melting your mouth

It’s that time of the month again … time for another Daring Bakers‘ event. This time, Kelly from Sass & Veracity and Ben from What’s cooking? hosted us to make a Danish Braid. Making this was a lot of fun. I have never made this kind of pastry before. The process is somewhat like making puff pastry (also on my list of things to try to do). After making the dough, which is deliciously flavored with orange and cardamon, you spread it with butter and fold it up on itself, then you keep rolling it back out and folding it in on itself several times over the course of a couple hours, so that you have thin layers of dough with butter in between. The dough is also yeasted, so after assembling the braid, you let it rise for a couple hours. Mine actually didn’t rise as much as it probably should’ve, but it still tasted fine and made a nice light, flaky dough.

This time we were allowed to put our own touch on the recipe by choosing the filling. The recipe came with directions for an apple filling, but I decided to use blackberry preserves instead. At the last minute I remembered that I also had some blanched almonds left over from the Opera Cake last month, so I ground those up with some sugar and an egg to make almond paste, which I spread in the braid underneath the jam.

This is definitely a recipe I will try again, and since the dough made enough for two braids, you might even hear about it again if I think of an interesting enough filling!

I didn’t make any changes to the dough recipe, so I will refer you to Kelly’s post for the recipe, which came from Sherry Yard’s book The Secrets of Baking. Thanks to Kelly and Ben for a great event! And make sure to check out everyone else’s Danish Braids on the Daring Bakers’ Blogroll … there are some great ones out there!

Well, it’s time for another Daring Bakers adventure, and what fun this one was! This month’s challenge was hosted by Daring Baker co-founders Ivonne of Cream Puffs In Venice and Lis of La Mia Cucina, with help from Fran of Apples Peaches Pumpkin Pie and Shea of Whiskful. The challenge is dedicated to Barbara of winosandfoodies.com and the Taste of Yellow LiveSTRONG event. In addition to this challenge, this month was also exciting because it brought a new Daring Bakers’ website, including public baking forums which you, dear reader, should go check out.

But enough with the business. You want to hear about cake! This month’s challenge was an Opera Cake. Though Opera cakes are usually flavored with dark ingredients like coffee or chocolate, these Opera Cakes were to choose light spring colors and flavorings. I’d recently been remembering a delicious white chocolate, honey, and lavender terrine I had when Mom and I visited Provence, so I immediately decided those would be the flavors I would pick.

Since Matt was out of town on baking day, Mom came over to our apartment and made the cake with me. I was sure glad — we had a lot of fun, and nothing was that hard, but there were times it was busy and it was good to have two sets of hands. I have to say, I’m pretty proud of how this came out. Aside from not letting the ganache firm up enough so that the glaze melted it a little, the cake looks beautiful, and it tasted delicious as well. Maybe a tad on the sweet side, but what kind of a complaint is that?! I was particularly glad of how much the lavender flavor came out. I thought it might be too subtle, but instead it asserted its presence just enough. Thanks Ivonne, Lis, Fran, and Shea, for a fun and whimsical challenge! Be sure to check out all the other Opera Cakes with the DB blogroll!

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And the finish line…wait where did the crowd go…oh I am a bit late.  First, Second, and Last Place have all finished, cleaned, and gone home for a long winter’s nap, but here we are at last.

The Daring Bakers challenge for April, hosted by Elle from Feeding My Enthusiasms (who recently brought us Chocolate Bakewell Tarts) and Deborah from Taste and Tell, was right up my alley, if I were at the receiving end.  It was Chocolate Covered Cheesecake pops.   I love cheesecake, typically I like it with some sort of fruit inside or a nice fruit topping.  I have to admit I never made a cheesecake, so when I had only two hours before church I decided I would take it slow.  I enjoyed a nice cup of coffee and a muffin while strolling the isles of the grocery store finding the ingredients for my grandmother’s spaghetti sauce, which I will share later, and this great challenge.

