Daring Bakers: Doughnuts

I was thrilled when I saw this month’s Daring Bakers challenge. Lori of Butter Me Up asked us to make doughnuts. I’ve been wanting to make doughnuts for a long time but I’ve been a little bit scared of deep frying. This challenge gave me the push I needed.

Since I hadn’t deep fried before, I decided to make a test batch a few weeks ago. I used this recipe from Smitten Kitchen for apple cider doughnuts, which I had bookmarked from last year. Generally I prefer a yeast doughnut to a cake doughnut but these were really delicious. I coated the doughnuts in cinnamon sugar. The nice thing about these doughnuts is that they kept well. I had intended to give them to my brother but when he couldn’t make it to a family dinner we were having, I pawned them off on my cousin Emily. (Thanks, Em!) We had a few at our house and they were still pretty good a couple days after being made. I’m glad I tested the technique though, because I got to practice keeping the oil temperature more consistent on my stove. If you’re new to deep frying you should know that if the temperature drops below the range specified in your recipe, the food you are frying absorbs more of the oil, which makes it greasy. Sometimes I needed to wait a few minutes between batches to let the temperature come back to the optimal range.

Last weekend I made another batch of doughnuts. Jeff requested boston creme. I used the yeast doughnut recipe Lori gave us for the challenge, which is originally from Alton Brown. This seemed to be the unanimous favorite of the other Daring Bakers. I did think this recipe made a light, airy yeast doughnut. I made some traditional doughnuts, which I rolled in the rest of my cinnamon sugar mixture. I also filled some of the doughnuts with a pastry cream and dipped the tops in a chocolate glaze. I used the pastry cream recipe from our Piece Montee challenge. After making a batch of glaze that became too stiff, I improvised one with equal parts cream and semisweet chocolate with a couple tablespoons of corn syrup. I wasn’t thrilled with the way it turned out and would recommend trying this one from Alton Brown, which would probably be sweeter and have a better texture for coating.

This challenge was a lot of fun and left a lot of room for creativity. I will definitely try my hand at doughnuts again. The pumpkin doughnut recipe Lori gave us is haunting me…

The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge DBers to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann and Epicurious.

Daring Bakers: Decorated Sugar Cookies

I swear some Daring Baker must have heard me talk about my lackluster decorating skills last month. Just a few days after the petit fours post, I logged into the Daring Bakers site to see if our new challenge had been posted. It turned out our September challenge was going to be all about honing our decorating skills. Mandy of “What the Fruitcake?!” challenged us to make a simple sugar cookie recipe… the trick was we had to jazz it up using royal icing and various piping techniques. She posted a fantastic photo guide that made even a piping-bag-adverse baker like me feel like I could tackle this challenge.

Mandy let us choose any theme for our cookies; she asked that we consider what September means to us. The month of September has a lot of significance to me – back to school, my wedding anniversary, and an astounding number of birthdays. When I realized that the posting date was the day of my sister-in-law’s birthday, I decided that I had to do a birthday theme so I could gift some of the cookies to her.

Piping with royal icing is definitely a time-intensive, labor-intensive task, but I actually loved it. I had fun experimenting with the different techniques and noticed a lot of improvement from my first cookie to my last. I can see myself working with this technique in the future, particularly around the holidays. If you are new to this type of decorating and want a good photo guide, check out Mandy’s site. And most importantly, happy birthday, Kristin!

The September 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mandy of “What the Fruitcake?!” Mandy challenged everyone to make Decorated Sugar Cookies based on recipes from Peggy Porschen and The Joy of Baking.

Daring Bakers: Ice Cream Petit Fours

This month’s Daring Bakers challenge was a pretty unusual one. The Daring Bakers partnered with another group of bloggers who participate in monthly baking events through Sugar High Fridays. I’d never heard of Sugar High Fridays, but the concept is somewhat similar to the Daring Bakers. Each month the members participate in a baking challenge, but rather than being given a specific recipe to cook from, they are given a theme or ingredient. They can then choose any recipe that works with the theme/ingredient. This month Sugar High Fridays was using browned butter as its theme so the Daring Bakers did as well. We were asked to make a browned butter pound cake, which we could then combine with an ice cream recipe of our choice to make either Baked Alaska or Ice Cream Petit Fours.

I chose to make the petit fours for a few reasons. First of all, I liked the fact that they would be individual servings rather than one big dessert. If I don’t have anything special to cook for in a given month, I end up trying to pawn off my creations on others. It’s much easier to do so when the dessert is already in small portions. Meringue is not my favorite dessert element, but chocolate glaze? Yes, please. And finally, aren’t petit fours just cute? I don’t have much of a decorating touch (unlike my friend Kim, who is amazing with a pastry bag!) but I figured I could handle a small canvas like petit fours.

I’d never heard of ice cream petit fours but they ended up being composed quite similarly to the traditional version. We had to make a batch of ice cream, a browned butter pound cake, and a chocolate glaze. The pound cake is baked in a 9×9 square pan and then sliced horizontally into two layers. Ice cream is sandwiched between the layers and then the cake is cut into smaller squares. Finally, each square is dipped in a rich chocolate glaze.  I made all the elements and the final product for this challenge in about 24 hours. Lots of freezing/waiting time was involved, but there wasn’t a ton of hands-on work.

