August 2010 Daring Baker's Challenge: Baked Alaska

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”.

This challenge has been quite tiring for me because I don't own an ice cream maker, which means that I had to take the ice cream out of the freezer every half an hour and stir it vigorously with a spatula. And it took me 3 hours to complete the vanilla ice cream!

I did the ice cream on monday and, on tuesday, I put it in the tea cups and baked the brown butter pound cake. Later on, before dinner, I assembled the pound cake + ice cream and left it in the freezer until wednesday, when I made the meringue and baked the completely assembled Baked Alaska. That makes 3 days to complete the challenge!

The easiest part was to make the meringue (of course! XD), but I had never made a meringue cover before and wasn't really fond of using the piping bag, so instead of that I chose to put the meringue on top of the ice cream and then try to make some spikes with the help of the spatula.

It's not that bad to be the first time, isn't it?

The recipes:

Ingredients for the vanilla ice cream:

250 ml whole milk
A pinch of salt
500 ml heavy cream
165g sugar
3 tsp vanilla extract
5 large egg yolks

Method for the vanilla ice cream:

1. Heat the milk, salt, and sugar in a medium saucepan until the liquid steams, then let cool to room temperature.
2. Set up an ice bath by placing a 2 litre bowl inside a large bowl partially filled with water and ice. Put a strainer on top of the smaller bowl and pour in the cream.
3. In another bowl, lightly beat the egg yolks together.
4. Reheat the milk in the medium saucepan until warmed, and then gradually pour 1/4 cup warmed milk into the yolks, constantly whisking to keep the eggs from scrambling.
5. Once the yolks are warmed, scrape the yolk and milk mixture back into the saucepan of warmed milk and cook over low heat. Stir constantly and scrape the bottom with a spatula until the mixture thickens into a custard which thinly coats the back of the spatula.
6. Strain the custard into the heavy cream and stir the mixture until cooled. Add the vanilla extract and refrigerate until thoroughly chilled, preferably overnight.
7. Put a deep baking dish, or bowl made of plastic, stainless steel or something durable in the freezer, and pour your custard mixture into it.
8. After 45 minutes, open the door and check it. As it starts to freeze near the edges, remove it from the freezer and stir it vigorously with a spatula or whisk to break up any frozen sections. Return to freezer.
9. Continue to check the mixture every 30 minutes, stirring vigorously as it's freezing. Keep checking periodically and stirring while it freezes until the ice cream is frozen. It will likely take 2-3 hours to be ready.

Ingredients for the Brown Butter Pound Cake (I made half of the recipe, thus I'm posting the ammounts I used):

125g unsalted butter
100g sifted cake flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
55g packed light brown sugar
35g granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Method for the Brown Butter Pound Cake:

1. Preheat the oven to 160°C and put a rack in the center. Butter and flour a 23cm x 23cm square pan.
2. Place the butter in a skillet over medium heat. Brown the butter until the milk solids are a dark chocolate brown and the butter smells nutty. Pour into a shallow bowl and chill in the freezer until just congealed, 15-30 minutes.
3. In another bowl, whisk together cake flour, baking powder, and salt.
4. Beat the brown butter, light brown sugar, and granulated sugar with an electric mixer until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Beat in the eggs one at a time, mixing well, and then the vanilla extract.
5. Stir in the flour mixture at low speed until just combined.
6. Scrape the batter into the greased and floured pan. Smooth the top with a rubber spatula and tap the pan on the counter. Bake until golden brown on top and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, about 15 minutes.
7. Cool in the pan 10 minutes. Run a knife along the edge and invert right-side-up onto a cooling rack to cool completely.

Ingredients for the Meringue:

2 large egg white
110g granulated sugar
1/4 tsp cream tartar
1/4 tsp salt

Method for the Meringue:

1. Beat the egg whites, cream of tartar, and salt on high speed in an electric mixer until soft peaks form.
2. Beat in the sugar gradually in a slow stream until stiff peaks form.

