And I’m back! After a brief Daring Bakers hiatus due to wedding- and honeymoon-related activities, I decided I was ready to get going again with the October challenge.

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. You can download the recipe here. We were free to use any cookie flavor and filling combinations we wanted, as long as we made them ourselves.

First, a clarification: macarons are different from macaroons. The latter is a dense coconut cookie, while the former consists of two almond meringue cookies sandwiching a flavored filling. Macarons are becoming increasingly popular in the foodie community (French pastry chef Pierre Hermé is especially known for his wild flavors, like ketchup and wasabi), probably in part because there are infinite variations of flavor and filling combinations.

They’re also pretty advanced baking: the almonds need to be finely ground, the egg whites must not be overbeaten or underbeaten, and the batter must be folded just the right amount. How do you know if you did everything right? It’s all about the feet! The appearance of a little bubbly platform below the rounded dome of the cookie means your macaron is a success.

Piped out macarons prior to baking.

Apparently, the challenge recipe made the feet somewhat difficult to achieve. So, after reading people’s comments, I ended up going with a slight variation on this recipe from Tartelette.

I followed this recipe pretty closely, including making the pumpkin filling (it’s Halloween week, after all!). I even left my egg whites out to “age” at room temperature overnight, which supposedly helps the development of the feet. My only change was to leave out the saffron and added cinnamon and nutmeg to the filling.  The whole process is kind of a pain (fortunately I have my new KitchenAid, which beat up the egg whites in about a minute), what with the egg whites, almond sifting, and piping. I dirtied a lot of dishes, but it was worth it: the macarons had feet!

After baking. Yay, they have feet!

The tops could have been smoother–I had to use a combination of almond meal and sliced almonds chopped in the food processor, and despite a pass through the sifter, there were still some larger chunks left.

Some artistic macaron stacking. See the feet?

I had never had macarons before, so I wasn’t sure how they should taste.  The verdict? They’re pretty sweet alone, but really great with the filling, which is unsweetened. A definite success (and hopefully not beginner’s luck)!

The June Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict and Annemarie of Ambrosia and Nectar. They chose a Traditional (UK) Bakewell Tart… er… pudding that was inspired by a rich baking history dating back to the 1800’s in England.  Check out their blogs for a discussion of the history behind the “tart…er…pudding” and the recipe.

Basically, the tart consists of a sweet pastry crust filled with a layer of jam and topped with frangipane. Frangipane is an almond flavored filling that, when baked, has a consistency somewhere between sponge cake and custard.  For the challenge, we had to make the crust and frangipane ourselves, but making the jam was optional.

Because I didn’t have a lot of time for the challenge this month,  I just used a storebought blueberry lemon ginger jam for the filling.

I chose it because I wanted a tangy filling to balance out the sweetness of the frangipane, but this jam was still a bit too sweet. Next time I think I’d use something like lemon curd, or else make my own jam with little or no sugar.

Everything came together pretty quickly, which was nice because I made the tart at 6pm on a Wednesday night, and I had plans to go out at 9pm

I was pretty happy with how the tart turned out overall–everyone in my lab seemed to enjoy it, and it was gone by the end of lab meeting. In the words of my labmate, Lil, “You baked your bakewell very well. It was a well-baked bakewell.”

The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge.  I’m not sure what makes the cheesecake infamous, but it was a good base recipe for elaboration.  I decided to replicate a really great dessert I’ve had several times at Cafe Rouge: goat cheese cheesecake.

The goat cheese is subtle, but detectable enough to make it interesting. I used a 2:1 ratio of cream cheese to goat cheese, which worked out well, and the red wine poached rhubarb gave a nice acidity to counter the creaminess of the cheesecake.

