Genius, daringly simple Febbaking

This is what I was waiting for, the reason - without knowing it - that I joined the Daring Bakers. Not for the endless rolling and resting of pastry, not for fiddling, getting out and putting back in the fridge, not for beating curdly buttercream icing and making toffee to pralinate in the food processor, or in fact for icing of any kind. Especially not for piping bags.

Genius.

Three ingredients. Chocolate, butter, eggs.

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.
(Never mind the ice cream. I made pistachio and served it another time. But it turned out such an ugly colour that I haven't got a good photo yet! so you won't see it in this post.)

Cared I that it was Valentine's Day? I wouldn't have noticed except for a certain teenager I know feeling the aloneness of couples all over the world doing coupley things (as far as she knew.. or defying the contrivedness of such a Hallmark holiday.. or not even caring enough to defy).

Chocolate is the answer!

It was a good distraction for my teenage friend, anyway. And an excellent one for me.
And an even better dessert the next day.

Who needs flour, honestly. The TEXTURE.

Chocolate Valentino (Australian adaptation)
Preparation Time: 20 minutes
454 g chocolate, roughly chopped (I just used 450. Aka 16 ounces)
146 g unsalted butter (Imperialists! Just measure it. Or use 125 g like me, quarter of a block.)
5 large eggs, separated

1. Put chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl and set over a pan of simmering water (the bottom of the bowl should not touch the water) and melt, stirring often.
2. While the choc-butter mixture is cooling, butter the pan and line with baking paper.
2a. Put on Ray LaMontagne, Bob Dylan, or whatever music you feel like. Dance around.
3. Separate the egg yolks from the egg whites and put into two medium/large bowls.
4. Whip the egg whites in a medium/large grease free bowl until stiff peaks are formed (do not over-whip or the cake will be dry).
5. With the same beater beat the egg yolks together. (Hooray! same beater. Clever 'un who wrote this owns the key to my own chocolate heart. Hear me Daring Bakers, our usual recipes use far too many dishes. Don't you have something better to do than wash up?)
6. Add the egg yolks to the cooled chocolate.
7. Fold in 1/3 of the egg whites into the chocolate mixture and follow with remaining 2/3rds. Fold until no white remains without deflating the batter.
8. Pour batter into prepared pan, the batter should fill the pan 3/4 of the way full, and bake at 375F/190C
9. Bake for 25 minutes until an instant read thermometer reads 140F/60C. If you do not have an instant read thermometer, the top of the cake will look similar to a brownie and a cake tester will appear wet.
10. Cool cake on a rack for 10 minutes then unmould..

It needs a good chocolate, because with no added sugar, nuts, flour or that, this cake tastes exactly like the chocolate you use. But even better, because it's cake.

it's really hot

REALLY hot.
On the verandah at the moment it's 46.5 degrees Celsius.

And the oven is not going on again today!

Also, this is late. But aren't they pretty?
This month's challenge is brought to us by Karen of Bake My Day and Zorra of 1x umruehren bitte aka Kochtopf. They have chosen Tuiles from The Chocolate Book by Angélique Schmeink and Nougatine and Chocolate Tuiles from Michel Roux.

I made plain sweet tuiles with raspberry filling, raspberries and mint leaves. The raspberry filling has lemon. My brain isn't working enough to tell you any more because the heat is making me act irrationally and yell at my siblings.

Happy January!

December away...

I am trying to track down this Donna Hay cake I saw the recipe for in that No Time to Cook book in a bookshop recently. It was like a giant raspberry friand (siiiiiiiigh) and I need to use up the egg whites in the fridge. It is not to be found! I'll have to wing it.

So on the topic of December away, it has been quite a month for fruit picking, just wait for my photos, but they shall be in the next post, because this one goes to those crazy 'bakers'. More like daring freezers, ha. Yes, darling readers. I complain, but do I stop following?

This month's challenge is brought to us by the adventurous Hilda from Saffron and Blueberry and Marion from Il en Faut Peu Pour Etre Heureux.
They have chosen a French Yule Log by Flore from Florilege Gourmand.. search it if you like. It's an ice cream cake, AKA a litre of cream and a few blocks of chocolate, with layers amillion. Well, eight-ish.
The half piece is because it was really hard to cut without breaking, even left out of the freezer. Some components softened more quickly than others. So we just cut huge fat pieces and served them in halves.

Starting from the top, we have:
chocolate icing (does that need stating?)
milk chocolate semifreddo in which everything else is set, i.e. frozen mousse
baked creme brulee
more chocolate mousse
praline feuilleté (hazelnut praline crushed with crisp-baked crepe biscuits, chocolate and butter)
mousse again
dark chocolate ganache (hands up if this is your favourite part. me, pick me!)
and hazelnut dacquoise, of which I could have happily eaten a bit more.

Yum. I won't be making THAT again anytime soon!

you put the salt in the caramel and eat it all up!

This months' darling bakers decided on a caramel cake with caramelised butter icing (defiantly Australian am I, frosting I will not acknowledge) (and yes we caramelise with an S).

I admit I reduced the sugar, but I can't remember how much.. a good amount. And made somewhat less of the icing, with not too much syrup. The icing turned out to be a very repeatable thing (mmmm). I made a half quantity of the suggested syrup and had enough left over for a toffee and banana cake.
Even reduced in syrupiness I doubted my friends and family's will to demolish the golden thing, so I took it to an all-day choir rehearsal where it happily disappeared. Thanks singers!

Anyway, as you can probably tell from my flattish tone, I have never been that excited about caramel, except obviously for sticky date pudding! and banoffee pie which I have yet to try! and homemade caramel slice!
ahem.
This was a nice cake. I could even have eaten some hokey pokey ice cream with it. Hokey pokey ice cream is a bit like English toffee flavour, for any non-Australasian readers.