Assembling instructions:

1. Line 2 10cm diameter tea cups with plastic wrap, so that plastic wrap covers all the sides and hangs over the edge. Fill to the top with ice cream. Cover the top with the overhanging plastic wrap and freeze for several hours, or until solid. 

2. Line 2 10cm diameter tea cups with plastic wrap, so that plastic wrap covers all the sides and hangs over the edge. Fill to the top with ice cream. Cover the top with the overhanging plastic wrap and freeze for several hours, or until solid. 
3. Level the top of the brown butter pound cake with a serrated knife or with a cake leveler. Cut out 2 10cm diameter circles from the cake. Discard the scraps or use for another purpose.
4. Unwrap the ice cream "cups" and invert on top of a cake round. Trim any extra cake if necessary.

5. Smooth the meringue over the ice cream and cake with a spatula, so that none of the ice cream or cake is exposed. Freeze for one hour or up to a day.
6. Bake the meringue-topped Baked Alaskas on a rimmed baking sheet in a 260°C pre-heated oven for 5 minutes until lightly golden. Serve immediately.

The Baked Alaska is really a stressing cake when it comes the part of "baking" the ice cream, but its worth the worries because it tastes wonderful! ^^

Back from blogging holidays: chocolate crackle cookies

I know I didn't say that I was going on holidays, but it's because I didn't plan it.
Well, I did plan the holidays from work, but I didn't plan the blogging holidays. That's because I felt soooooo lazy that I didn't want to bake anything, therefore I had nothing to show. It felt good being on holidays and it feels horrible going back to work, but I suppose I'm left with no other alternative T_T

So, lets focus on the cookies: this isn't the first time that I bake this cookies, but it's the first time that I bake them not following the original recipe step by step.
A friend of mine gave me this recipe a year ago and I tried it inmediatly, but the cookies were too sweet for me and thus I decided that I was going to make them again but with some modifications. But I eventually forgot about doing that. Till now. Yesterday, while browsing through some old papers, I found the recipe and decided to try it again. Fortunately I wrote down last time the modifications that I wanted to do next time! Basicaly, I've cut down by half the amount of sugar and double the amount of vanila extract and baking powder (last time I thought the were a bit "hard" -_-U).
I prefer them now, they are not as dry as last time and you can taste better the chocolate flavour.

So, here's the recipe:

Ingredients:        

60g of butter
1 box of Nestle's chocolate fondue or 250g of cooking chocolate
50g of white granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsp of vanilla
210g of flour
1 tsp of baking powder
1 pinch of salt
(Optional)confectioners' sugar for dusting

Method:

1. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler or in the microwave.
2. Add the butter and let it cool sighly.
3. In a bowl, whisk together the granulated sugar and the eggs until it doubles it's size.
4. Add the chocolate and the vanila extract to the egg mixture and whisk until well combined.
5. Measure the flour into a small bowl, and stir in the baking powder and salt, blending well.
6. With a wooden spoon, stir the flour mixture into the egg mixture.
7. Wrap the bowl with plastic wrap and let it cool in the fridge for 1 hour.
8. Preheat the oven to 180ºC.
9. Take the bowl out of the fridge and, with your hands, take a small amount of dough, roll it into a ball shape and put it in a baking sheet. Here you can roll the balls in confectioners' sugar to give them a white coating. I ommited this step because I think that the cookies taste too sweet if I do it.
10. Bake in the pre-heated oven at 180ºC for about 10 minutes.
11. Transfer from oven to a wire rack and let them cool completely before storing in an airtight container.

Chocolate custard tart

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!!!

Yup, today's my birthday (¡viva!) and following other bloggers' tradition of posting a cake I decided to post the tart I made a month ago ^^U I like to spend my birthday doing nothing so, instead of making myself a bithday cake, I went out to a restaurant with my parents and my boyfriend (poor him! XD).

