February Daring Baker's Challenge: Panna Cotta


Q: What could be more indulgent than a dessert comprised nearly entirely of heavy cream?

A: A dessert comprised nearly entirely of heavy cream, with added sugar and hot fudge, served from a champagne flute and enjoyed after an extraordinarily decadent 3-course dinner at home.

The February 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mallory from A Sofa in the Kitchen. She chose to challenge everyone to make Panna Cotta from a Giada De Laurentiis recipe and Nestle Florentine Cookies.

Well, I forgot about the cookies. And I used a David Leibovitz recipe. Whoops.

Otherwise, thank goodness this challenge came around when it did, because we decided to cook at home this year on Valentine's Day, and I had no idea what to make for dessert. Chocolate was a given, but if I made cake, we would be left with far too many leftovers - plus I have issues with eating my weight in cake batter. Panna cotta also requires (or rather, demands) vanilla beans instead of extract, and I happen to be fascinated with vanilla beans. Sold!

Since it would be just the two of us, I divided the following recipe in half (but stuck with one whole vanilla bean), and the panna cotta mixture still divided perfectly among 3 champagne flutes (kindly ignore the price tags on my champagne flutes). I topped each flute with an espresso hot fudge sauce. While the pudding and the sauce were lovely and a perfect end to an indulgent meal, I think I finally understand what people mean when they say something is “too rich” – I couldn’t finish my glass. This summer, I’d love to experiment with different toppings, like fresh berries or peaches, and serve dessert in smaller cups.
You will need:

4 cups heavy cream (my heavy cream carton yielded only half of this, so I topped it off with skim milk and the results were fine)
½ cup sugar
2 tsp vanillia extract, or one vanilla bean, split lengthwise
2 packets powdered gelatin
6 tbs cold water

Heat the heavy cream and sugar in a saucepan. Once the sugar is dissolved, remove from heat and stir in the vanilla extract. If you are using a vanilla bean, scrape the seeds from the bean into the cream and add the bean pod. Cover, and let infuse for 30 minutes. Remove the bean then rewarm the mixture before continuing. Lightly oil eight custard cups with a neutral-tasting oil, or spray lightly with cooking spray.

Sprinkle the gelatin over the cold water in a medium-sized bowl and let stand 5 to 10 minutes. Pour the very warm panna cotta mixture over the gelatin and stir until the gelatin is completely dissolved.

Divide the panna cotta mixture into the prepared cups/glasses, then chill them until firm, which will take at least two hours. Cover with plastic wrap if not enjoying immediately after they have set.

Top with desired garnish - some ideas are:

Hot fudge
A mix of white and semisweet chocolate chips
Caramel sauce
Macerated berries
Grilled peaches
Candied nuts
 
Go crazy! Here's the link to the original post.

November Daring Baker's Challenge: Crostata

This chocolate and ricotta tart is light, fresh and easy to make. I do wish I had gone with a different pastry - something saltier and flakier - but for the quick pastry it is, it works well with the ricotta filling. We had a couple of pieces once it cooled, and left the rest of the tart in the freezer for several weeks until the day after Thanksgiving, and it froze and defrosted perfectly.

The 2010 November Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Simona of briciole. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make pasta frolla for a crostata. She used her own experience as a source, as well as information from Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well.

These challenges are helping me to better equip my kitchen - I've been after a tart pan for ages, and even though we were allowed to make a free-form tart, I took this challenge as the best excuse I could fathom to get my hands on a tart pan!

The recipe I used came from Broxholm Road (warning: measurements are given in Metric format, so some conversions and/or a kitchen scale are necessary).

And here's the challenge post.

October Daring Baker's Challenge: Doughnuts

The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge D-B-er's to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann and Epicurious.

 Despite my excitement when October's challenge was posted, I was unfortunately disappointed at the results. My donuts just didn't rise, and I know where to lay the blame. I know better. I'm disappointed in myself.

For whatever reason, I refused to use my mixer, and opted to make the entire dough by hand with a whisk (which is actually ok). People were making baked goods before electric hand mixers and stand mixers. But, I didn't make up time for power - meaning I should have whisked for way longer doing it manually than I would have had to with some electricity in hand. There simply wasn't enough air in my dough, which made for a paltry rise. I started my dough and left it to rise while I went to Zumba, expecting to find fluffy, towering puffs of doughnutty dough to fry and douse in sugar when I returned from my hour of intense calorie burning.

                                                                           Pre-rise

                                                                     Post-rise. Sigh.

Then my candy thermometer broke in the dutch oven and released mercury into my oil. What's the point of being able to measure 400 degrees if the damn thing gets too hot to stay intact at 375? So I switched to the cast iron skillet, which I suppose worked just as well.

They rose a little more as they cooked, but overall I was unimpressed. Regardless, I pushed on with a variety of glazes: classic, chocolate, pumpkin, and "Homer Simpson pink."

I've got to start paying better attention to the Daring challenges. Baking is a relatively new concept for me, and while I've impressed myself recently, I've also been getting ahead of myself as far as the challenges are concerned. If I hadn't rushed myself to get these donuts done, they might be as pretty as some of the other Bakers'. Lesson learned, I hope.

Original recipe here. Prettier donuts here.

September Daring Baker's Challenge: Decorated Sugar Cookies

The challenge this month was to not only bake and decorate sugar cookies, but to settle on a theme that represents September to the baker. Easy: my birthday is on the 26th of September, and I for some reason already had a birthday cake cookie cutter.