I do have one admission to make–I knew I wanted to make mini cheesecakes (a huge cheesecake for two people, one of whom is ostensibly on a diet, is not the best idea), and so when I saw the cute mini graham cracker crusts at the store, I couldn’t resist. Hopefully no one will hold that against me (and I’ve included the crust recipe below anyway)

Abbey’s Infamous Cheesecake:

This is the base recipe for the challenge. I cut it in half for my six mini-cheesecakes, using 5 oz of goat cheese and 8 oz of cream cheese for my variation.

crust:
2 cups / 180 g graham cracker crumbs
1 stick / 4 oz butter, melted
2 tbsp. / 24 g sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract

cheesecake:
3 sticks of cream cheese, 8 oz each (total of 24 oz) room temperature
1 cup / 210 g sugar
3 large eggs
1 cup / 8 oz heavy cream
1 tbsp. lemon juice
1 tbsp. vanilla extract (or the innards of a vanilla bean)
1 tbsp liqueur, optional, but choose what will work well with your cheesecake

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (Gas Mark 4 = 180C = Moderate heat). Begin to boil a large pot of water for the water bath.

2. Mix together the crust ingredients and press into your preferred pan. You can press the crust just into the bottom, or up the sides of the pan too – baker’s choice. Set crust aside.

3. Combine cream cheese and sugar in the bowl of a stand-mixer (or in a large bowl if using a hand-mixer) and cream together until smooth. Add eggs, one at a time, fully incorporating each before adding the next. Make sure to scrape down the bowl in between each egg. Add heavy cream, vanilla, lemon juice, and alcohol and blend until smooth and creamy.

4. Pour batter into prepared crust and tap the pan on the counter a few times to bring all air bubbles to the surface. Place pan into a larger pan and pour boiling water into the larger pan until halfway up the side of the cheesecake pan. If cheesecake pan is not airtight, cover bottom securely with foil before adding water.

5. Bake 45 to 55 minutes, until it is almost done – this can be hard to judge, but you’re looking for the cake to hold together, but still have a lot of jiggle to it in the center. You don’t want it to be completely firm at this stage. Close the oven door, turn the heat off, and let rest in the cooling oven for one hour. This lets the cake finish cooking and cool down gently enough so that it won’t crack on the top. After one hour, remove cheesecake from oven and lift carefully out of water bath. Let it finish cooling on the counter, and then cover and put in the fridge to chill. Once fully chilled, it is ready to serve.

Recipe for red wine poached rhubarb (This recipe was good, but next time I would cook the rhubarb less–it ended up pretty mushy. Also, I removed the rhubarb after 10 minutes and reduced the syrup to ~1/2 cup before combining them again and refrigerating.)

This month’s challenge is brought to us by Karen of Bake My Day and Zorra of 1x umruehren bitte aka Kochtopf. They have chosen Tuiles from The Chocolate Book by Angélique Schmeink and Nougatine and Chocolate Tuiles from Michel Roux.

Tuiles are basically really thin cookies that are shaped while warm. They’re traditionally made into sort of a Pringle shape by draping a round cookie over a rolling pin, causing it to resemble a roof tile (hence “tuiles”).  However, they can pretty much be made into any shape you desire. So, inspired by those pirouette cookies, I decided to roll mine and dip them in chocolate.

First, I used a stencil made from cardboard from a cereal box to spread the dough into a thin circle. Some were thinner than others–almost transparent–and I think those turned out the best. The thicker onces got spongy when they dried, but the thin ones got crisp. However, I had to be careful about my cooking time — 6 minutes, no longer, or they were too crisp to roll.

I baked the cookies in batches of 5-6 so I could shape them right as they came out of the oven. The first were a little rough because I had baked them for too long, but the later batches got better and better.

Finally, I dipped the cookies in semisweet Scharffen Berger chocolate.

I was pretty happy with how these turned out overall, since I was able to get them quite thin. But they don’t store well–by the next day, when I brought them into my lab’s weekly meeting to get rid of them (I started Weight Watchers a few weeks ago, and I’ve already lost about 8 lbs!), they were spongy. I do have to admit that we were supposed to serve something “light”, like fruit or a mousse, on the side with the tuiles. I made these at the last minute for my lab meeting, so I didn’t have the ingredients to make any side items. Sorry DBers!

