Wild Yeast

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.

For the second month in a row, the Daring Bakers were challenged with ice cream and cake, and I am not complaining one bit. (The only drawback is that these things are very tricky to photograph when the weather is hot, as it has been this week. And I’m not altogether facile with my camera. Which means I resort to photographing things like a carved soapstone fish on a plate as a stand-in to figure out the appropriate camera settings, while the sweet and meltable things rest comfortably in the freezer until the last possible moment. This will give the archaeologists something to wonder about when they unearth my photo collection a thousand years hence.)

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This month, the Bread Baking Babes are smiling even more sweetly than our usual sweet selves, with the Portuguese Sweet Bread (aka Pão Doce) Tanna selected for us. I love crusty hearth loaves, but sometimes you’re in the mood for something softer, richer, and sweeter, and this bread hits that spot nicely.

The recipe allows for a variable amount of sugar, and I opted for the lowest amount, which was just lovely. The result was beautiful for sandwiches as well as morning toast, and would make wonderful dinner rolls as well (maybe without the lemon zest). The inclusion of ground flaxseed and about 25% whole wheat flour might or might not make a healthful difference, but they definitely add flavor and color.

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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.

Well now, this is a little embarrassing. Looking over my last few Daring Bakers challenges, I see that I have chosen to do a raspberry/chocolate combination for the latest three, and four of the last six. And I wonder why my friends find it so easy to predict what dessert I’m going to order in restaurants.

Not that I’m regretting a minute of it. Chocolate and rasberries go together like, well, ice cream and cake.

And although I have never been big a fan of Swiss rolls (I’m quite certain there is an early-childhood run-in with Little Debbie lurking in my long-repressed recesses), and although my cake looks on the outside like it’s had a run-in with something or other, this bombe was the bomb.

I followed Sunita’s recipes for the Swiss rolls that form the bombe’s outer layer, and for the fudge sauce that ended up sandwiched between the two home-made ice creams inside. My ice creams, churned with my KitchenAid mixer’s ice cream attachment, were both adapted from David Lebovitz’s wonderful book, The Perfect Scoop. I added cocoa nibs (crushed unsweetened cocoa beans) to the vanilla, and I made the raspberry with Perfect Purée supplemented with a little puree of frozen mixed berries.

Of course it wouldn’t be a DB challenge if I didn’t wind up up with a list of  ”do-next-times” so here it is:

• Notice how my Swiss roll slices are rather crumby? This happened upon slicing, and freezing thoroughly before slicing would help.
• I think I’d like a fudge sauce based on cream rather than water; this became a bit icy when frozen.
• Reversing the ice cream layers (raspberry on top, vanilla on the bottom) would give a better contrast between the ice cream and the Swiss roll layer.
• Whole raspberries should go in there somewhere.

I believe some of the other Daring Bakers offer suggestions for flavor combinations that are not chocolate and raspberry. I might have to grudgingly admit that they might be good too.

The July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Margie of More Please and Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make their own nut butter from scratch, and use the nut butter in a recipe. Their sources include Better with Nut Butter by Cooking Light Magazine, Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, and Food Network online.

What I loved about this month’s Daring Cooks challenge — aside from being the second challenge in a row where I made something that’s perfectly paired with good bread or crostini — is that the concept is simple (nothing is much simpler than tossing a bunch of nuts into the food processor and turning it on), but the possibilities are limitless. (Actually, now that I think about it, that seems a good axiom: the simpler the concept, the greater the possibilities. I must remember to keep this in mind.)

I made Walnut and White Bean Dip (based on walnut butter) straight from the challenge recipe, as well as a pumpkin seed butter (yes, I do know that pumpkin seeds are not nuts, but the idea is the same), which was an … interesting color, but went very nicely on whole wheat bread with a smear of fig spread to top it off.

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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.

When I was in school, we made a Concorde cake: layers of chocolate meringue and chocolate mousse, encased by and topped with chocolate meringue “logs.” My classmates and I agreed it was delicious, but we were hard-pressed to understand how the 8-inch cake could be gracefully cut into individual servings. The idea of single-serving-sized desserts came up.

This month’s Daring Bakers challenge — individual chocolate Pavlovas (meringue shells) topped with chocolate mascarpone mousse and drizzled with mascarpone cream — seemed like a good candiate for a Concorde-style interpretation.

All of the challenge components — meringue, mousse, cream — are here, with just a couple of tweaks to the original recipes. In the mousse, I replaced the Grand Marnier with 4 tablespoons of Chambord. And to give the mascarpone cream more body, so it could be used as a top layer rather than a drizzling sauce, I cut back the crème anglaise in the recipe to one cup, and whipped the finished cream to soft peaks.

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Daring Cooks strike again! Our hostesses this month, Evelyne of Cheap Ethnic Eatz, and Valerie of The Chocolate Bunny, chose delicious pate with freshly baked bread as their June Daring Cooks challenge. They’ve provided us with four different pate recipes to choose from and are allowing us to go wild with our homemade bread choice.

Okay, I can’t say I went exactly wild with the bread choice, but in my opinion there is no better complement to liver pâté than a simple baguette. Made from pâte de baguette (baguette dough), of course.

And wow, who knew that liver pâté was so easy to make at home? I would like to try the other challenge recipes soon, too — Chicken Liver Terrine, Tricolor Vegetable Pâté, and Trout and Shrimp Pâté — but I really liked the one I chose: Three Spice Liver Pâté.

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