August Daring Bakers Challenge — Brown Butter Pound Cake (Baked Alaska???)

Seriously?

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”.

When I heard last months’ challenge was going to be based on a pound cake, I figured I had this one in the bag.  When I heard I needed to make another ice cream, I thought, “How hard could this be?”. When I heard they wanted us to make baked Alaska out of it, I figured, “No problemo”.

August’s challenge was a lesson in humility.

For starters, having made two of David Leibovitz’s brilliant ice creams in July, it took about two seconds to figure out where our next ice cream recipe was going to come from.  We chose his salted caramel ice cream from his website.  What I didn’t bank on, was that the salted caramel that went INTO the ice cream would take several tries to get right, and then, having actually MADE the ice cream, it would contribute to the failure of the dessert as a whole.

Caramelizing the sugar for the accent took three tries, because we kept burning it.  And the caramel for the ice cream base seized when we added the cream to it, which means it wound up taking THREE hours to make instead of one. At the end, though, it tasted FANTASTIC, and Small Magpie and I were really excited to taste the finished result.

We decided to mix things up a bit, by freezing the ice cream layer in the same sized cake tin we planned to use for the cake, so that they would stack without us having to cut the cake down any. Perhaps that was our first mistake, as I guess it’s possible the ice cream didn’t have enough volume to truly freeze firmly.

At any rate, we baked the cake with no obvious problems, and let it cool thoroughly.  When cool, we set the ice cream on top of it, and plunked it back into the freezer to get nice and hard and ready for meringue.  Or so we thought…

After making the meringue, I pulled the ice cream base out of the freezer to find that instead of freezing, it had spent the last hour MELTING.  The ice cream was really more of a pudding at that point than anything else, and the cake base was soggy.

So instead of covering it with yummy meringue and playing with the brulee torch, we salvaged what we could of it (which was yummy, by the way), and called it a day.

This is what I get for thinking this would be a relative “walk in the park”.  Lesson learned.

Speaking of which, what did we learn?

1. Salt in ice cream will make the ice cream melt.  (So eat it FAST after you make it!)
2. Caramel burns in about two seconds, while you are busy testing to see if it is to the “hard crack” stage (it was, but by then it was too late).
3. Neither of us really wants any ice cream challenges for awhile.  We are still licking our wounds.
4. There’s nothing like an epic failure to make one humble.
5. I am really looking forward to Small Magpie being around for these challenges during the school year so I don’t have to do them on my own.

Oh well, on to next month!

Daring Bakers July Challenge – Swiss Swirl Ice Cream Cake

Ta Da!

Well, it’s all done, except for the eating!

The Challenge:

The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food. Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home. Sunita has apparently been doing these challenges for three years now. Hopefully, we manage to achieve the same!

Chocolate ice cream added, back to the freezer it goes!

Our  Challenge:

When Small Magpie and I signed up to do the Daring  Bakers challenge, I apparently forgot she was going to be away at her dad’s house until July 24th.  Big mistake.  In the end, the work on this project got broken down into her choosing the flavors, and me running all sorts of “test runs” while she was away.

Here’s Small Magpie’s flavour vision (vision?):

The rolls, waiting for their starring role.

She wanted a vanilla Swiss roll, filled with raspberry jam, whipped cream and chocolate shavings.

She wanted coconut and chocolate ice creams, and fresh raspberry sauce. Needless to say, we had to go a few different places for our recipes.

Lucky us...looks like there's going to be leftover whipped cream!

It all started with the Swiss rolls.  We searched Tastespotting, picked our Swiss roll recipe from here, although we added about 1/2 tsp. of vanilla to give it a proper vanilla flavour.  In the end, we agreed that it tasted more like fortune cookies than anything else, which we also agreed was a good thing. Thankfully, I had just made some homemade raspberry jam, so we were good to go to fill and roll. We filled them with a smear of raspberry jam, lightly sweetened whipped cream, and chocolate shavings.

We made a simple raspberry sauce from here, using raspberries that we had picked up at Krause Bros. and frozen.

Infusing the cream with the toasted coconut. It smelled AMAZING!

Then it came time to do the ice cream.  I had tried several different coconut ice creams while small magpie was away, and none of them were quite right.  Then we stumbled onto a post about David Leibovitz’s toasted coconut ice cream, and wouldn’t you know, it was simply HEAVEN!  (That said, the recipe recommends keeping the vanilla bean for other purposes, and throwing out the toasted coconut, which we simply don’t understand.  The coconut will appear in cookies at some point, but the vanilla bean was cooked in milk, so it didn’t seem safe to prolong its life unnecessarily).

Can we get enough milk chocolate in here to make it taste good?

With the coconut ice cream such a smashing success, we again turned to David’s “Perfect Scoop” book for the chocolate ice cream recipe.  Unfortunately, neither of us is much of a chocolate ice cream fan, so we cut the semisweet chocolate (we used dark chocolate) in half, and added that much milk chocolate instead.  And in the end, we added a bunch of chopped up milk chocolate as well, as the flavour of the dark chocolate was just too bitter for us. I suspect the real culprit might have been the cocoa, and not the dark chocolate, but you live and learn.

Small Magpie mixing the Swiss roll batter.

Raspberries...check!

Hmm...perhaps the raspberry sauce makes it look like a "Twilight" cake...

What did we learn?

1. How to make a Swiss roll taste like fortune cookie.
2. Egg whites are tasteless. Might as well scramble cardboard.
3. The texture of custard-based ice creams is really superior.
4. David Leibovitz might just be an ice cream genius.
5. Neither one of us really likes chocolate ice cream.

Was this fun?

Yes, although I have to say I am looking forward to actually doing the challenge TOGETHER in August (including any test runs)!

And…?

Well, it was delicious when we cut into it tonight!  The uber-tart raspberry sauce was excellent with either the toasted coconut OR the chocolate ice cream.  Actually, the most disappointing part was the Swiss roll itself (there was no flavour of fortune cookies once it was frozen, unfortunately).  It was gobbled down without much ado, and with many chocolate moustaches amongst the little people in our family.

~ Two Magpies

A birthday to remember!

So the little guy wanted a “carnival” for his birthday party this year.  So I made the lollipop cookies from here; candy apples from here; and in the end, he wanted martian cupcakes from here.