This month’s Daring Bakers Challenge was to make caramel cake, with the optional addition of homemade caramels. I decided to do both — I made the caramels in my apartment here in Berkeley, then brought them home to Atlanta for Thanksgiving. There, I made the caramel cake and frosting. I’m posting a day late because  I didn’t have my camera USB cord with me in Atlanta, and I was traveling back to California all day yesterday. I know you’ve been on the edge of your seat!

Sea salt caramels

Recipe from Alice Medrich’s Pure Dessert.

First stage of making caramels–getting sugar and golden syrup to 305F. I bought my first candy thermometer for this recipe, so now I need to make more use of it

After adding the cream and butter. Look at the sides of the pan and you can see how high it bubbled up at first! The key here is definitely using a very large pot. The recipe said to cook this mixture to 260F, but I only let mine get to about 248F because others had trouble with the caramels getting very hard (i.e. becoming toffee). Mine turned out nice and soft, and I was definitely assured I did the right thing when Barefoot Contessa cooked her caramels to 248F on the episode I watched today!

Caramel poured into pan to set.

After cooling in the fridge overnight, topping with gray sea salt, and cutting into pieces.

Greg helped me wrap all the caramels in squares of unbleached waxed parchment paper.

Finally done wrapping! This recipe probably made about 80 caramels.

Caramel cake with caramelized butter frosting

Recipe from Shuna Fish Lydon, http://blogs.kqed.org/bayareabites/2006 … he-recipe/.

Making the caramel syrup. I used a big pot because when you add the water to stop the caramelization process, it spatters a lot. I actually poured the water through a hole in some aluminum foil to avoid getting hot sugar on myself.

I was worried I had made the caramel a bit dark, even though David Lebovitz says it should be the color of an old penny. It tasted kind of bitter, but in the end,  the cake and frosting both ended up just tasting really caramelly.

Cake before frosting. My mom only had a 10-inch cake pan (not the 9-inch one called for in the recipe), so I didn’t try to make multiple layers.

After frosting and decorating with some caramels.

Yum! I had this for breakfast the next day too

This month’s challenge was hosted by Shuna Fish Lydon (http://eggbeater.typepad.com), along with Dolores (http://culinarycuriosity.blogspot.com/), Alex (Brownie of the Blondie and Brownie duo: http://blondieandbrownie.blogspot.com/), Jenny of Foray into Food (http://forayintofood.blogspot.com/), and with Gluten-free assistance by Natalie of Gluten-a-Go-Go (http://glutenagogo.blogspot.com/).

Check out their blogs for more info about the recipes!

This month’s Daring Bakers challenge was another savory one — homemade pizza, using the dough recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.  This was slightly different from the recipe I normally use, since it calls for leaving the dough in the refrigerator overnight. While that did help split up the work and made for a stronger yeasty flavor (which honestly I wasn’t a huge fan of), I felt like the dough didn’t really rise as much as it should have — though that could also have been my old yeast I split the original recipe, which was supposed to produce 6 9-12” pizzas, in half. Though I was hoping to make two pizzas with it (another part of the challenge) I ended up only being able to make one ~13-14″ pizza with a normal crust.

As part of the challenge, we also had to attempt tossing the dough in the air. I had never tried it before but was excited to go for it.  Here’s my best toss (thanks to my fiancé Greg for the great photo!):

[Yes, that's Anthony Bourdain on my t-shirt]

I was able to toss it a few times, but I ended up doing the final shaping on a cookie sheet. The sauce was homemade too, using this great recipe from Smitten Kitchen:

_______________________________________________________

Moderately Easy Tomato Sauce

4 roma tomatoes
1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, minced
Pinch of red pepper flakes
Splash of white wine
1/2 teaspoon sugar
3/4 teaspoon salt

Bring medium pot of water to a boil. Poach the tomatoes for one minute only, and then drain them. As soon as they are cooled off enough that you can touch them, peel them. The peels should come right off. If they don’t, make a slit in the skins. This always does the trick.