The September 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mandy of “What the Fruitcake?!" Mandy challenged everyone to make Decorated Sugar Cookies based on recipes from Peggy Porschen and The Joy of Baking.

For me, the only challenge this assignment posed was figuring out a better way to mix and pipe royal icing. I have used it in the past with success; however the process was always a little tricky. While workable, my icing was always very runny, which made outlining difficult since the icing would dribble out of the bag before I even started squeezing. I always forged ahead without outlining, which definitely makes for a messier-looking cookie. Nevertheless, I made piped cookies for Christmas (be kind - these snowmen were my first ever experience with both royal icing and piping bags):

And, if you may remember, I turned tiny heart cookies into strawberries for Andrea's birthday cake:

But back to my runny icing. Some why-didn't-I-think-of-that fixes: start with thicker icing, and use gel food coloring instead of liquid so the consistency of the icing doesn’t change. Another great tip I picked up for ease in filling a piping bag: stuff the bag with the tip into a tall glass, then fold the open end of the bag down over the glass…the icing stays contained and you don’t have to try to balance a bag in one hand while filling it with the other.

To add a bit of depth to the plain sugar cookie, I added lemon zest and lemon extract to both the dough and the icing. It wasn’t a very strong flavor, but what did come through was pleasant enough.  I also happen to dislike royal icing (I much prefer buttercream), so I only ate half a cookie, because I figured I should.

Happy birthday to me!

Original post and recipe here.

August Daring Baker's Challenge: Ice Cream Petits Four

I found my first Daring Baker's challenge to be...well, challenging.

I do realize that's the whole point. I knew what I was getting into, if only from the examples I've seen around the blogosphere. And truth be told, if participating in these challenges is going to teach me anything, the biggest lesson I'll learn is time management.

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 Petits Four. The sources for Elissa’s challenge were Gourmet magazine and David Lebovitz’s “The Perfect Scoop.”

Ok, ice cream. It was about to be another in a string of 95+ degree days, and apart from that, it's definitely a new skill, which is why I set out to join this group in the first place.

Though we were given free reign on the type of ice cream to make, I didn't want to attempt spreading my creative wings too far this time around, given that it was my first challenge. My head swirled with ideas: coconut-lime ice cream, blackberry-lemon, chocolate and pretzel, etc. Instead I played it safe (or so I thought), with a classic chocolate-vanilla stracciatella (literal translation from Italian: torn apart).

Stracciatella is an Italian version of American chocolate chip ice cream (my favorite). Near the end of the freezing process, you simply drizzle ribbons of hot, melted dark chocolate over the frozen custard, and nearly immediately break it up, creating broken chips of dark chocolate running through the ice cream.

Nearly immediately. Remember I said that.

Infusing the milk with vanilla went well (vanilla beans on sale at World Market through September - 2 for $2.99!).

The custard process went well.

I was pleased with the taste, pleased with the way it was setting up in the ice bath. It went into the freezer at 7:00; I finally left the kitchen around 12:15. Because I don't have an ice cream maker - an appliance I'd have never deemed necessary until I attempted the process manually - I attacked the freezing ice cream with a hand mixer every 30 minutes in between. Two to three hours to until ready to eat, David Lebovitz? This is the first time you've ever led me astray.

At 11:45 in an otherwise sleeping house, I melted 5 ounces of dark chocolate over a double boiler, and pulled my almost-set ice cream out of the freezer. I drizzled the chocolate over the top, neglecting to break up the larger blobs (mistake #1), and set it back in the freezer for about 10 minutes (mistake #2).

When I pulled it out again, the chocolate was hard as a rock, but I proceeded to assail it with my hand mixer regardless (mistake #3). Chocolate flew everywhere as the whirling beaters struck the hardened blobs, splattering my countertops with dark, sticky lumps. Panicked that I might soon fling chocolate within reach of the sleepily curious dogs at my feet, I gave up on the mixer and pulled the bigger chunks out with my fingers. I started to chop them on a cutting board, but the clonk of my knife meeting frozen chocolate was not a sound suited for midnight. So I brought out the cheese grater and grated the blobs until my fingers were dripping with body heat-melted chocolate.

I then gave up completely, took one final picture of the mess I'd created:

And flopped into bed.

In the morning, the stuff actually looked pretty good. I fluffed it up a bit with a fork, and let it melt just a little bit later in the evening so I could have a go at it one more time with the hand mixer.

The melting before the last freeze turned out to be the key: even though Josh eschewed the mixer and volunteered to stir it by hand, it re-froze creamy and smooth, and I had to stop everyone in the house from progressively chipping away at my ice cream supply. It turned out to be precious stuff, after everything I had to do to get it there.

Making the pound cake went smoothly. Aside from the 19 tablespoons of butter (the browned butter added a lot of depth to the taste of the batter, but honestly I could not taste it in the final product), the process wasn't much unlike any other cake I've made in the past. Plus, I found myself a sous chef for challenges to come.

Frankly, I can't be bothered to write much about the cake, assembly or glazing - even though the glazing turned out to be a huge nightmare - lest this saga continue much longer. In the end, I wound up with 12 cute iced petits four, which was decidedly less than the number of lopsided, melty rectangles Josh and Alyssa ate off the pan (the first picture in this post, of a petit four cut in half, is without ice cream. It separated from its other half and I was dumb enough to use that one as the display picture).

If I were to make this recipe again, it should come as no surprise that I'd more than likely make a full-size cake, and I will utilize store-bought ice cream - impressed though everyone was that the ice cream was both delicious and made without a machine.

Here's a link to the recipes and the original post (and some examples that turned out better than mine did).