Double Post of Daring Baker Goodness

This month's recipe is the Chocolate Valentino and an accompanying ice cream. The Valentino is a pretty standard flourless chocolate cake- eggs, chocolate and butter. In this version the eggs get separated and whipped up so it's not just a chocolate custard, but has a fluffier texture. The type and quality of the chocolate really determines the flavor of the cake. We used a 62% semisweet chocolate that we have liked in everything else we've made. Not this, though. The cake had a chalky dry quality and terribly bitter flavor. Robb had been especially keen for this one- was sure we were going to love it. I don't know why we didn't. The chocolate is tasty on its own and has been in other things we've made.

It's always fun to make ice cream, and it did provide some moisture and sweetness against the very chalky tasting cake. We made an apricot ice cream- pureed dried apricots in a typical custard base. It was fruity and creamy and a beautiful pale color.


The second Daring Baker item that I recently made was the milk chocolate and caramel tart. It's pretty good-nice to have a milk chocolate recipe for a change. The crust has quite a bit of cinnamon which is a nice compliment to the caramel and milk chocolate layers.


Happy Baking!
Janet

The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE’s blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef.
We have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan; a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.

Chocolate Valentino
16 oz. chocolate, roughly chopped
5 oz. unsalted butter
5 large eggs separated

1. Melt chocolate and butter, cool.
2. Butter, paper, butter pan.
3. Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks

4. Mix yolks together and add to cooled chocolate.
5. Lighten, then fold together.
6. Bake at 375˚ for 25 min., the batter should fill 8” spring form pan 3/4
Will test wet, internal temp is 140˚, the top of the cake will look similar to a brownie.
7. Cool 10 then turn out.Chocolate Shortbread Pastry
To make 3 tarts, 9 ½ inches (24 cm) square
or 10 inches (26 cm round)

Ingredients:
1 cup butter, softened CREAM in f.p. ADD 150 g 10x, 50 g gr hazelnuts, 2 t cinn. MIX in 2 eggs, 1x1. SIFT 400 g cake flour, 2 ½ t b powd. & 1 ½ T cocoa and mix in.

Form into a ball and chill overnight.

Blind bake 15 min. @ 325˚

Milk Chocolate and Caramel Tart
One 9-inch(24-cm) square pan; 1 10-inch (26-cm) round baking pan

CARAMELIZE 1 cup granulated sugar to golden. ADD 1 c xx cream or crème fraiche, and ¼ c butter. Cool.

BEAT 2 eggs & 1 yolk, ADD 2 ½ T flour. ADD to caramel mix. Pour into shell and bake 15 min. Cool.

BEAT 1 ¼ c xx cream to stiff and fold into 8 oz. melted milk choc.

SMOOTH over caramel mix. Chill for one hour in the refrigerator.

Guess who had a big birthday??

Robb, that's who!! He turned 40 and had a pretty terrific surprise party put together by his partner, Michael.
Who knew there was a decent place to go here in Peekskill?? Henry's on Hudson had been reported to be a real s&#t hole. It's a motel restaurant so expectations were low to boot. But it was shockingly good! The food and beer selection was good, the service was excellent, and no one could complain about gorgeous views of the Hudson river at sunset.
My contribution to this monumental event was, naturally, a birthday cake. What to make for Robb... It has to be special, that's a given. I don't want for him to "know" all the elements. Uh, but I can't remember what he doesn't fancy. I'm sure that he's not fond of coconut, but what else... I don't want it to be too predictable...not just chocolate... Ok here goes!

It's a variation on a Baumtorte. This is not a widely known cake (at least here in the U.S.). It's not one that you are likely to see done commercially, either. The labor is a killer, although I bet it wouldn't be that hard to mechanize production. It's a cake that gets baked, broiled really, in thin layers one at a time, so that the end result is a short cake with tons of layers that looks like a cross section of a tree trunk. The almond paste batter gets spread into a very thin layer and broiled until its set, every other layer gets brushed with apricot and dusted with ground pistachios.
In honor of Robb's 40 years, I thought it appropriate to make it with 40 layers. I counted the cake batter layers. A second layer had 29, figuring that's the age many of us wish to stay in perpetuity.

The normal Baumtorte would be covered in Apricot and glazed with chocolate. It's tapered sides then covered with ground pistachio. To create a little more drama with this tiered version, I made an Apricot Silk Meringue Buttercream- our favorite from the cake bible (p. 239) with creme Anglaise, Italian meringue, butter, and apricot puree ( p. 335).

My piping skills are improving, and even though I thought it would be smashing to have some chocolate scroll work piped on the pale orange frosting, I decided not to ruin the cake! Instead, I recycled something we had done before. Robb and I liked it so well on the Strawberry Maria (CB p. 184), that along with the buttercream replay I didn't think he'd mind seeing it.















