As Comic Book Guy would say… Worst. Xmas. Ever.

This buche de Noel is brought to you by three festive doses (in varying strengths) of the flu—proper flu, none of this “I have a bad cold, so I’ll call it flu” crap—two aggrieved prolapsed discs (me), food-allergy triggered blotchiness & swelling (Dave), and a distinct lack of appetite for anything (all of us).  Even for dessert.

It probably goes without saying that I’m a little cranky, too.

At any rate, on to the challenge.  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

I was so excited about this month’s challenge.  I babbled for days to Lorraine about it, and started it with such enthusiasm.  And then the ‘flu hit.  Now I have zero enthusiasm for the buche or indeed, any form of food.  (I don’t feel any thinner yet, but I’m still hopeful.)

My chosen flavour combinations were a coconut dacquoise, white chocolate ganache insert, mango mousse, ginger creme brulee, and a gorgeously glossy (but very tempermental) white chocolate icing.  I went all Blue Peter and created a mould out of an old plastic bottle, some cardboard and sticky tape.  I’m really happy with how ithe shape turned out and I’d certainly make my own mould again rather than buy a tin that’s only going to be used once a year.

Oh, I should mention that I added some popping candy to the coconut crisp insert and it stayed nicely pop-py, which was quite cool.  It was a shame that I didn’t like the taste of the rest of the layer.  I suspect, that gavottes aren’t quite my thing and I should have just bought a box of Rice Krispies or asked around and begged some from a friend.

On the whole, I did like the buche, but I was by no means blown away or impressed.  Which makes me really sad, considering how excited I was and also that I dragged myself through its creation when I should have been languishing in bed.  But I would like to thank Hilda and Marion for giving us such a wonderful challenge to end 2008 with!

Sparkling royal icing snowflakes adorn the top of the buche.

Caramel is one of my all-time favourite flavours, so when I saw that this month’s Daring Bakers challenge was a sumptuous old-style caramel cake, I was thrilled.  I even clapped my hands with glee.  Really.  Okay, so maybe I was a little tipsy when I read the announcement, but even stone-cold sober the next morning I was still v.excited.

This month, our lovely hosts Dolores, Alex, Jenny and Natalie have chosen Shuna Fish Lydon’s signature caramel cake.  Shuna, of Eggbeater fame, is a San Francisco London based pastry chef with a wonderfully relaxed style of writing.  Shuna has had a glittering career in pastry, having worked at The Gramercy Tavern, The French Laundry and Bouchon.  Wow!

So, with that kind of pedigree in mind, I must admit that I was a little intimidated when I saw that Shuna considered this a difficult cake.  When a pastry chef describes something as difficult, that’s just plain scary to a home cook.  Nevertheless, I happily dived in headfirst.

So, let’s start at the very beginning.  A very good place to start…

The caramel syrup was fairly easy to make, once I sorted out the horrendous crystalisation that occurred halfway through.  I inadvertently knocked some crystals down from the side of the pan while stirring the pale gold caramel—I’ve never seen crystals seed so quickly!  Turning out the heat and mashing the crystals until the syrup felt smooth under the spatula seemed to sort it out, and then I just turned the heat on full again and let the caramel boil until it reached a gorgeous dark amber, almost the colour of treacle.  Because Shuna instructed us to cook the caramel until it was smoking, the house filled with the most gorgeous burnt caramel scent.

Once it was the right colour—and smell—I hurriedly pulled my sleeves down and threw on my oven gloves.  With the heat off, and the pan lid on and slightly adjar, I poured in the extra water to “stop” the caramel from going any further.   I expected the caramel to sieze but it all dissolved into a smooth syrup straight away.  I boiled it for a further three minutes, checked the consistency on a spoon and let it cool to room temperature.  Once cooled, the consistency was somewhere between maple and Golden syrup when it fell from a spoon.  Sweet, slightly bitter, slightly burnt and quite irresistable.

One thing I’ve noted over the last month is that “dark amber” is a really subjective colour.  I’ve seen syrups that are barely blonde in colour, and no one else’s seems to have been as dark as mine!  But, I chose to take the caramel as far as possible until it really did smoke as I figured that it was the primary flavour of the cake so it had to be as intense as possible.  I would have loved to have seen a picture of the syrup as prepared by Shuna, but then I would probably have wondered if my monitor was showing the true colour!  So, yes.  Colour is very subjective.