We were given a recipe for vanilla ice cream but I chose to use one of my favorite coffee ice cream recipe from David Lebovitz. I’ve adapted the recipe to make a Mocha Almond Fudge flavor. By swirling a thin stream of a melted dark chocolate bar (preferably with chopped almonds or hazelnuts already in it) into the ice cream at the last minute of churning, you get a nice distribution of nutty chocolate in each bite of ice cream. I love this technique because it means you don’t bite into a hard chunk of chocolate or nut, but you get the flavor from each of those elements. I thought this ice cream flavor would pair well with the nuttiness of the browned butter in the pound cake.

The sliver of pound cake I tried when slicing the layers was delicious- very moist and full of the rich flavor of the browned butter. Though I loved the look and taste of the petit fours, I did think that in the final product the flavor of the browned butter became lost in the richness of the chocolate and ice cream. Some of that may have been due to the fact that I chose such an aggressive flavor of ice cream. If you want to see the creative products the other Daring Bakers put out, check out the blogroll. Thanks to Elissa for hosting such a unique challenge!

The August 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Elissa of 17 and Baking. For the first time, The Daring Bakers partnered with Sugar High Fridays for a co-event and Elissa was the gracious hostess of both. Using the theme of beurre noisette, or browned butter, Elissa chose to challenge Daring Bakers to make a pound cake to be used in either a Baked Alaska or in Ice Cream Petit Fours. The sources for Elissa’s challenge were Gourmet magazine and David Lebovitz’s “The Perfect Scoop”.

Daring Bakers: Piece Montee

Hi everyone! It’s the 27th of the month, which means it’s time for a Daring Bakers post. You may have thought I’d forgotten about the Daring Bakers, given the fact that I skipped out on the March AND April challenges. I hate to be critical of the Daring Bakers because I love being a part of the group and am constantly inspired by the incredible bakers that are a part of it. So let’s just say that March and April’s challenges were not my cup of tea. But I was so excited to try my hand at May’s challenge, which was right up my alley.

The May 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Cat of Little Miss Cupcake. Cat challenged everyone to make a piece montée, or croquembouche, based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri.

A croquembouche (I like that name better than piece montee) is basically a little tower of cream puffs. It is traditionally served as a wedding cake in France. As it turns out, my office was throwing a bridal shower for our colleague at the beginning of the month. It had an around-the-world theme because the bride-to-be and her fiance love to travel. The day this challenge was posted I got an e-mail asking if I could make a dessert for the shower. It was seriously like the stars were aligning, telling me to get off my butt and do a DB challenge early for once. So rather than scrambling around at the last minute to bake the challenge and post it, I baked and served the croquembouche before the first week of May was over. Ahhh. It’s been nice to finish early for once.

Daring Bakers: Tiramisu

I can’t believe November was my last Daring Bakers post. In December the DBs made gingerbread houses, which I made in Phoenix with Jeff’s cousins but didn’t get a chance to post. January slipped away from me, but the Nanaimo Bars everyone made looked delicious. I still want to try my hand at making graham crackers, which was part of that challenge. But as soon as this month’s challenge was revealed, I knew I would not be missing out on this one. Tiramisu is one of my favorite desserts and though I’ve made it many times, I’ve never made all the components myself. I was especially excited to try making mascarpone.

This recipe has a lot of components, but each component is fairly simple. My double boiler did get quite a workout and some of these components require my least favorite type of baking: standing at the stove and stirring. But each of the stovetop recipes only took about 15 minutes, so the time commitment wasn’t outrageous. Like many other Daring Bakers, I had trouble getting the cream for my mascarpone up to 190F. After what seemed like a reasonable amount of time (~30 minutes? I was running back and forth from the kitchen to the living room to watch ice skating) I ended up just adding the lemon juice when the cream was at about 145F and after only a couple more minutes it thickened up, so apparently, no harm was done. The overnight in the fridge really did turn it into cheese and I was quite impressed with the simplicity of the process. Mascarpone can be so expensive; cream is somewhat cheaper, so I can certainly see myself making my own when I need a large amount.

Tastewise, I’d have to say that this tiramisu was good, but not the best I’ve ever had. I think I’d use the recipe again, but might prefer a mixture of equal parts mascarpone and whipped cream to the mascarpone/zabaglione/pastry cream/whipped cream mixture. I’d also add a little kahlua to the filling mixture as the coffee flavor wasn’t very pronounced. Luckily that fit the tastes of the birthday girl whom I made it for. (Happy actual birthday, Anne!) This was a really fun challenge though; thanks to Aparna & Deeba for hosting!

The February 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen and Deeba of Passionate About Baking. They chose Tiramisu as the challenge for the month. Their challenge recipe is based on recipes from The Washington Post, Cordon Bleu at Home and Baking Obsession.

Daring Bakers: Cannoli

I decided to bake this month’s challenge while I was with my family in the mountains for Thanksgiving. As a kid, I hated cannoli but my dad and sister loved them. Both their birthdays are in November, so it was the perfect month for this challenge.