Drain and dry the pot. Put it back on the burner over medium heat. Pour in olive oil and let it heat completely before adding the garlic and stirring it for a minute with a wooden spoon. Add the red pepper flakes and stir it for anther minute. You do not want the garlic to brown. Put the peeled tomatoes in the pot, along with the wine, sugar and salt. Break the tomatoes up with your spoon.

Let the sauce simmer for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes break down. Carefully taste without burning your tongue and adjust seasonings, if necessary.

Makes enough for one small/medium pizza.

(Note: I substituted red wine for the white wine with no problems. SK also has a recipe for a sauce that calls for canned tomatoes, but I haven’t tried it yet).

__________________________________________________________

I topped the pizza with my old favorites: sun-dried tomatoes, feta cheese, onions, and fresh basil.

I think next time I would add the basil at the end of baking to keep it greener.

Although I have a pizza peel and a baking stone, I always get nervous about moving the pizza from one surface to another after topping the unbaked dough. Because I want to leave the stone in the oven, I just assemble and bake the pizza on a cookie sheet for about 5 minutes, then slide it directly onto the baking stone for the last few minutes of baking to help crisp the crust.

For the pizza dough recipe, check out the blog of this month’s host, Rosa.

And stay tuned — for dessert after the pizza, I made pumpkin crème brûlée

This months Daring Bakers challenge was pretty straightforward–make lavash crackers and a vegan dip to accompany them. I made mine a few weeks ago and it went pretty well.  The dough is yeasted and didn’t rise as much as I thought it should have, but I had plenty to roll out. It’s the same kind of dough that you’d use to make pita–the key for crackers is just to roll it very thin and bake it till it’s crispy. I got mine pretty thin with my new rolling pin (first time using it!), but it ended up being a little more pita-like in the middle. I actually liked the gradient of textures though, all the way from soft to very crispy.

I topped my crackers with cumin seeds and coarse sea salt. I should have rolled the cumin seeds into the dough, because most of them fell off when I broke up the crackers.

I served these with the Barefoot Contessa hummus.  They didn’t last long!

Here’s a link to the full recipe (both gluten-free and regular versions) on Shellyfish’s blog: http://shellyfish.wordpress.com/

This month’s Daring Bakers challenge was definitely easier and less time consuming than the cake from last month, and I do love eclairs (even though I don’t remember the last time I had one). My only real concern about making them was that the eclairs are really meant to be served immediately. Since I usually bring my baked goods to lab to show them off/get rid of them so I don’t eat them all, it would mean I’d need to make them the day before and keep them in the fridge overnight (and risk them getting soggy). Since I live on the edge, I decided to go for it anyway

[I actually just happened to have that Eiffel tower from a trip to France in college]

The recipe starts with a pâte à choux, which is a cooked dough used for eclairs, beignets, and profiteroles, and which I’ve never made before. It involves mixing milk and butter on the stove, then adding flour and mixing a lot more as the dough comes together. Then, you take it off the heat and mix in the eggs. The dough is still warm when you pipe it out onto a cookie sheet.

The steam in the dough helps it to rise, so the shells get puffed up and hollow on the inside.  Half of mine puffed up nicely (the front tray in the picture below), but the other half fell when I was rotating the cookie sheets halfway through. I think it was because they started off on top and didn’t cook enough before I moved them.

The next step was to make the pastry cream, which I’ve also never done before. We had the option of making chocolate pastry cream and glaze, or just picking one or the other chocolate element. I decided to do the traditional eclair with vanilla bean cream and chocolate glaze. The pastry cream was also cooked on the stove — basically, you mix some egg yolks, sugar, and cornstarch, then drizzle hot cream into the eggs and keep mixing. It was fun because it comes together really quickly, suddenly changing from a thin and loose to thick and creamy.

Finally came the chocolate glaze. The recipe was pretty complicated, since first you had to make a “chocolate syrup”, and then use some of that for the glaze. I went ahead and used it, but was unhappy with the final product — it was too thin to give a good coat on the eclairs, though it did taste good.