For the cake, I made certain to follow all of Shuna’s hints and tips.  I even got Dave to adjust the head on my KitchenAid to make sure it was mixing properly—it’s been knocking for a little while, but apparently I’ve been trying to adjust the wrong screw.  Ooops.

I loved trickling the dark, dark syrup into the creamed butter and sugar, changing it in an instant from ivory fluff to a sexy dark gold.  I was so tempted to throw in more and more of the syrup, and I probably would, if not making this for a challenge.  (I’d reduce the milk to compensate, though.)

The batter did break when I was adding the milk, so I stopped, scraped down the sides and then added the next portion of the flour which made it recover nicely.  I went cautiously when adding the remainder of the milk and ended up leaving a couple of tablespoons behind as I felt it just wouldn’t recover if I added the whole amount.  Sometimes you just have to use your intuition when baking, and the amount of milk you’ll need very much depends on the flour you use.

What I should have done, was make a slight well in the centre of the cake batter before baking it.  When I turned it round, half-way through baking, it was very well risen in the centre with a cracked peak, so the oven was most likely too hot.  I gnashed my teeth and tried to ignore it.

But, ignore it, I could not.  It preyed on my mind all night and the next morning found me back in the kitchen whipping up a second cake.  Which came out exactly the same, even though I went off-piste slightly and chose to bake the cake without a sheet pan underneath.  Luckily, I’d been conservative and halved the recipe each time otherwise I could have been quite annoyed.

So, what was meant to be a simple and conservative caramel cake turned into a four layer extravaganza.  I really should have put more frosting between each layer, but I wanted to make the top all swirly and pretty, hence it only looks like a two layer cake until you cut a slice.  I like to think of it as a stealth cake.

Four layers of caramel madness

The caramel flavour was intense, but with an edge to it which I can only attribute to cooking the caramel so dark.  This was not a bad thing—we loved it!  None of us found the cake to be too sweet, which is something I was really worried about after reading comments on the DB forums.

I can’t say enough good things about the frosting.  Using browned butter was an absolute stroke of genius and you could control the thickness of the frosting by leaving the butter more on the liquid side or letting it set up again.  So, glaze or buttercream.  Like I said, genius.  Before I started adding the caramel syrup, I knew this was going to be fabulous and I wasn’t wrong.  To adjust the seasoning I used Maldon sea salt and crushed up the flakes randomly so that there would be the occasional salty hit in there as well as a gloriously slightly salted caramel taste.  This was so incredibly, wonderfully, amazingly good!  I’ll be happily slathering this frosting over pumpkin cupcakes in the future.   I suppose it might be considered excessive to make a big bowl just for my own gluttonous needs?  Shame.  It’s seriously good.

I am so pleased to have finally tried out one of Shuna’s recipes.  This is a wonderful cake that I will happily—oh, so very happily—make again.  Perhaps even for my birthday…

Don’t forget to check out The Daring Bakers Blogroll to see the other amazing caramel creations! (more…)

This month The Daring Bakers are making pizza for the first time.  Yup, that’s right.  This is the first time that we as a group have tossed and twirled dough around to make pizza!

Our host Rosa from Rosa’s Yummy Yums chose Peter Reinhart’s pizza dough recipe from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice—coincidentally, last month’s challenge came from the same book—and left us endless options for toppings.

I did have a bunch of fancy thoughts about toppings—fig and feta over caramelised onions would have been gorgeous—but what with Lucas’s birthday and various other things, I was pushed for time this month.  So, I played it safe (and simple) and made pepperoni pizzas for Dave and I.

The dough was pretty sticky, more like a foccacia than any pizza doughs I’ve made before, but still relatively manageable.  The trouble came when I came to toss the dough…

I tried—oh, how I tried—to toss the pizza dough, but it was impossible.  Within two bounces on my floury little fists it was see-through in the centre and with a further toss it just tore.  I ended up pinching the edges of the holes together and praying that the pizza wouldn’t stick to the baking sheet.  Needless to say, I do not have a picture of my disastrous attempts and I’m pretty sure that I won’t be getting a job in a pizza parlour any time in this lifetime!!