I made the cake just because I wanted to try the recipe I saw at dailydelicious and well, it's obvious that my tart shell its kinda messy, but the chocolate custard was even worse. It's not that it tasted wrong (it didn't, the tart was delicious), it's only that I should had cooked a bit longer the custard in order to allow it to be thicker because it was too liquid. Anyways it still tasted superb with the strawberries ^^

Ham and cheese ring bread

I made this bread for Friday's dinner, for my parents and me. Even though you may think that it's too much for only 3 people, the truth is that we ate it all. Yes, not a single bit was left as we were VERY hungry (indeed, I was whishing that my mother couldn't eat all of her share, but I wasn't lucky T_T). I used a very thinly sliced ham and, instead of using grated cheddar cheese for the inside and grated gruyère cheese for the outside of the bread, I used Hochland's cheese slices for the filling and the grated emmental that I use for pasta for the topping.

The bread was really delicious, with all that creamy cheese going into my mouth in every bite (yes, I love cheese so I used a lot of slices for the filling ^^). The making of it was not as tiring as of the chorizo rolls, so I'll be going for this one more often than the other (you're allowed to call me lazyass ^^U).

I got the recipe and the kneading intructions from dailydelicious.

June 2010 Daring Baker's Challenge: Chocolate Pavlovas with Chocolate Mascarpone Mousse

The June 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Dawn of Doable and Delicious. Dawn challenged the Daring Bakers’ to make Chocolate Pavlovas and Chocolate Mascarpone Mousse. The challenge recipe is based on a recipe from the book Chocolate Epiphany by Francois Payard.

Sorry for posting this challenge a day later, but my usual lazyness prevents me from writing and programming the post ahead of the posting date, thus and because I had an unexpectedly busy sunday, I've ended up doing it in a hurry today. Indeed, everything in this month's challenge has been made in a hurry -_-U

I made the Mascarpone Cream last friday after coming from a visit to my grandma's home and before dinner (in Spain dinner is eaten at around 9 o'clock in the evening), while the chocolate pavlovas were in the oven. So, that means: I came house from work at lunchtime (3 o'clock, and no, that's not very late; lunch is eaten here between 2-3:30 in the afternoon, and don't expect to be served in any restaurant before 1:30 ^^), ate lunch and went to grandma's (4:30 in the afternoon), came back home (around 7:00) and got ready to make the mentioned above before 9:00 to be able to help with dinner. Buffff! So tiring!
Unfortunately, I overbaked the pavlovas and they went to the bin T_T The recipe states that they need 2-3 hours baking, but after 45 minutes they were already wasted! I had to redo the pavlovas the next morning, but this time I baked them for 25 minutes, which proved to be enough for me.
On saturday morning I made the chocolate and mascarpone mousse too, to have everything ready before lunch because I wanted to serve it for dessert.

I made one third of the recipes because I thought that the ammounts were going to be too much for my parents and me, therefore, I'm posting the ammounts I used.

The recipe:

Ingredients for the Crème Anglaise (a component of the Mascarpone Cream):

80 ml whole milk
80 ml heavy cream
25g sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 large egg yolks

Method for the vanilla Crème Anglaise:

1. In a bowl, whisk together the egg yolks and sugar until the mixture turns pale yellow.
2. Combine the milk, cream and vanilla in a saucepan over medium high heat, bringing the mixture to a boil. Take off the heat.
3. Pour about half of the hot liquid into the yolk mixture, whisking constantly to keep from making scrambled eggs.
4. Pour the yolk mixture into the pan with the remaining cream mixture and put the heat back on medium. Stir constantly with a wooden spoon until the mixture thickens enough to lightly coat the back of a wooden spoon. DO NOT OVERCOOK.
5. Remove the mixture from the heat and strain it through a fine mesh sieve into a bowl. Cover and refrigerate until the mixture is thoroughly chilled, about 2 hours or overnight (as the ammount of cream I made was only one thirth of the original I only had it in the fridge for half an hour before using it).

Ingredients for the Mascarpone Cream:

1 recipe crème anglaise
40g mascarpone
40 ml heavy cream

Method for the Mascarpone Cream:

1. Slowly whisk the mascarpone in the crème anglaise and let the mixture cool.
2. Put the heavy cream in a bowl and beat with electric mixer until very soft peaks are formed.
3. Fold the cream into the mascarpone mixture.