Assembly:

Ready to take to lab (they were gone in a few hours):

I don’t think they suffered from being in the fridge overnight, though the chocolate got some condensation on it.

Check out the full recipe on the blog of this month’s challenge host, MeetaK.

I’m excited for next month — I’m kind of hoping for a savory challenge, but Greg’s hoping for doughnuts

I had some trepidation about doing this month’s DB challenge. Not only did it have EIGHT sub-headings, but it also contained hazelnuts as a key ingredient, to which I’m allergic. But since I skipped the last two challenges, I knew I needed to do it, and I had the perfect occasion — my friend and former roommate Emily’s birthday party. Plus, isn’t the whole point of DB to be daring?

I decided to replace the hazelnuts with almonds, to which I’m not allergic — they’re actually related to peaches. I also did the different parts over the course of several days so as to make the assembly (and the cleanup) easier. Here’s the full original recipe if you want to follow along (it’s too long to post in my main entry).

Phases 1 and 2: Cake and simple syrup

The cake is a “genoise” (which I’ve never made before), meaning it has no chemical leavening, just whipped egg whites to give it a lift. I used almond flour instead of the ground nuts called for by the recipe. I think I did a pretty good job with the folding of the egg whites–the cake didn’t really rise, but it didn’t fall either. It ended up being about 1.5 inches high and quite sturdy, so it came out of the springform pan without incident. After it cooled, I wrapped it in plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator to await phase 2. I also made the sugar syrup ahead of time (I added kirsch and a little rum to it) and stored it in the fridge.

Phase 3: “Praline” buttercream

I had also never made buttercream frosting before — only read horror stories about it. But thankfully, Deb did get it to work eventually, and I partially followed her updated recipe when I was making this frosting. Maybe it was beginner’s luck, but my frosting came together almost immediately. I then took another little shortcut (the almond flour being the first) and used store-bought almond paste rather than making my own praline. It just made the whole process a little less overwhelming. This wasn’t the best decision, however, because while it did give the buttercream a nice flavor, the small chunks made for a piping nightmare (but more on that later). I made the buttercream the day before the party, so I put it in the fridge overnight because I wanted to assemble the cake the next day. It got kinda hard in the fridge, meaning I had to re-whip it a bit before I could spread it on the cake.

Phases 4 and 5: Cake layering and apricot glaze

The remainder of the process took place on the day of the party. I was a bit concerned about cutting the cake into three layers, but since the cake seemed pretty sturdy, I decided to go for it. I used toothpicks to mark off each layers as I was cutting. I first tried using floss, which I had read works well for cutting evenly, but either my floss was too flimsy or the cake was too hard — either way, it didn’t work. So I just used a knife, and it actually was fine. I made three layers and even managed to keep them all in once piece as I spread on the sugar syrup and the buttercream between layers. This is also the last place where I took a shortcut — I didn’t buy enough heavy cream to make the whipped cream that’s supposed to go between the layers (plus it just seemed a bit excessive), so I left it out. I definitely think that was a good decision.
The apricot glaze was pretty straightforward. I think its main purpose is to provide a smooth base for the ganache

Phase 6: Ganache

This was the messiest part of the whole process. The recipe makes way more ganache than is needed, which means I wasted some really good Scharffen Berger semisweet chocolate that ran off as I was pouring. Oh well.

(This is after I cleaned up the mess. Thanks to Andronico’s for the free cardboard cake round and cardboard box!)

Phase 7: Decoration

This was pretty much my first piping experience. It went okay, in that at least you could read the words. However, because of the combination of almond paste chunks and the melting frosting (it was kind of hot that day), there are a few mistakes. Or, as I like to think of it, artistic dots And hey, all the frosting that I managed to get all over my arms — great moisturizer!

(btw, the reason I didn’t write “Emily” is because I ran out of frosting)

Phase 8: Yum!

I was really happy with the taste of the cake (as was everyone else at the party, or so they said). Despite its sturdiness, the cake itself ended up moist from the simple syrup. And the buttercream and ganache were delicious. It was quite almondy, but not overpoweringly so. I definitely didn’t miss the whipped cream, either.

