Biscuit avec Joconde et Noel. Or cake and cake with a side of cookies. Ouais.

Astheroshe of accro hosted this month's Daring Bakers challenge, getting us to make a biscuit joconde which is essentially those gorgeous cakes you see with the decorative outside, filled with things like creams and mouses or cake, and an amazingly perfect top which really when you look at one it looks like someone who's done pastries for years probably made and you could never do it. But as I've learned a lot of baking that looks tricky is really pretty easy, you just have to figure out the process.  This challenge was pretty neat in the fact it gave you a lot of flexibility with the final product. It mainly focused on making a joconde imprime which is a design baked into a sponge cake.

I made mine just straight vanilla and instead of using almond flour, I used walnut flour which I like the taste and nuttiness of better. Although it is winter, I wanted the flavours to be light because we just finished having Christmas and New Year's and no one in their right mind wants to eat more sweets, so I turned to fruits and mousses.

I used my mother's recipe for lemon semifreddo; a semi-frozen custard that I find holds it's shape really nicely and although it's rather decadent (think along the lines of a creme mousseline) it doesn't make you want to undo a button or two from your pants. I topped the whole thing with a raspberry mirroir which my boyfriend patiently waited for me to do the whole process before I would leave the house.

The top border is a rather lemony buttercream, giving you a zing of lemon that hits your tongue like it's almost salty juxtaposing the other fruits rather well. Because of the raspberry mirroir I made the design in the joconde a bright pink to tie all the colours in. It was really good and rather easy it just took a while to do. You would just keep cutting a piece off at a time to nibble on (maybe not the healthiest of snacks out there).

For Christmas, my family hosted dinner twice. On boxing day we had my mother's side of the family over and after a failed attempt at dessert number one I quickly changed gears and went to plan B: A snowy hill of cakey wonder avec a gingerbread house. The cake came from How to Eat a Cupcakes Triple Chocolate Fudge cake. Holy H Jesus was it good, but you got A LOT of cake. I filled the layers with vanilla buttercream and a hazelnut ganache, carved it into a shape of a hill, covered that with more buttercream and ganache then added some gingerbread trees and a cabin and some merengue snowmen and balls.

Luckily I had baked the cake on the weekend, so the rest of the cookies, baking, and decorating were finished right on time (only barely). While not pretty it tasted amazing. I will definitely be using this recipe as my go-to for chocolate cake.

Crostata Time DB'ers!

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.

Things just always seem to work out.  Simona announced that the Daring Bakers would be doing crostata this month and what was my mother doing for her book club this month and needed to bring a dessert?  Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert giving me the perfect excuse to foist an Italian dessert off on my mother.  Another of her book clubbers is married to an Italian so we were kind of worried she would do something Italian as well, so I went with the more savory crostata.  Pear, walnut, and blue cheese were the winning combo. 

The basic crostata recipe consists of a short crust pastry sweet or savory, with your choice of filling; the most often being jams, fruit, custards, or more savory things such as cheese.  Whenever I have to work with chilled butter for crusts or scones or what have you I use my food processor, pull the dough together with a little liquid, then throw it in the fridge or freezer as soon as I can.  Everything is cold, cold, cold and works out perfectly.  Like others mentioned, pasta frolla was fairly forgiving to work with, although a little crumbly.  Having made shortbread I knew to persevere.   I found that it wasn't as tender as a regular pie crust, but it was still very good.  Two words of caution though is not to use too much blue cheese.  The pears don't have a huge pear taste, so the cheese could overpower it easily.  The other being that it probably would have been better to blind bake the crust.  Although it wasn't terrible, it would have been better if I had blind baked it. 

It went over very well (her friend having made tiramisu) and my mother only brought back two pieces which are being frozen for a later tea date.   I will be posting photos to accompany my post, but the camera and laptop they are on is in Maui at the moment.  It always seems to be the case...

UPDATE: I have added a photo of the final product.  Mmmm tasty business!

There's something about the smell of fried sugar.

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

Growing up in Canada it's pretty much a given that you've eaten your far share of doughnuts and timbits from Tim Hortons. You've probably been through that inevitable showdown of elementary school children who fight over who gets the chocolate timbits whenever someone brought a snack pack to school. You know the flavors, the glazes, the fillings, the sprinkles, and the seasonal flavours off by heart and you know which kinds you like best and those you won't let within licking room of your large double double.

As it is, my family is more of the yeast doughnuts kind of people (if your my father, the more sprinkles you have that you can drop throughout your car the better). So for this months challenge I made yeast doughnuts and topped them with glaze and sprinkles or rolled them in cinnamon sugar.

Making doughnuts is a fairly easy process. The dough was nice to work with (although I did halve the recipe and like others suggested, I did end up adding about 1 cup more of flour to get the right consistency). I fried them in vegetable oil and let them cool slightly before adding some sugary sweetness. That being said, the doughnuts themselves are not really sweet so if you are going to make them, be sure to add some finishing touches via glazes or sugar.

My mother, led by the siren song of fried yeasty sugar goodness, came and watched me while I fried them them promptly suggested that she should try one while they were still warm. So she ate a doughnut with cinnamon sugar and said "oh my god" then continued by eating a couple more timbits and I'm pretty sure another doughnut. And just to let you know, while my mother does enjoy her sweet treats, she does not typically mow down in such a way. She then took a bunch over to our neighbour who called back a couple minutes later to say they were amazing and that she couldn't stop eating them. (She and her husband finished them off later that day.)  Needless to say, the doughnuts were a success. They're best eaten when just fried and went south fairly quickly after a day or two, but they were well worth it.