I sauced the pizzas with a little passata, simply seasoned with some dried oregano, salt, pepper and a pinch of sugar then piled on a mixture of shredded mozzarella and grated pecorino.  I tried to be restrained with the pepperoni slices, but wound up overlapping and tucking them in wherever I could as it looked so good!  When each pizza came out of the oven I added some freshly torn basil for extra flavour—echoing the herbs in the sauce—and colour.

My pizza was good, but… I have to be honest and say that I didn’t think this was the best pizza crust recipe ever.  It struck me that this was the sort of recipe that needed a furiously hot wood-burning oven—Hi Jeremy!—rather than a domestic oven to cope with the high water content.  It did develop good flavour overnight and it was very, very thin, but it came out doughy rather than crispy despite extra time in the oven.  (And believe me, my oven was very hot!)

I’ll be sticking with my current favourite crust recipe—the lavash crackers from last month’s challenge—for the moment, but I’m glad that I got the chance to try out a new recipe!

Thanks for a fun challenge, Rosa!  And don’t forget to check out the other Daring Bakers pizzas on the blogroll.

(more…)

This month, The Daring Bakers are making our own kind of history.  For the first time, the monthly challenge is hosted two ‘alternative’ Daring Bakers, Shel and Natalie.  The challenge was to make Lavash Crackers from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice plus a vegan and gluten-free dip.  Fantastic!  I’ve been wondering when our next savoury challenge would come and yay!  Here it is!

So what is lavash?  Lavash is an Armenian flatbread that is pretty versatile.  Straight from the oven it is soft and pliable, but upon cooling it hardens to a cracker texture.  I’d never heard of this bread before the challenge was announced, despite owning The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.  I guess I must have skipped over the page whilst flicking through my own copy of the BBA but now that I’ve been introduced to them I’m quite enamoured.

The dough was very quick to mix, with a nice smooth texture from the oil.  Perhaps I added too much water, but my dough didn’t double in size, despite leaving it for almost two hours at room temperature (21.5C according to our fantastic new digital thermostat) but as it had risen a bit, I figured that I could just go ahead and roll it out as I did want very thin crackers.

To make life easier on myself, I rolled the dough out directly on a teflon sheet and then wiggled a baking sheet underneath the whole affair.  It took maybe about 15 minutes to get the dough as thin and even as possible.

I really liked the spice and seed combination shown in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice so I decided to go with that and proceeded to sprinkle and strew the sheet of dough with the most amazing array of earthy colours and textures.  As I was worried about the seeds and spice falling off after the crackers had baked, I prodded them down into the dough.  Oh, I did make one small change.  I used smoked Maldon salt to give it a bit of a kick.

As they baked, a spicy-sweet aroma drifted out from the kitchen.  I tried not to hover over the oven, but as usual I found myself standing there watching the crackers bake.  I guess I shouldn’t laugh at Lucas watching the washing machine going round and round and round if I can stand in front of the oven and watch bread baking with equal levels of fascination…

The crackers came out wonderfully thin and crispy with all the toppings firmly stuck in place.  Hurrah!  As I’d opted to pre-cut the crackers, all I had to do was snap off as many as I wanted and taste away.

I originally planned to serve the lavash with some pea guacamole, the idea being that the sweetness of the peas would contrast nicely with the earthiness of the spices.  But… when it came down to it, I realised that not only had I forgotten to thaw the peas, I’d used up my limes and salsa earlier on in the week.  There was no way that I was going out to the supermarket on the busiest night of the week, so I hit the pantry for inspiration.

After tossing back and forth a few options, I settled on making a chickpea and pomegranate molasses dip.  I guess this is really just a bit of a twist on hummus, but who cares?  It was very easy and very delicious with a gorgeous balance between the sweet and sour molasses and the creamy chickpeas.  I loved how the pomegranate was the first and last thing you tasted in the dip, effortlessly sliding from achingly sour to a wonderfully sweet aftertaste which combined perfectly with the spices.

The lavash were an absolute breeze to make and great fun, too.  I’m really proud of how thin I managed to get them, but there’s still room for improvement.  Next time I’ll run the dough through my pasta machine for the ultimate in thinness.  These would be great, broken into artistic shards and served with a rainbow of dips, at a drinks party if I ever were to host such a thing.  Less glamorously, but equally as delicious, they make a great afternoon snack with just about any dip or extra topping–gluttonous?  Moi?–you can think of.

Check out The Daring Bakers Blogroll to see everyone else’s lovely lavash and dips!  Thanks for an awesome challenge, Natalie and Shel!