While I wouldn’t necessarily make such a complicated cake anytime soon, I’m really happy I had a chance to try all these new techniques. I just wish I had made two cakes so I could have had more than one piece

I actually made these cheesecake pops, my first Daring Bakers challenge, a few weeks ago, but I wasn’t supposed to post about it until the 27th. So, of course, I’m now actually posting 3 days late because I kept putting off writing the post!

Anyway, the challenge was to make chocolate-dipped cheesecake pops. It was a challenge because you had to first make a cheesecake using a water bath, and then scoop out the bite-sized pops, freeze them, coat them in chocolate (and optional decorations), then freeze them again.

5 sticks of cream cheese later, here’s the cheesecake:

It was delicious and creamy, as I discovered when I was scooping out the pops:

I used king-sized party toothpicks as the sticks, since they didn’t have real lollipop sticks at Andronico’s. Here they are after the chocolate dipping (using Guittard semisweet couverture chocolate, and colored sprinkles on some):

The recipe made about 40 pops, which is a lot when they’re so rich that most people can only eat one. However, after taking them to a party, bringing some to lab, and eating two a day (between the two of us) at home, we finally finished them about a week ago!

I can’t wait for the May challenge!

Full recipe:

Cheesecake Pops
(makes 30 – 40 pops)
(from Sticky, Chewy, Messy, Gooey by Jill O’Connor)

5 8-ounce packages cream cheese, at room temp
2 cups granulated sugar
¼ cup all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon salt
5 large eggs
2 egg yolks
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
¼ cup heavy cream

Boiling water as needed
Thirty to forty 8-inch lollipop sticks

1 pound chocolate, finely chopped
2 tablespoons vegetable shortening

Assorted decorations such as chopped nuts, colored jimmies, crushed peppermints, mini chocolate chips, sanding sugars – Optional

Instructions:
Position oven rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 325 degrees F. Set some water to boil.

In a large bowl, beat together the cream cheese, sugar, flour, and salt until smooth. If using a mixer, mix on low speed. Add the whole eggs and the egg yolks, one at a time, beating well (but still at low speed) after each addition. Beat in the vanilla and cream.

Grease a 10-inch cake pan (not a springform pan), and pour the batter into the cake pan. Place the pan in a larger roasting pan. Fill the roasting pan with the boiling water until it reaches halfway up the sides of the cake pan. Bake until the cheesecake is firm and slightly golden on top, 35 to 45 minutes.

Remove the cheesecake from the water bath and cool to room temperature. Cover the cheesecake with plastic wrap and refrigerate until very cold, at least 3 hours or up to overnight.

When the cheesecake is cold and very firm, scoop the cheesecake into 2-ounce balls and place on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Carefully insert a lollipop stick into each cheesecake ball. Freeze the cheesecake pops, uncovered, until very hard, at least 1 – 2 hours.

When the cheesecake pops are frozen and ready for dipping, prepare the chocolate. In the top of a double boiler, set over simmering water, or in a heatproof bowl set over a pot of simmering water, heat half the chocolate and half the shortening, stirring often, until chocolate is melted and chocolate and shortening are combined. Stir until completely smooth. Do not heat the chocolate too much or your chocolate will lose its shine after it has dried. Save the rest of the chocolate and shortening for later dipping, or use another type of chocolate for variety.

Alternately, you can microwave the same amount of chocolate coating pieces on high at 30 second intervals, stirring until smooth.

Quickly dip a frozen cheesecake pop in the melted chocolate, swirling quickly to coat it completely. Shake off any excess into the melted chocolate. If you like, you can now roll the pops quickly in optional decorations. You can also drizzle them with a contrasting color of melted chocolate (dark chocolate drizzled over milk chocolate or white chocolate over dark chocolate, etc.) Place the pop on a clean parchment paper-lined baking sheet to set. Repeat with remaining pops, melting more chocolate and shortening as needed.

Refrigerate the pops for up to 24 hours, until ready to serve.