I experimented with some candy making molds, too. The little cordial cups came out pretty well and I liked the marbled look of the white and dark chocolate. I filled them with the frosting, although some apricot puree topped with frosting would have been better. Live and learn, right?
Robb's gifts there are an Easy Bake oven- yes they still make them- and some extra cake mix and tools to go whit it. My Dad always said it made a perfectly edible cake, hopefully we'll see sometime soon.

















Lots of great folks were at his party, including Robb's friend Rob who was kind enough to share some of the photos he took at the event. Thanks Rob!

To be fair, I'll add a picture that Rob shot of me at the party too. I'm no spring chicken either, my 40th is only 1 month away!

Happy birthday!
Janet


P.S. If you're dying for the recipe to the cake, just send me an email. Or google for it, I found little to no variation in recipes for it.

Looking Back

After I realized that we'd been doing Bake Through for a year, I found myself re-reading the previous posts.  Back in April 2007, we had said that we'd like to try the Chocolate Cherry Almond Pound cake (pg 32) in its more traditional Apricot Version.  Well, here it is.

I have to say that I wasn't a big fan of this cake, then or now. And, while I'm glad that I made it using apricot preserves and a lemon sugar glaze, I'll not make this again. The texture once again was too dry and crumbly. It had a host of good things in it: hazlenuts, almond paste, chocolate, yet, it seemed almost too bland to me.

When I mentioned to J that I had remade it, she said, "Isn't that the one that looked like meatloaf?"  As soon as she said it, I knew she was right. Look at this picture: 

Sometimes, it's good to go back and see how far you've come.  Honestly, a year ago, this would have seemed to daunting of a task to attempt.  And now, I did it on a Sunday afternoon, just because I had a bit of time.

Bake Through

Robb

Learning Lessons

The Golden Cage (pg 172)

Yes, we are still working our way through the Cake Bible. But, we've decided that it's much more fun to work through it a bit at a time and darnit, we enjoy just hanging out sometimes.

The Golden Cage uses the Golden Genoise (pg 125), Barak Palinka or brandy, Apricot Silk Meringue Buttercream (pg 243) and Gold Dust & Caramel Cage (pg 313)

The Golden Genoise is an incredibly dense cake, made with 12 egg yolks. So, it's rich with a texture that is fine -- RLB says it makes wonderful Madeleines. One of these days were going to have to try this. This cake has such a tight uniform crumb without being dense and heavy. Simply amazing.

After all this baking, I have to be honest, buttercreams still rock! We've done so many variations on this theme (Today's: Apricot Silk Buttercream). The Silk Buttercream, as you may recall, has a couple things happening simultaneously. You make a creme anglaise, you make an italian meringue, you beat the butter, you add the creme anglaise, until smooth, you add the Italian meringue (This is the one with egg whites and a sugar syrup beat into them). There are a ton of steps, but it always seems to turn out for us -- even back in the beginning.

For the caramel cage and dust, you basically do a controlled burn of some sugar with some water. Once you've got it just right (amber colored), you drizzle it over a prepared kugelhupf pan (OK, neither J nor I have one of these, so we used the alternate spring form pan to bake the cake in). For the cage, we improvised and ended up with a few really good pieces that we stuck into the top of the cake, in a caramel version of the Enchanted Broccoli Forest (in college, we had a copy of that cook book on our communal shelf. Full disclosure, I still have a copy on my shelf.)

We learned a couple of things with this recipe. A humid day really does make it tough to work with caramel. It never stops being sticky on a humid day. Although, in this months Gourmet, one of the writers says that they made wonderful meringue in Ireland, I wonder how they fare with caramel? Ours just never stopped being sticky, except when we wanted to get it off the spoon, it stuck like concrete! But it did taste good.

(Notice the strawberry? That was J's suggestion and she was right!)

Second, trimming the dark edges off the edge of the cake layers is a good thing to do. That's what we're doing this project for- to learn and improve and to have fun spending time together of course. I think we have done some improving, and I hope that it is noticeable?

This cake was an amalgam of things that we've learned baking our way through the Cake Bible and taking the class at La Tulipe. Next week's post will have an example of something we probably couldn't have done without some of this last year's worth of practice.

Wow, what a year it has been. I remember the trepidation that I had bringing up the idea of Bake Through to J. Would she think it a colossal waste of time? Would she laugh and politely get out of it? It didn't occur to me that she'd embrace it with even more excitement than I had. That she'd be the one to, more often than not, push to keep us on track so we will some day actually make our way through the book.

So while I take my hat off to Rose for the book, and Chef Maarten for the baking class, I throw it in the air that J and I get to spend this time hanging out. I can't imagine a better baking partner.

Bake through everyone.

Robb