Strawberry and banana nice cream

Ceri and I con­stantly get ques­tions about how we put together the blog. Actu­ally, that’s not true. I con­stantly get ques­tions relat­ing to what I used to do. When peo­ple find out that I worked at a mag­a­zine as a beauty direc­tor all they really want to know is what they should do about their skin and can I rec­om­mend a good moisturizer–No one actu­ally tracks me down to find out where I get my kale. How­ever, I’m going to tell you how we put the blog together any way. But, since you prob­a­bly wanted to ask, in regards to your skin, never ever leave the house with­out sun­screen (no, I’m dead seri­ous), don’t pick your damn zits, drink lots of water, use prod­ucts appro­pri­ate to your skin type (don’t worry if they don’t cost 10 mil­lion dol­lars because it doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean they’re bet­ter) and I swear by Der­ma­log­ica moisturizers.

Pho­tos by Maya Visnyei

Since we’re mag­a­zine girls, Ceri and I like to begin our work with what’s called an edit plan. Basi­cally, it’s a sched­ule of themes for each week of a three month period. After we go off on our own and decide what fan­tas­ti­cally deli­cious dishes we want to pre­pare, we start test­ing. We test again and again and again. Then we spend one day in our pho­tog­ra­pher Maya Visnyei’s stu­dio shoot­ing about 4 weeks worth of posts (recipes). One dish after the next until we’ve filled our bel­lies, com­pletely trashed her kitchen, and are punch drunk from cook­ing non-stop. On one of these recent occa­sions, my parent’s, who were in town for a visit, decided to tag along with Scarlett.

I was wor­ried it was going to be a night­mare but it was actu­ally quite fun. After I got over the fact that my dad was going to talk Maya’s ear off while she worked, I loved watch­ing their reac­tion to how much of a lit­tle pro­fes­sional Scar­lett is on set. I also enjoyed hav­ing them see how the pho­tos come together. In our tech-savvy world of down­load­able fil­ters mak­ing the most ama­teur of pho­tos look edgy, it is still hum­bling to watch a true artist at work. My par­ents couldn’t believe how my ho-hum peaches and cream muffins (ok, there’s noth­ing ho-hum about their taste, you got me?!) looked once Maya had them in the sights of her cam­era lens.

One of the dishes we shot that day was this Straw­berry Banana Nice Cream. The recipe is from Whole Foods but I did change it to accom­mo­date the straw­ber­ries in my freezer. For some rea­son, I just didn’t want to use rasp­ber­ries. What I loved about this recipe was the name, Nice Cream. It really says it all since this frozen won­der doesn’t call for heavy cream and is, basi­cally, as close to a healthy ice cream as you can come. With Scar­lett in the stu­dio, we decided to shoot this super yummy cool treat exactly the way you’d expect to see it, being eaten by a happy lit­tle kid. While there is all of the usual Maya magic at work here, this Nice Cream is as good as it looks.