner party or quick get-together, share your creativity and take the Creative Whip along with you.

Try the classic Chocolate Mousse Express and top with candied hazelnuts or fresh fruit, or mix up the Mango-Coconut Mousse and have shredded toasted coconut or crushed macadamia nuts on hand to finish the dessert. Each recipe is less than five ingredients so they come together in a nothing flat. Best of all, you can mix and pour into your Creative Whip ahead of time. Just keep it chilled until you’re ready to go and dessert will be ready to go when you are.

Note: Many of the recipes mentioned are scaled for the pint iSi Creative Whip. Halve the ingredients to use with the ½-pint iSi Creative Whip.

Which would you rather have? A cookie? Or a cookie with cream? I hope the latter: a slightly crisp on the outside, chewy on the inside chocolate chip cookie, embellished with a cool swirl of freshly whipped cream. It’s classic comfort food – cookies and milk – simply dressed up.

My name is Louisa Chu – I’m a chef and journalist – and I’ll be this year’s guest chef at the iSi booth at the International Home + Housewares Show in Chicago. The show starts this Sunday but I’ve been working on recipes for months using the new Creative Whip.

At industry-only trade shows like the Housewares Show, buyers and journalists from around the world will walk miles upon miles through the cavernous McCormick Place convention center to see the newest products offered by thousands of exhibitors, some of which you’ll eventually buy for your own home.

Celebrity chefs – including Mario Batali, Ming Tsai, and Rick Bayless – will do cooking demonstrations and sign their books.

I’ve cooked at some of the best restaurants in the world, including El Bulli in Spain, where we used iSi whippers to make extremely inventive dishes, like airy “gnocchi” from potato foam – garnished with seaweed gelatin wrapped butter ravioli, finished with a roasted potato skin consomme. The dish was beautiful, surprising, and yes, delicious but not quite what friends and family want me to whip up at home.

During the show I’ll offer tastings using the Creative Whip of not only the cookies, but many of the recipes found right here on our blog, like the Cheese Wizard on mini grass-fed burgers with tiny challah buns. I’ll also introduce new recipes including Sparkling Arnold Palmers (sweet tea and lemonade) and Buffalo Style Fried Chicken. We’ll post the menu and recipes for everything we’ll serve at the show, because you can and will want to try these at home.

If you’re visiting the show, please stop by and say hi – and you can now follow us on Twitter at iSiCreativeWhip!

Dispense batter onto a preheated wafflemaker. Close the lid, cook until waffle are golden and crisp.

Serve with fresh whipped cream and warm maple syrup. Keep any remaining batter in the fridge up to 5 days, ready for waffles any time of the day.

Make the batter from scratch or an all-natual, buttermilk pancake mix works just great too. This one says 1 cup of milk to 1 cup of mix but I found it best with just 2/3 cup of milk.

Whisk batter in an iSi Basics Flex~It measuring cup, pinch to create a spout, then pour directly into whipper. Screw on lid,

Dispense batter directly onto hot griddle. Note the correct hand position for proper dispensing.

Hot pancakes, warm maple syrup, melting butter. Keep any remaining batter in the fridge where it will stay nice and fluffy for up to 5 days!

To serve, add ice cubes made of the same drink or a scoop of your favorite ice cream or sorbet for very special and completely original ice cream floats.

Plus with homemade carbonated beverages made with recyclable iSi soda chargers, no more big, heavy plastic or glass bottles shipped across the country or around the world.

Simply mix your drink ingredients together. Cool and strain if necessary.

Pour into bottle.

Screw on one iSi soda charger. Shake vigorously 3 to 5 times.

Soda! Serve chilled or over ice.

Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, famous for some of the finest restaurants around the world and whom you might have seen as a guest judge on Top Chef, serves an iSi-carbonated, batter-fried chicken at his restaurant Perry St.

A few months ago Jean-Georges’s 27-year old son Cedric took over the restaurant as executive chef but promises, "I won’t get rid of the fried chicken! You don't need to worry about that.”

The deboned and seared chicken is dipped in whipper-made batter charged with CO2 and infused with Thai chili, Schechuan peppercorns, and ginger before getting fried to super crunchy perfection. Topped off with smoked chicken gravy and fresh lemon zest, this is aint no ordinary fried chicken but it sure is delicious.

We’ll try to get Cedric to share Perry St’s extremely popular fried chicken recipe with us. In the meantime, see and hear the making and crunching of their famous fried chicken on Vimeo for The Feedbag:

VIDEO: The Feedbag makes Fried Chicken at Perry St. Restaurant

For more love and photos of Perry St.'s fried chicken, visit Serious Eats.

