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!
