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.

Pate choux.

The May 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Cat of Little Miss Cupcake. Cat challenged everyone to make a piece montée, or croquembouche, based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri.

I've never worked with pate choux before (at least not that I can remember) and I've never had a reason to as no one in my family likes eclairs, cream puffs, etc. but it was the May 24 long weekend and I had a barbecue to go to and my friends eat anything.

I made my pate choux and creme a day in advance which worked very well time-wise. My choux came out beautifully and I was quite proud (things did get a little hairy as I didn't have a non-stick pan to judge the dough's humidity). The creme was very easy to make and work with. I used caramel glaze for my piece montee. Everything was fine until I was almost all the way through and I burned myself on the caramel causing me to flinch, hit my piece, and kill 3/4 of what I had done. By the time I had rearranged everything, the caramel I had already applied had cooled and broken off and the stuff still left in the pot had cooled to the point where it was just ridiculous to try and put it all together.

Basically I had no time as I was already late for the party to make more sauce, so I did what I could and monteed that sucker, got it in the car, and my friends rejoiced. It may look ugly, but it tasted goood. I can't wait for the next DB challenge!

It's like autumn in your mouth in the spring.

It was my friend's birthday on Mother's Day, but since we all have mothers he decided to celebrate a week later with a lovely barbecue. Since I am the baker of us all and that I wouldn't be eating the meat that would be provided, I decided to bring a dessert. I had some leftover pumpkin puree from making cinnamon buns and my friend loves pumpkin pie, but I knew he had pie the previous week . I also know my friends love cheesecake as they bought me one for my birthday even though I don't eat sweet stuff just so they could eat it.

I decided upon pumpkin cheesecake swirl brownies, the recipe for which I found on Perry's Plate. It worked out fairly well although the brownie batter was a bit thick, so swirling wasn't so swirly, but the brownies were soo good. The whole plate was devoured rather quickly. They're even better on the second or third day as the pumpkin cheesecake makes the lower brownie turn almost fudgy.

There's another close-up photo of these things on my flickr account which also shows the colour and interior a bit better (minus the blurry bits because apparently I can't see what I'm doing with the digital. One day...).

A backlog of baked goods.

A bunch of my friends have birthdays in December, so to celebrate and please both the chocolate and vanilla lovers I made marble cupcakes. I used my go to recipe for marble cakes (more like a pound cake). They were tender and moist and even better on the second day.

I was also cleaning out my digital camera and came across these lovely pictures. Aparantly I forgot to import them which is a shame really. I'm pretty sure these are my infamous pumpkin cinnamon buns aka the best cinnamon buns I have ever made. I only make them in the fall because it seems weird to do something that has pumpkin in it outside of harvest season. It' like making a buche de noel in the middle of summer, but they're lovely! They proofed perfectly, the pumpkin gave it a nice golden brown colour and they were nice and tender even after a couple days (which you know can get shifty when it comes to yeasted breads) Check out flickr to see a picture of them with icing.

Lastly I made some apricot date squares for work for a party. We didn't have enough dates for a complete recipe of my usual date squares, so I pulled out my Taste of Home Cookies since I knew there was a recipe for some apricoty bars. They were fairly easy to put together, not quite as much oats as your typical date square-a little more on the shortbread side if you will. They topping is a little messy while eating, but only really tasty things are.

It's all in the cocoa.

We ran out of cookies once again, so my family requested brownies. I usually use my go-to recipe where I mix premium cocoa with Ghiradelli unsweetened Cocoa, a little coffee, and some cayenne which turns out some pretty dirty (and by dirty I mean good) brownies. They're extremely fudgey, moist, and melt in your mouth and are even better if you nuke them in the microwave before you eat them.

This time around I ran out of both of my usual cocoas as I made a bunch of my infamous coal cookies for my family and sister's boss so instead I used the only stuff we had left-generic store brand cocoa powder. I'm not saying that all store brand or no name products are horrible as I do enjoy President's Choice products these days, but this time the crapy cocoa made a difference. I had a bit of the old cocoas left and even just looking at the two I had my "Really? I'm not impressed?" grossed out face on. I even mixed in some truffle-filled chocolate bar chunks my sister brought back from Europe, but you could see and taste the difference.

See how light it is? Normally it's the rich, deep, dark colour of fertile earth or a flourless cake whereas instead it's a chalky brown. They still tasted like a good brownie, but they didn't taste like my best brownies. I'm going grocery shopping today and will be getting some new cocoa. Anybody want some partially used cocoa powder?...