Since Halloween was just around the corner and my family was in need of cookies since SOMEONE ACTUALLY BOUGHT OREOS (WTH, seriously) I wanted to make something a little festive, but I didn't have time to go all out as I got a new job which I'm training to be the manager of a new cupcake store.  I had seen these cookies in one of my bakebooks and thought they were cute.  Behold Candy Corn Cookies!

Cute non?  They're just sugar cookies that you divide the batter in half, dye one half yellow.  Then divide the other half in an uneven half and dye the larger half of that orange, leaving the last bit plain.  Roll them into long strips, stack them and press them into a pyramid shape before wrapping them and putting them in the fridge to firm up for a couple hours.  From there it's just a case of slicing and baking then you're on your way to candy heaven.

A windfall of sugar cookies.

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.

Rarely do I use cookie cutters and even more rare do I use ones I see in stores and dream beautiful baked dreams, but never use. This time I put to use small pie pastry cutters and some forest animal cookie cutters I picked up from IKEA (which were meant for cottage fun, but never made it there).

The cookie recipe worked out great. The dough was extremely easy to work with. I ended up freezing half of it and used it a couple of weeks later for thumb print cookies which were quite tasty.

I always like the looks of an iced sugar cookie and was quite inspired by the posts of others. What I forgot was that I hated doing it, but was quickly reminded at 11pm as I stood at my kitchen counter with my head proped up by one hand, icing bag in the other, diligently piping . Maybe it's because it was so late and I was tired, maybe because I forgot what a process it all was. Either way, although my family loved them and my mother shared them proudly with friends over a cuppa, they made me hate life briefly.  They were quite cute...

Ice cream petit fours.

So I know I haven't posted my July Daring Bakers challenge yet and seemed to have bypassed it for August, but I swear I did it. There was quite the production for making the ice cream cake- I will explain at the end.

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”.

If you haven't tried using brown butter in any baked goods you should. Everyone who had a piece loved the nutty flavour it had and kept suggesting different ice cream and glaze combinations (some actually got pretty excited about it). I used the recipe provided for the cake, some leftover maple ice cream from the July challenge and glazed it with a maple butter glaze. The snapdragons are from our garden-we have every colour you could ever want in a flower and then a few more. And they're growing all crazy.

I honestly hate the smell of brown butter. It makes me feel nauseous however it has a huge impact on the colour, taste, and texture of the cake. It looked so moist that at first I wasn't sure that it was done baking until I toothpicked it. Everything was super easy to put together (it's always nice to use up past DB challenge components) and it looks rather impressive when sharing.

As for my July challenge I haven't posted because I don't have pictures. It was done up at my cottage and the pictures are on my mother's camera which she has with her and has been up at the cottage since then. She did come home at one point and uploaded the pictures on the laptop, told me she did, then proceeded to take the laptop back up to the cottage. I don't get it. It's my mother-go figure. I should have it in the next couple days as she's coming home to help my sister move so check back soon!

Cupcakes les Deux

Because Canada Day was on a Thursday this year, work was fairly slow today. The solution to boredom? That would be baking cupcakes. The flavors that won out were chocolate mayonnaise from How to Eat a Cupcake and Key Lime.

The chocolate ones are never a let down and stay super moist and chocolatey (I did add extra melted chocolate and some cocoa) and I made chocolate buttercream icing rather than the chocolate glaze as suggested on Cassie's site.

As for the key lime, we had mass amounts of limes for beer. The icing is a lime cream cheese almost glaze rather than icing in consistancy and I topped it with some candied lime zest. I was told that they were quite possibly the best cupcakes someone's ever had. There was one woman who came in to buy some of the lemon drop cupcakes I made earlier in the week because she thought they were amazing but we were out, so she bought a bunch of these ones instead and seemed quite happy about it.

I'll be taking some to a barbecue tomorrow to test them out so we'll see what the verdict is.

The whole wheat maple banana bread is my go-to for banana breads. There's no story for it, I just needed something for my Dad's morning snack at work and it does look rather tasty non? I always sprinkly sugar in the raw on top for a little bit of extra crunch.

Chocolate Pavlovas with Chocolate Marscapone Mousse

I'm just getting this posted with less than two hours to go on our posting day as I just got back from a great weekend at a friend's cottage and the past couple weeks have been crazy at work. Let's just say I'm glad that the June Daring Bakers' challenge could be made in steps a couple of days in advance so I could get it all done or I would be SOL.

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.

All in all it worked out fantastically well. As I mentioned before, I was very busy at work-either working 7 days a week or leaving for work at 7am and coming home after 11pm so there was little time (and motivation) to get things done. The recipes were fairly easy to do as we just made some creme anglaise for the previous challenge so I was familiar with making that. The pavlovas and mousse were simple, yet they're impressive to look at.

My mother was hosting her year-end bookclub bbq so I made these and some coal cookies and ended up saving the day as no one else brought dessert.  Afterwards I received messages and letters saying how amazing they were from a number of women. 
My lesson through all of this:
I need to get myself another frigging piping bag.