(more…)

Our hosts for this month’s Daring Bakers challenge are the lovely Meeta of What’s for lunch, Honey? and Tony Tahhan. They took pity on us and offered up a fairly straightforward recipe that wouldn’t leave us sweltering in the kitchen for too long: Pierre Herme’s chocolate éclairs.

I adore éclairs and also have a little bit of a crush on Pierre Hermé, so I was thrilled with this challenge recipe. I often flick through Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Hermé, sighing longingly over each recipe, but always reluctant to commit myself to so much butter and sugar. The Daring Bakers have provided me with the perfect excuse to indulge myself–learning, camaraderie and fun–and I couldn’t be happier.

While I could have made the entire recipe within a day, I chose to spread it over two so that I could take things easy. I’ve only recently been allowed back into the kitchen after having surgery on my right eye, so I felt the need to move slowly, especially where sharp objects are concerned.

I kicked things off with the pastry cream. The challenge rules stated that we had to make the choux pastry with no changes, but we had the option of having one non-chocolate component. I opted to make a coconut pastry cream as I suspected that an all-chocolate experience would be a little too much for my two expert taste-testers.

Anyone who has ever eaten a dark chocolate Bounty bar will tell you that it is a match made in heaven and I hoped that this would be the case with the eclairs.

The pastry cream came together like a dream. Richly scented and flavoured with coconut; I had to hurriedly press a sheet of clingfilm to it otherwise I’d have eaten the whole lot in the name of ‘tasting’.

The chocolate sauce–a necessary component of the chocolate glaze–was next and was so easy to make. It provided a really intense hit of chocolate, unlocking the layers of flavour and making it easy to pick out the more subtle nuances. I’ll definitely be using this recipe again as it wasn’t overly rich or cloying.

The next morning I moved on to the choux pastry which turned out to be pretty damn fabulous. It was a world away from the previous recipe I used in every respect–texture, colour, flavour and behaviour. Taking an extra few minutes to cook out the choux pastry after it forms a ball in the pan really makes a difference to the finished pastry. Clouds of steam billowed up from the bowl of my KitchenAid when I beat the initial paste to cool it slightly before adding the eggs and it looked ever so slightly oily, but I persevered. Upon adding the eggs, that old magic happened and the most beautiful choux pastry emerged. Thick, glossy, silky smooth and sporting the most gorgeous golden glow. This will be my ‘go-to’ choux pastry recipe in future. I can’t say enough how much I loved it.

And so to the actual eclairs. Interestingly Pierre said that the choux pastry must be used warm so I began piping straight away. I am not very good at piping. In fact, I suck at piping so I was dreading this part.

We were instructed to use a 2cm diameter piping tip and after looking at my meagre collection of tips I determined that the best thing to do would be to use the coupler without any tip at all, as that was closest to 2cm. This did seem to make the piping more difficult, but I persevered and by the time that I’d piped my fourth line of pate aux choux I’d managed one presentable line.

You see, in an effort to create perfect éclair shapes, I had opted to follow the lovely Tartlette’s advice to pipe the choux in long lines, freeze, and then cut the éclairs to size. This worked out really well, and if I manage to improve my piping skills then I can see my turning out some really beautiful eclairs in future. Just not today.

Once baked, the éclairs were a little… rustic in appearance, but chocolate glaze can hide a multitude of sins. This is where things went really, really wrong. I think I over-stirred the chocolate when it was melting into the hot cream, as when I added the butter the entire mixture split. After staring in horror at the mess before me, I poured off the fat and gently stirred in the warm chocolate sauce at which point it miraculously recovered. Being greatly daring, I re-added the butter, drop by drop, and the glaze was rescued!

The glaze started to thicken really quickly, despite the warmth of the kitchen, so I had to work fast. After all the trauma of making the glaze I did not want to have to reheat it. So I quickly dipped the éclair tops in the glaze which worked out really nicely and they looked like a million dollars with their slick of chocolate.

And now the home straight… I added some sweetened coconut flakes to the pastry cream, just for a bit of textural interest as well as an added hit of flavour and lightened it with some whipped cream before piping it into the éclair bases and tumbling over a few raspberries. Popped their tops on and voilà! Dark chocolate and coconut éclairs!