Once home from church about 2:30 I quickly started adding the time and knew it was going to be tight, but now real ways to rush it.  The ingredients gathered above I thought made a great picture and a great start for the baking.  I only wish it wasn’t the best part, well at least one of the highlights.

The cheesecake itself went together fairly seamlessly.  Getting the cheese to soften up was the only tricky part, as I ignored the part about having it a room temperature.  After baking almost twice as long as the recipe stated we were finally ready for the two stage cooling.  Once to get it to room temperature.  Secondly to get it nice and set for cutting.

I decided I didn’t want to make pops but rather used cookie cutters.  This was a fairly messy and frustrating choice at first but I quickly got the hang of it.  Soon I had about 4 large plates full of triangles, squares, balls, and one mini cheesecake sliced to perfection.

Off to the freezer, and I was off to bed…well I thought I was.  With some encouraging words from my loving wife I was back in the kitchen melting chocolates in the double boiler.  Out of the freezer and into chocolate easy enough.  Soon I realized  lots of chocolate was getting wasted and pooling at the bottom of each piece.  A call up to my wife who successfully had done this a few weeks earlier for a bit of support.  Together we played with the temperature and it all went downhill from there.   My wife reminded me that the many times she had done chocolate this never happened.  The second batch, milk chocolate this time, went even worse.  This went crystalline very quickly.  I wonder if this was the fact that I washed and not thoroughly dried the double boiler between rounds.  About the only successful in that batch was the mini slice that you can see below.

I did ultimately enjoy doing this recipe.  I also enforced for myself that I am not a great baker without the support of one of the strong women in my life either calling the shots or right there helping me along.  But if you find a good recipe or even just the need for anything to be simmered, sliced, chopped, grilled, flipped, or fried I am right there ready to charge ahead.

Oh yeah I almost forgot they do taste wonderfully.  My wife likes the smaller ones with more chocolate and I adore the larger ones with more cheesecake.  I do find that I eat around the outside and save that last glorious bite from the center for the very end.  Enjoy!  And while you’re at it, check out some of the other Daring Bakers’ lovely creations on the blogroll.  If you want to try these yourself, you can find the recipe (which was adapted from Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey) on Deborah’s post.

Today is the big day, the day of unveiling the results of April’s challenge.  Due to lack of preparation, follow through, and distraction I made no progress yesterday on the challenge.  I am proud to say I have begun the turnaround and now have the ingredients necessary for success.  For you, our faithful readers and new found enthusiasts, I will have an adequate post up in due time.  Thanks for the support.

This month’s Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Morven at Food Art and Random Thoughts. It was another wonderful Dorie Greenspan recipe — I’m seeing a lot of these lately. Baking from My Home to Yours is definitely on my wish list. I served Dorie’s “Perfect Party Cake” for our Easter lunch with my parents. This is a lemon flavored cake topped with a lemon meringue buttercream (also called Swiss buttercream) frosting and raspberry jam filling. I followed the recipe pretty much as directed, though it was supposed to be topped with coconut and I left that out. I don’t know, maybe it would be good, but coconut just doesn’t really go with lemon and raspberries to me. So I garnished it with lemon slices instead. If I’d had a tad yellow food coloring I probably would’ve added it to the frosting, too.

Anyway the cake was delicious, especially the frosting. It didn’t really rise that much, but it was plenty tall enough anyway. Someone apparently leaked to Dorie that we were making her cake, and so she got a message to us that some people had told her they’d had problems with the cake not rising, and she thought it might have to do with the flour. She thus recommended substituting 1 C minus 2 T all purpose flour for the cake flour, which I did. So I don’t know, it still didn’t rise much, but I thought it had a very nice texture anyway. It was really moist and pretty light.

The buttercream is rich, but I thought it nicely balanced the cake. (Mom thought it was a bit too heavy and that I should’ve been a bit lighter on the butter, and of course mother always knows best…) To make a Swiss buttercream frosting, you first cook the meringue (egg whites and sugar) over a pot of simmering water, and then beat it until very stiff before beating in the butter, and then, in this case, lemon juice. I will definitely be trying this again!

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