I searched a few places for cannoli molds to no avail, so I decided to try the recommended substitute: cannelloni pasta pieces. These, too, were surprisingly difficult to find. I could only find pasta with ridges. My first batch was a royal failure; though I had oiled the pasta, the cannoli shells stuck to them and would not come off without breaking. I also had a hard time with the dough, which I found quite stiff and difficult to roll. I had to let it rest several times while rolling it out.

My dad took pity on me. He bought a dowel, sawed it into lengths, and sanded it. (Thanks, Dad!) I tried again a few days later. This time I mixed the dough with a hand mixer (no stand mixer or food processor in that kitchen) and let it rest in the fridge overnight, as opposed to ~4 hours on my first try. It was much easier to roll and I had no problems getting it quite thin. When I fried the cannoli, however, I still didn’t get many of the characteristic bubbles.

The good news is that despite some struggles, I have a new appreciation for cannoli. I know that the ricotta was the part I disliked in the past. So I made a filling by whipping equal parts mascarpone & whipping cream with a few tablespoons of sugar and a splash of vanilla. It was great – a thicker, more substantial version of whipped cream. Don’t forget to check out what other Daring Bakers did via the blogroll.

The November 2009 Daring Bakers Challenge was chosen and hosted by Lisa Michele of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives. She chose the Italian Pastry, Cannolo (Cannoli is plural), using the cookbooks Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and The Sopranos Family Cookbook by Allen Rucker; recipes by Michelle Scicolone, as ingredient/direction guides. She added her own modifications/changes, so the recipe is not 100% verbatim from either book.

Keep reading for the recipe…

Daring Bakers: Macarons

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

Wow – what a deceptively difficult challenge! For a short & sweet recipe, with a mere 4 ingredients, it sure was a doozy. The discussion board was ablaze with chatter about the finer points of baking macarons. Should the egg whites be aged? Double up on baking trays? How best to dry the macarons? And most importantly – just HOW does one achieve the elusive feet?

I guess I should back up. I’ve never eaten a macaron, but I have certainly seen my fair share of them in pastry shops and on other folks’ food blogs. I always assumed I wouldn’t like them because I had the impression they tasted like meringue, which isn’t my cup of tea. But due to their growing popularity, I’d all but decided to give them a try when, bam, this challenge arrived. I knew these little buggers were reputed to be tricky, so I readied myself for a fight. Though I love the really complex Daring Bakers challenges, I also find some of the most valuable ones to be those that require us to hone in on and perfect a particular technique.

The main challenge here was getting the consistency of the macarons just right. They should have crisp outer shells but remain chewy on the inside. Most importantly, they should develop feet – a distinctive puff around the bottom of the shell. I baked 3 trays of macarons and only got about 1/10 of them to turn out as they should. For some reason there were two rows (on two different trays) that developed feet and a shiny, crack-free shell. The rest of them… not so much. Since they were all from the same batch of batter, my theory is as follows: the ones closest to the heat source did the best. Perhaps my oven temperature needs adjusting. Or maybe I shouldn’t have chosen chocolate macarons for my first go-round. If they’d been a lighter color I probably could have gauged doneness better. Also, they seemed to benefit from sitting out on the counter a bit after they’d been piped. I couldn’t fit all three trays in the oven at once, so I baked one, then the other two. The second two trays were the ones that had the” good” macarons. Interesting…

Luckily, the failures are just as delicious as the successes. We shared some with friends last night and have been munching away on them since then. I couldn’t resist making them a little Halloween-themed. I sifted 2 tbsp. cocoa powder in with the almond flour and confectioner’s sugar. A little orange food coloring in the vanilla icing and tada! Halloween macarons.

Daring Bakers: Vols-au-Vent

It’s that time again! The September 2009 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Steph of A Whisk and a Spoon. She chose the French treat, Vols-au-Vent based on the Puff Pastry recipe by Michel Richard from the cookbook Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan. There were many, many creative and interesting twists on this recipe out there in Daring Bakersville this month. Check out the blogroll to see some of what was made.

This was such a fun challenge. From what I’ve read in the Daring Bakers forums, many people were as surprised as I was to find out that puff pastry is actually quite easy and not that time-consuming. The process really only takes 10 minutes start to finish, but because there is resting and chilling involved, you have to commit a few hours to being around the house. Luckily, time stuck in the house is easy to come by when you are a full-time student with readings coming out of your ears, half-written papers lying around, and midterms to study for. Student or not,  I will only be buying puff pastry in a pinch from here on out. Making it yourself is much cheaper and you get the added bonus of knowing how your food was made and what was put into it.

I kept it simple with this challenge and went with a very traditional mushroom filling for my vols-au-vent. I can’t think of a better combination and have been drooling all month just thinking about it. My recipe for this filling, made up on the fly, is the last item in the recipe list found below.

The recipe for the puff pastry made what I would imagine is akin to 3 sheets of the storebought stuff. We only needed 1/3 of it for the vols-au-vent. Consequently, I was left with 2 more recipes worth of puff pastry. I’ll post about what I did with the rest of it in the near future, so come on back!