I much preferred the éclairs after they’d chilled overnight. I love crisp profiteroles, but for me… éclairs need a bit of extra squidge to reach the proper heights of decadence. The crisp exterior gave way to the most delicious coconut pastry cream which gave up more and more flavour with each chew. And then the chocolate hit. Oh my god, the glaze was obscenely good!

It all melded together to create the Bounty flavour that I was aiming for, but so, so much better. This is a sophisticated and decadent–if not particularly elegant–éclair. Thank-you so much, Meeta and Tony, for a wonderful recipe!

Don’t forget to visit the Daring Bakers Blogroll for more wonderful éclairs!

(more…)

This month, The Daring Bakers are undertaking a real challenge: Danish Braid.

I once tried to make Danish pastries using Nigella’s recipe in How to be a Domestic Goddess and let’s just say that it wasn’t a resounding success. But this was the real deal: laminated dough and in the height of summer, too!

Whatever you do, don’t start thinking about making your dough at 2130. Sure, the chilling will take two hours, enabling you to get to bed at a semi-decent hour, but what about the time needed to do your mis-en-place or roll out perfect rectangles? Whoops.

So, there I was at an ungodly hour, turning my dough every 30 minutes and wishing that I’d started this in the afternoon when Lucas was asleep. He had a nice long nap, and I kept thinking that he’d be waking up soon. But he didn’t and I wound up frittering away the afternoon. Woe.

Still, the dough started off pretty well once I got going. The combination of cardamom, vanilla (seeds and extract) and orange was delicious and the dough looked pretty rich even before the butter was spread onto it.

This was my first attempt at a laminated dough. The closest I’d come previously was brioche when Dave gave me my Kitchen Aid. I’ve shied away from using such huge amounts of butter in dough ever since. It probably wasn’t that bad, but the memories of sticky dough and butter everywhere are strong.

When spreading the butter on, I left a small border around the edges to try and minimise the possibility of it oozing out the sides. This seemed to work quite well: when I did the second turn there was only tiny bit of ooze that I patched up as best I could. The dough looked more yellow, too. Another thirty minutes. Weak yay.

Still, on the plus side I did manage to get plenty of reading done in between turns. I read the whole of Powers: Who Killed Retro Girl? in good time for recording our comics podcast.

Once the fourth turn was completed I cut the dough in half and gazed in wonder at all the beautiful layers I’d created. The photo doesn’t do it justice, alas, but trust me. It was an amazing sight. Almost enough to make me try making puff pastry! (Click for a much better look at the dough.)

The next evening, I rolled out one half of the dough which had risen quite dramatically, despite the cold of the fridge. It had certainly more than doubled! I’d decided to fill this braid with pistachio pastry cream—using home-made pistachio paste—some white chocolate chunks and a boozy apricot sat atop each chunk.

Alas, this braid was doomed to failure. As the dough rose, the pastry cream, despite its very thick texture—oozed out and one end started to unravel. By the time it was baked it looked quite pathetic. It tasted great, but I knew I could do better, so I sent it off to work with Dave to be devoured by locusts his colleagues and opted to make a second sweet braid the next day.

Before braiding the second, and hopefully more successful braid, I watched Julia Child’s masterclass with Beatrice Ojakangas with the sort of ferocious intensity that a lion would be proud of. One thing I noted was that she pulled up the dough surrounding the filling of the braid rather than just folding the strips of dough over. If that makes any sense? Just watch the video and you’ll see. This looked like it would help prevent the filling from escaping.

Rather than go the pistachio pastry cream route again, I chose to create a ‘Strawberries and Cream’ filling. I boiled a jar of strawberry conserve with the juice of half a lemon for five minutes until slightly thickened and let it cool. It ended up as a thick paste which I had to blob over the centre of the dough. I topped that with the remainder of the pastry cream. I topped the completed braid with some demerera sugar for a bit of crunch—has anyone in the UK managed to find pearl sugar for sale anywhere?

I just have one word to say: Wow.

Okay, maybe a few more words… This braid was world’s away from my first attempt. For a start, it looked and smelt gorgeous, with no leaky filling at all. A massive improvement. I drizzled it with a coffee glace icing which made it even prettier.