Perry St., 176 Perry Street, New York, NY, 10014, (212) 352-1900

But if you go to the dairy section of your grocery store, you’ll find a lot of cartons and bottles labeled with the word “cream.” There are so many that you might just pick up the wrong kind or worse yet, walk out without any.

In the U.S. the fat content in cream varies:
Heavy Cream (often labeled Heavy Whipping Cream): 36% fat or more
Whipping Cream (often labeled Light Whipping Cream): 30 to 36% fat
Light Cream: 18 to 30% fat
Half-and-Half: 10.5 to 18% fat

And just in case you were wondering about milk:
Whole Milk: 3.25% fat
2% Milk (often labeled Reduced Fat): 2% fat
1% Milk (often labeled Low Fat): 1% fat
Skim Milk (often labeled Fat Free): 0 to 0.5% fat

Can you remember all that at the store? Us neither. We make it easy and just say use heavy cream because it always whips up light and fluffy. If you use yogurt or cream cheese, just get whole milk kinds too.

You can whip up any brand but we especially like the fresh and delicious products from Country Dairy, Farmers’ Creamery, and Traderspoint Creamery.

You’ll see egg whites and gelatin in our recipes for mousses and foams which also stabilize air bubbles like heavy cream.

And remember, your iSi Creative Whip makes five times more whipped cream than you can whip by hand. So a spoonful of our whipped cream is less than spoonful of hand whipped cream and a whole lot less than liquid cream – and that’s the real skinny on fat!

In Provence and Catalonia, it’s aïoli, made with olive oil and garlic, served with seafood platters and grilled vegetables.In Japan, with rice or cider vinegar instead of lemon juice, they squiggle it on okonomiyaki. In Mexico, it’s lime instead of lemon, found on elote, one of the world’s greatest street foods. Roasted corn on the cob, slathered with lime mayo, sprinkled with spicy chili powder, and topped with finely crumbled queso anejo, a salty cow’s milk cheese. In Belgium, cones of golden, crispy frites are served with a classic side of mayo. In the U.S., restaurant cooks can’t seem to live without Sriracha for staff or their own personal meals. The spicy red pepper hot sauce mixed into mayo makes for an irresistible dip or sauce for everything from tacos to burgers, to fried calamari and catfish.

To make your own flavored mayo, mix up your ingredients, flavor it up (passing through a fine sieve if there are any chunks), charge, shake, and your ready to go.

Easy enough for everyday, your homemade mayo brings a world of flavor to your next tailgate or holiday party – and it’s only a squeeze away.

With whipped cream so fluffy and fresh, there’s no such thing as plain whipped cream. But there are a world of possibilities beyond simply sweetened or even vanilla whipped cream.

Europeans often don’t sweeten their whipped cream, preferring theirs au naturel. But for us with sweet-tooths (and salt-tooths too), the iSi Creative Whip provides endless flavor possibilities.

To sweeten, you can use either powdered sugar or regular granulated sugar – although powdered dissolves a bit faster. Honey, maple syrup, agave nectar, or flavored syrups all work well too. If you’re looking for a lower calorie alternative, you can use Splenda, Equal, or any number of the many stevia-based sweeteners out there.

Monin, maker of gourmet flavors from France since 1912, offers natural syrups including many fun seasonal flavors.

Pair Pumpkin Spice whipped cream on your next pumpkin pies, cheesecake, or latte. Or their new Spicy Red Cinnamon whipped cream over apple crisp or a cranberry-apple Tarte Tatin. Gingerbread whipped cream on warm bread pudding. How about cool Peppermint whipped cream on hot chocolate and hot fudge sundaes?

Extracts offer you the ability to add flavor while controlling the amount and type of sweetener used. You can’t go wrong with pure vanilla extract but other commonly available extracts on your supermarket shelves include almond, lemon, coffee, and rum.

Grown-ups can flavor cream with liqueur for an extra shot of deliciousness. Liqueurs come in all manner of fruit, berry, nut, and flower flavors as well as chocolate, coffee, and cream variations. Try Cointreau whipped cream over warm chocolate cake, St-Germain elderflower whipped cream on sour cherry pie, Vermeer Dutch Chocolate whipped cream to top just about anything. Are you getting the idea?

Or try a savory whipped cream with smoked salt, chili powder, wasabi, or even horseradish to serve with savory dishes like braised short ribs or smoked salmon.

No matter the flavor, season to taste. Stir the flavor in the cream to completely dissolve or incorporate, straining if needed – don’t beat in air – your iSi Creative Whip will do that for you. Shake three to five times then test consistency. To serve, hold the whipper with the decorator tip pointing straight down and press lever. Store unused whipped cream in refrigerator for up to 10 days. And remember, your iSi Creative Whip whips up to five times the volume of hand-whipped cream which means fewer calories per serving. But with whipped cream is this good, who’s counting calories?