Ingredients for the Chocolate Meringue (for the chocolate Pavlova):

1 large egg white
35g white granulated sugar
10g confectioner’s (icing) sugar
10g cocoa powder

Method for the Chocolate Meringue:

1. Place a rack in the center of the oven and preheat to 95ºC. Line two baking sheets with silpat or parchment and set aside.
2. Put the egg white in a bowl and whip until soft peaks form. Increase speed to high and gradually add granulated sugar about 1 tbsp at a time until stiff peaks form (the egg white should be firm but moist).
3. Sift the confectioner’s sugar and cocoa powder over the egg white and fold the dry ingredients into the white (this looks like it will not happen, but keep folding gently and it will eventually come together).
4. Shape the meringues on the parchment paper and level them a bit with the back of a spoon.
5. Bake for 25 minutes or until the meringues become dry and crisp on the outside but still moist inside.

Ingredients for the Chocolate Mascarpone Mousse (for the top of the Pavlova base):

120 ml heavy cream
85g 72% chocolate, chopped (I used Lindt's)
130g mascarpone

Method for the Chocolate Mascarpone Mousse:

1. Put 40 ml of the heavy cream in a saucepan over medium high heat. Once warm, add the chocolate and whisk until melted and smooth. Transfer the mixture to a bowl and let sit at room temperature until cool.
2. Place the mascarpone and the remaining cream in a bowl. Whip on low for a minute until the mascarpone is loose and then whip on medium speed until it holds soft peaks (DO NOT OVERBEAT AS THE MASCARPONE WILL BREAK).
3. Mix about 1/4 of the mascarpone mixture into the chocolate to lighten.
4. Fold in the remaining mascarpone until well incorporated.
5. Fill a pastry bag with the mousse.

Method for assembling:
Pipe the mousse onto the pavlovas and drizzle with the mascarpone cream over the top (or under, or aside, or however you prefer). Dust with confectioner’s sugar and fresh fruit if desired.

Well, after all I can say that it was worth the effort, even though the results were not the best possible because I, as said previously, made them in a hurry.

Japanese Cotton Cheesecake

I made this cake 2 weeks ago, but I've been too busy lately to post anything new T_T I found this recipe in the same blog as the peanut cookies' one, Table for 2...or more, and it caught my attention inmediatly because the cake in the post looked very fluffly ^^ Well, I was looking for something that wasn't too dense, as the summer was getting nearer and I prefered a lighter dessert.
And know what? This cake not only met my expectations, but surpassed them by way too far!!! It isn't fluffly, but SUPER FLUFFLY! Really! I ate a portion shortly after taking it from the oven and I can say that it's the lightest cake that I've ever eaten. It reminded me of cotton candy because of its fluffiness and because it melted in my mouth. So, I'll definitively do it again soon, only that next time I'll restraint myself from eating as soon as it comes from the oven and I'll try to put some fresh fruits and wipped cream on top of it ^^

P.S. The cake looks so white because it is upside-down. Actually, the top is light brown, but I thought that it would look better this way.

Peanut Cookies

Last week I was browsing through Table for 2...or more when I saw this recipe of Chinese New Year's peanut cookies. I decided to make them because the recipe uses vegetable oil (I used olive oil, not corn oil) instead of lard and I had some peanuts (and I love them ^^). Also, we don't celebrate here the Chinese New Year, so I didn't feel like out-of-season while making (and eating) them.

The original recipe yields too much cookies for us, so I made 1/10 of it, which yielded 35 marble ball-sized cookies:

Ingredients:        

100g flour
100g roasted peanuts (deskinned and ground)
100g fine sugar
40ml olive oil
1 egg (beaten)
Peanut halves for decoration

Method:

1. Mix flour, sugar and peanuts until well blended together.
2. Pour in the oil and knead until the oil is well incorporated.
3. Take a small amount of peanut dough onto your palm and roll into a small ball the size of a marble.
4. Place the peanut ball onto a baking tray and place a peanut half onto it. Lightly press the peanut half.
5. Apply the egg wash with a small brush.
6. Bake at 180ºC for 12 minutes or until the egg wash turns golden.