When I eventually tasted it, the taste combination was just wonderful. The strawberry jam was thick but not overly so—I had worried that it would thicken even more in the oven, leaving me with a chewy centre—and the pastry cream helped balance out the sweetness. Both took really well to the flavoursome dough. It’s been ages since I’ve had a Danish, so I’m not quite certain if the texture of the pastry was right. It was a little bready in the centre of the braid—still light, though—and only a little flaky on top. I don’t really care if the texture was 100% correct or not… the Danish braid was absolutely gorgeous (once I got the braiding right) and I’ll definitely be doing it again!

Thanks, Kelly and Ben, for such a fantastic challenge!

(more…)

This month the Daring Bakers are tackling the multi-layered and very impressive Opera cake.

As you can see from the picture, I haven’t made a traditional chocolate and coffee Opera. There was a twist stipulated by our four lovely hosts for May: all Opera cakes were to bee light. So, light in colour and flavour to celebrate springtime.

After a bit of thought, I decided to make a mango and raspberry opera cake. The two flavours go together very well and also work with almond–the main flavour of the joconde sponge that is the base for the cake.

In an effort to be a Good Girl and follow the recipe exactly, I splashed out on a lovely 15×10″ jelly roll pan. It really is beautiful, and I’ll be happy to sell it on to anyone with an oven large enough to fit it into! I discovered–thankfully before adding batter to the pan–that my oven was about 1cm too narrow to take the tin. Calamity! I rescued the day, or so I thought, by baking three 8.5″ square layers.

The buttercream was a breeze. I hate making Italian buttercream, so opted to use the Swiss buttercream recipe from a previous Dber challenge. It’s really, really easy and is worlds away from the simple buttercream I grew up with. You can add such an incredible variety of flavours to it, which is a huge bonus. This time I slowly added some thick, unsweetened raspberry puree and watched the colour swirl and change.

Assembly was the least fun part for me. I’ve got to buy an offset spatula–I seriously contemplated getting out a spirit level to try and make sure that the buttercream was going on at least vaguely level. In an attempt to get a pouring consistency, I made the glaze too runny and it went everywhere except on the cake. I wound up scraping it back into the bowl, letting it cool some more, then re-spreading the cake with it. Surprisingly it looked pretty good, apart from the pink colour I tinted the chocolate with clashing with the raspberry buttercream. Whoops.

After all that, the cake tasted good but I just wasn’t blown away. Plus, it looked clunky; not at all like the elegant visions of cake that I’d been dreaming of. And even worse… the raspberry buttercream drowned out the flavour of the mango mousse.

So, I bought yet another tin–this time a British Swiss roll tin–and re-made the cake one evening when Dave was away and Lucas was tucked up in bed.

This time I switched round the proportions of mango and raspberries and also added a punnet of strawberries an extra taste of summer. This gave me an opportunity to use my own strawberry liqueur, not that I ever need an excuse to play around with it. Gorgeous stuff.

I halved the recipe, with the exception of the soaking syrup, and the difference between the two cakes is just incredible. For a start… just look at the height difference! Cake v2 is so much more dainty and elegant. The mango buttercream is fragrant and light and stands up very well to the strong berry flavour of the mousse. The glaze may not be as smooth and pretty as that of v1, but it did set beautifully this time round.

Click for a better view.

I’m so pleased that I chose to redo the cake. Finally the cake I’d envisaged in my head has appeared on a plate and I couldn’t be happier with it. The flavours are balanced, the joconde is wonderfully moist with a subtle strawberry flavour, and it looks pretty damn good, too!

Thank-you girls (Lis, Ivonne, Shea and Fran) for giving us such a wonderful challenge this month! Please do check out the other Daring Bakers creations via the blogroll.

(more…)

This month’s Daring Bakers challenge, hosted by Deborah of Taste and Tell and Elle of Feeding My Enthusiasms, is Cheesecake Pops. Or, as I like to think of it, cheesecake-onna-stick.

My love of cheesecake is legendary and of course, I’m more than a little fond of chocolate, too. Alas, I’m firmly back on the Weight Watchers bandwagon, so making the cheesecake pops, while great fun, was absolutely tortuous. Still, I valiantly baked and dipped my pops without sneaking any “little tastes.” I did taste all the different pops after dinner, and as they’re very, very more-ish, I shall be packing the rest of them off to work with Dave tomorrow morning!

I made three-fifths of the cheesecake batter and baked my cheesecake in an 8×8-inch ceramic dish for 40 minutes and it set beautifully. It had just gone from jiggly to firm in the centre when I pulled it out and this meant that when it came to scooping the balls, it rolled really well.