And now the referencing.
Recipe courtesy of Shuna Fish Lydon from Eggbeater as published on Bay Area Bites, challenge hosted by Dolores of Chronicles in Culinary Curiosity and co-hosts Alex (Brownie of the Blondie and Brownie duo, Jenny of Foray into Food and for gluten-free daring bakers not quite daring enough to eat the gluten, help from Natalie of Gluten-a-Go-Go.
Optional was an extra challenge, Golden Vanilla Bean Caramels from Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich, Artisan Press, Copyright 2007, ISBN: 978-1579652111

Le lavash que je viens d'avoir fait

Ta da!
Ready for my Lethlean rip-off phrasing? Aussie foodie journalism at its easy reading best. What can I say, I know some of you other Melbournian bloggers have a thing about him and his writing, but I love it. (How can you not enjoy his loveable adventures in A2? My favourite comfort food reading on a Saturday morning.)
Pasta machine worked a dream.


On the left, poppy.
Smelled like bread in the oven.

Some got a bit overdone. Let's call it toasted (tastes good, tastes toasted). Some puffed up like a pillow, or Arnott's goldfish, but better.. one bite and you're hooked.

Sesame smelled even better.

P.S. I'm not really sure why we made lavash. So easy. Just bread dough rolled flat. I don't mean to complain, it's just, it didn't feel all that daring. I'll make some vegan friendly - that was one of the reasons behind lavash I think - dip later, but even without, this is good stuff. Who doesn't love a good dry biscuit. Even if it isn't very daring.

late lavash

Oops! Daring Bakers was yesterday and I've been out of the house for the last two weeks!
Life is increasingly hectic this last month. A catering-sized cupcake bake with Kris of A Bit o' Culture, a week in the beautiful Blue Mountains (some photos may follow soon), a googolplex rehearsals, several hours spent planning projects and recital material, stressing, reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, walking, laughing, driving, sitting on trains, writing, a short film soundtrack..
and somehow, my lavash got left behind. It awaits me now! to lovingly roll and bake it. I plan to be terribly lazy and squish it through the pasta machine. Poppy and maybe sesame shall be my decor.

This time of the month

...in a totally male-friendly way. The end of the month means one thing in baking blogs all over the world.Daring Bakers, thankyou for not even threatening my sanity with this month's chocolate eclairs!

I thought choux pastry was meant to be hard? The only part I struggled with was piping the dough/paste onto the trays, because either my piping skills or equipment (most likely both) are not quite up to it. Never mind, roundish globs became pretty profiteroles!

I freaked out when I saw instructions to boil the pastry cream, and to my delight discovered that cornflour stops the yolk curdling! Genius. I actually was surprised to see that the recipe called for a chocolate custard and that other bakers going for a chocolate non-overload had used a set custard rather than just whipped cream, which I had thought was the more traditional way to fill an eclair. Custard suits me perfectly.

What else is there to tell you... let me know if you want the recipe, it's quite easy.

Mum came in as they were in the oven and said they smelled right. She used to make them all the time and she said Grandma (of the trusted sponge kisses and luince jelly) used to just spoon the paste onto the tray and smooth it out in eclair shape with a knife. I'll do that next time, and there will be a next time, because these were not only easy but fun to make.

And after taking photos to show off how wonderful they looked, I'd forgotten that they would have a taste! and delicious they were.
P.S. Reading other Daring Bakers' commentaries, I thought lavender and chocolate sounded gorgeously good, especially as spring arrives here, so my cream is subtly lavender. Enjoy :)

Flaring Bakers go the hazelnut genoise

So, I am still going strong in the second month of claiming Daring Bakership.


The majority of this pack of strange people (I feel myself becoming addicted already) live far away in the US of A or far away elsewhere. So it seems they are likely to come up with slightly different challenges to what another Melbournian might think of.. a super-duper layered torte-ish gateau with creamy fillings, requiring hours of fridge time, for example, I think I would have been more inspired to make in summer. Teacakes call to me lately now that winter is settled in for the last coldest stretch...

That being said, I came home looking for the last piece of this creation about a day after completing it, and nowhere was it to be seen...!! So nobody had a major problem with it.
Nobody else in our house minded my lack of decoration skills either - well, maybe the noises coming from the kitchen during the decoration process! - so I am pleased.

Some books seem to say filberts and hazelnuts are related but slightly different, while other sources say they are the same thing. Whatevs.
Description:
Layers of Frangelico-brushed hazelnut meringue, held with praline buttercream and whipped cream, all swept over with a pear and vanilla glaze and finished with a second glaze of ganache (my favourite bit ;) and decorated (sigh) with more praline buttercream.

I left the skins on all my hazelnuts because going on my little experience of the sweetness of the DBs I -rightly, in all our opinions- predicted the cake would be sweet enough to take a tiny hint of bitterness. And maybe even some nutrition (fibre is in the skins, yes?). No laziness there at all.
mmmm.

the silly baker

I may have been out of my mind, but I joined the Daring Bakers for a little bit of ... something.
It seemed like a good idea at the time.

I was up half the night (I happened to be up half the night in a head-cold-induced trance) pondering fillings and rollings and my arms .. what's the underside of the forearm? .. were sore for two days after the rolling, we definitely need a rolling pin on a wheel, rather than a big fat stick that requires much awkward wrist twists.

Was it worth it?
My Danish Braids. It made a truckload of pastry and with my offcuts there is a little family of darling croissants. I think I forgot to take photos once the croissants were done, but they are sugar and spice and all things nice.

Apricot Almond Danish braid. and below, apple.











I am worn out! ....but vaguely proud.