It definitely pays to think up flavour/topping ideas before you put the cheesecake balls in the freezer. I came up with some fun ideas for the centre of each ball by which time the pops were solidly frozen, and pressing chopped stem ginger into the balls would have been much easier before they were frozen!

Stem ginger pops

I love the combination of hot ginger with smooth dark chocolate, so this one was a real winner for me. Next time round I’ll press even more minced ginger into the cheesecake as I found myself wanting it to be really hot.

Limoncello pops

First dipped in a limoncello-spiked lemon jelly, then in white chocolate, these pops had a great flavour but the jelly had a disappointingly icy texture. Still quite delicious, though.

Toffee pops

Dipped in dark chocolate and quickly rolled in chocolate-toffee pieces, these were awesome. I had wanted to use Dime bars, but couldn’t find any, so instead substituted Cadbury Chomp Bars which are similar but chewy rather than crunchy.

Classic cheesecake pops

Dark chocolate and a roll around in crushed Digestive biscuits equals classic cheesecake flavour in my book. The biscuits were salty in comparison to the cheesecake and chocolate, making this my absolute favourite of the bunch.

Overall, these were a huge success. I reckon that they’d make the perfect party dessert for kids and adults alike, so I’ll definitely be making them again. Thanks for choosing such a great recipe, Elle and Deborah!

Riddle me this… what recipe sprawls over ten pages and takes seven hours to complete?

Julia Child’s French Bread, of course!

Julia Child evokes warm, fuzzy feelings in the hearts of many Americans, however on this side of the pond she’s hardly a household name. So I headed over to Wikipedia–I know, I know… hardly an accurate source, but it’s a good starting point–for some background, and was amazed to discover that she worked in US Intelligence during WWII. Very cool.

It was also quite inspiring to read that she only started cooking seriously in her 40s. That should give hope to career changers or even the most inexperienced and nervous cooks, presuming they want to improve, of course!

Julia’s French Bread clocks in at an impressive ten pages as already mentioned. It’s not just a recipe, though. It’s more of a treatise on the art of French bread-making as it stood in the fifties.

The best bread is often the simplest, and you can’t get much more simple than Julia’s ingredients: flour, salt, yeast and water. One of the requirements for this month’s challenge was that we use all-purpose flour to get as close as possible to the 8% gluten that French bakers use. I’ve got to admit, this hurt. I hate using all-purpose/plain flour for bread baking. It always produces a weak, flabby dough and in any case, the brand that I use is 11% protein and my standard bread flour (Dove’s) is 12.8%. I really, really wanted to pull out the bread flour but decided that I should be a proper Daring Baker and put aside my prejudices.

Despite–or perhaps because of–the length of the recipe, it went pretty well. Certainly much better than last month’s disastrous Lemon Meringue Pie.

My crust wasn’t terrifically hard–no nice shattering noises when I tore into the loaf, alas–but it was very tasty indeed. I did manage to get some decent-sized holes in the crumb which worked perfectly for holding butter. The flavour was good, but as I’ve never had real French bread I don’t have anything to compare it to. I can say, however, that it was a decent loaf of bread. I’ve baked far better in the past and I’m sure I will in the future, but I’m glad that I gave this recipe a whirl!

The best thing about this recipe was that it gave me the perfect opportunity to christen my shiny new dough scraper and lame, bought in a (slightly) enthusiastic splurge after my cookery course last weekend. I’ve always wanted a lame and I have to say that the proper tool makes a massive difference. Normally even my sharpest knife drags and deflates the dough, but the lame glided through without snagging. And the dough scraper was awesome! Very good for mixing and also the initial very sticky stage of the kneading. I’ve actually been using it every day when chopping vegetables as it’s a nice safe way of transferring them from board to pot or container. Better for your knife, too, I suspect.

Next time round I think I will swap to bread flour and perhaps reduce the amount of yeast as my dough rose twice as fast as the recipe dictated, despite my efforts to find the coldest spot in the house. I think that proving the dough on the final baking sheet would also be an improvement–I lost a lot of air in the painstaking transfer between cloth, intermediate and baking sheet. As the crust wasn’t terribly golden or very hard–but still tasty!–I would increase the oven temperature to maximum for the first 10 minutes of baking, and then drop it back down.

For the full recipe (and helpful pictures), visit Breadchick Mary’s website.

…or how to dent your ego in one easy step.

I’ve been baking Lemon Meringue Pies (hereafter abbreviated to LMP) since the age of seven, so when LMP was announced as the January challenge for the Daring Bakers–hosted by Canadian Baker, Jen–I was slightly… underwhelmed.

“How on earth could LMP be challenging,” I thought to myself, smugly.

Dave suggested that perhaps the challenge in this instance would be in following the recipe exactly and not making any adjustments, even those I would normally do to rescue things. If things went wrong, which of course they wouldn’t. Because, you know, I’ve been making these things since I was seven.

See my ego?

I have to admit that I started to get worried when reports of weepy meringue and runny filling–or sauce, as one poster described it–started to pour in on the Daring Bakers private blog. So I took a closer look at the recipe.

Oh dear.

Now I could see why people were having so much trouble with the filling.

The ingredients for the lemon filling were absolutely standard, but the proportions and the techniques used were different to what I’ve previously used.

Pouring a dry mixture of cornflour (cornstarch) and sugar into hot water really didn’t sit well with me. Apart from the distinct possibility of lumps forming, the cornflour was added at the beginning of the cooking process for the filling and was then subsequently heated to boiling point twice. And all that heating means lots of stirring to prevent lumps, and cornflour doesn’t particularly like being stirred.

The other thing with cornflour is that it loses its thickening properties when heated too high and for too long. I never, ever bring it to a boil, and yet… if I was following the recipe as I promised I would when I signed up to become a Daring Baker, I had to boil the damn filling.

Sure enough, I had problems. Despite the huge amount of cornflour, the mixture never got really, really thick. And given how temperamental cornflour is, I didn’t want to cook it for even longer or more aggressively. When I added the egg yolks, I expected the mixture to finally thicken up properly… but it didn’t. And when I finished it off with butter–thickened slightly–and lemon juice–got thinner and thinner despite adding it ultra-slowly–I knew it was a disaster.

I should probably have just started again, but I chose to be optimistic. Perhaps I hadn’t cooked the filling for long enough and it would firm up more after a trip through the oven and then the fridge?

Yeah, right.

A really, really good lemon meringue pie should have a thick, slicable filling. It shouldn’t be completely set and firm like a Key Lime Pie, but neither should it slither out from under the meringue and cover your plate. Instead, it should generously concede to wobble ever-so-slightly and perhaps bulge at the edges once the slice has made its perilous journey to your plate. (I should point out that I only ever eat LMP cold. A hot LMP is heresy, as far as I’m concerned.)

This… this… lemon sauce does not correspond in any way, shape or form with my idea of the perfect lemon meringue pie. Frankly, it was pretty disastrous.

To give you some idea of just how runny the filling was, when I cut into the pie there was an immediate whoosh as filling spurted out and proceeded to run all over the worktop and dribble onto the floor. After staring in horror for a few seconds, I hurriedly put the collar back on the tart tin and shoved a plate underneath to catch the drips. I knew it would be runny, but I never expected it to be quite so bad!

The worst thing was that I’d promised Dave’s mum the finished pie as it’s her absolute favourite dessert ever. I wound up making a very embarrassed phone call and promised to make her one–using my own recipe–with a proper filling rather than sauce.

Despite the problems I encountered with the filling, quite a few other DBers reported back that their pies turned out amazingly well with properly set fillings, so the recipe isn’t totally flawed. Just highly variable.

If the pie had tasted amazing, then I could have forgiven the runny filling, but it just didn’t taste that great to be honest. You would think that it would be exquisitely tart with the massive amount of lemon juice needed, but it was just sweet and vaguely lemony. Now, since I used five organic, unwaxed lemons, I was a little peeved about this.

The crust was nice and short, but somehow managed to lack flavour. Left to my own devices I would probably have added some vanilla seeds and a little bit more salt to bring out the sweetness of the pastry.

No complaints about the meringue. I really liked the addition of vanilla and will probably add it into my own LMP recipe. I didn’t have any problems at all with the meringue weeping; the only weeping in our household came from me as I stood helplessly watching lemon sauce cascade over the worktop.

So, after my first Daring Bakers challenge, I stand before you all, humbled and shame-faced, but still very excited to be a DBer. I wonder what next month’s challenge will be?