Daring Bakers: Armenian Treats

April 27, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 47 Comments

The Daring Bakers’ April 2012 challenge, hosted by Jason at Daily Candor, were two Armenian standards: nazook and nutmeg cake. Nazook is a layered yeasted dough pastry with a sweet filling, and nutmeg cake is a fragrant, nutty coffee-style cake.

Armenian baking is not something I had ever contemplated before this challenge, which may ring true to many (have you ever contemplated Armenian baking?). However, Nate’s paternal forebears came from Armenia several generations ago, and he has a very Armenian last name, so it does surprise me just a little bit that, me being me, I never looked into it. That’s totally something I would do….

Daring Bakers: Dutch Crunch Rolls

March 27, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 31 Comments

Sara and Erica of Baking JDs were our March 2012 Daring Baker hostesses! Sara & Erica challenged us to make Dutch Crunch bread, a delicious sandwich bread with a unique, crunchy topping. Sara and Erica also challenged us to create a one of a kind sandwich with our bread!

Despite the fact that I was really hoping for a ridiculous, elaborate, sugary baking project for this month’s challenge, these Dutch Crunch Rolls are pretty fantastic. I had never heard of Dutch Crunch bread, but it turns out that it’s a San Francisco local specialty that originated in the Netherlands (hence the name). In Dutch, it’s called tijgerbrood, or “tiger bread” because of the way the topping cracks to look like tiger stripes (although there’s a growing consensus that it looks more like a giraffe’s spots!). “Dutch crunch” refers to the yeasted rice flour topping that is applied to the bread before baking, rather than to the bread itself, which can be any kind of soft-ish sandwich-style bread.

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Daring Bakers: Quickbread

February 27, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 43 Comments

The Daring Bakers’ February 2012 host was – Lis! Lisa stepped in last minute and challenged us to create a quick bread we could call our own. She supplied us with a base recipe and shared some recipes she loves from various websites and encouraged us to build upon them and create new flavor profiles.

A quickbread is a sweet or savory bread/cake that is made with baking powder or baking soda (and sometimes eggs) rather than yeast, thereby making it “quick” to make, start to finish. Scones, muffins, popovers, Irish soda bread, and loaves like banana bread and tea cakes all fall into this category.

A beautiful, golden brown, airy popover

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Daring Bakers: Scone Mojo

January 27, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 44 Comments

Audax Artifex was our January 2012 Daring Bakers’ host. Aud worked tirelessly to master light and fluffy scones (a/k/a biscuits) to help us create delicious and perfect batches in our own kitchens!

Audax, who can offer a wealth of information, tips, and tricks for every challenge (even when he’s not hosting it), did not disappoint with this one. When I saw that the challenge was scones, I honestly wondered how much I would learn, being that I already considered myself to have “mastered” scones – I learned to make them in grade 7 Home Ec, and have been turning them out very successfully ever since. The spirit of this challenge was to find a way to make scones that works best for you, and Audax did a ton of research on what makes a good scone and the techniques to use to make them more flaky or more tender and cake-like. All things I never knew before! He also went into the difference between a scone and a biscuit, which as far as I understand, mostly comes down to geography: they are essentially the same thing, but in America they are called biscuits, and anywhere with a British influence they are called scones. In general, I personally tend to think of scones as sweet (or served with sweet things) and biscuits as savory (or served with savory things).

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Daring Bakers: letting nature do the work…

December 27, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 21 Comments

Our Daring Bakers Host for December 2011 was Jessica of My Recipe Project and she showed us how fun it is to create Sour Dough bread in our own kitchens! She provided us with Sour Dough recipes from Bread Matters by AndrewWhitley as well as delicious recipes to use our Sour Dough bread in from Tonia George’s Things on Toast and Canteen’s Great British Food!

Well. This was QUITE the exhaustive challenge! Not only making bread, but actually cultivating the natural yeasty-beasties that turn it from flour-and-water-glop to bread, and then creating an edible to showcase said bread. See, exhaustive.

Sourdough bread begins with a “starter”, which is essentially a mixture of flour and water left long enough to get all bubbly and alive. Yes, alive – those little yeasties in the starter are living and need to be fed their own weight in flour and water in order to stay lively enough to make bread rise. When I began this challenge, I thought that making a starter involved catching wild yeast from the air (does that sound crazy?), but it turns out that the yeasts in question are actually on the grains that the flour is made from, and the flour-water mixture just wakes them up to they can do their yeasty thang. For this reason, whole, organic grains are best for making a starter: less processing equals more natural yeast in the flour, which means a more active and effective starter. You can turn a whole grain starter into a white flour starter (which is a little more versatile) by simply feeding it white flour after it has been established.…

Daring Bakers: Filipino Sans Rival Cake

November 27, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 30 Comments

Catherine of Munchie Musings was our November Daring Bakers’ host and she challenged us to make a traditional Filipino dessert – the delicious Sans Rival cake! And for those of us who wanted to try an additional Filipino dessert, Catherine also gave us a bonus recipe for Bibingka which comes from her friend Jun of Jun-blog.

At first glance, it seems odd that Sans Rival is a traditional Filipino dessert, being that all of its components are decidedly French! This is a cake made of dacquoise discs – meringue mixed with nuts and baked until crisp – layered with French buttercream frosting and decorated with more nuts (traditionally cashews). Apparently, in the 1920s and 30s, many Filipinos went abroad to study and those who ended up in France brought home the French language and pastry chef techniques that originated the Sans Rival. Sans Rival means “without rival”, and it’s a pretty appropriate name: this is a delicious, rich dessert.

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Daring Bakers: Povitica

October 27, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 30 Comments

The Daring Baker’s October 2011 challenge was Povitica, hosted by Jenni of The Gingered Whisk. Povitica is a traditional Eastern European Dessert Bread that is as lovely to look at as it is to eat!

My first thought when I saw this month’s challenge was, “What the hell is povitica?”. When I found out that it was a walnut-filled bread, I have to admit that I was not super excited about it – we had just done croissants last month, and I was hankering for something drenched in chocolate. However, once I started seeing some of the beautiful loaves showing up on the Daring Baker’s members’ forum and reading all the various iterations of, “OH MY GOD THIS IS SO GOOD!!!”, I decided to pull up my socks like a big girl and get over my attitude problem. And I’m really glad I did, because this is a beautiful, delicious bread!…

Daring Bakers: Homemade Croissants!

September 27, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 32 Comments

The Daring Bakers go retro this month! Thanks to one of our very talented non-blogging members, Sarah, the Daring Bakers were challenged to make Croissants using a recipe from the Queen of French Cooking, none other than Julia Child!

I have been wanting to try making croissants for a long time, so this was the perfect challenge! It became immediately apparent, however, that croissants can be very finicky. To make then, you encase butter in dough and then roll it out and fold it and let it rest and roll it out and fold it and let it rest and repeat several more times, all the while making sure that the butter in the dough doesn’t get too soft and melt or get too hard and shatter and that you keep it evenly layered, so that in the end you hopefully end up with beautiful, flaky, light crescents of buttery, airy, honeycomb-textured pastry. No wonder croissants are considered daunting by many home bakers!…

Daring Bakers: Chocolate and Candy!

August 27, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 15 Comments

The August 2011 Daring Bakers’ Challenge was hosted by Lisa of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives and Mandy of What the Fruitcake?!. These two sugar mavens challenged us to make sinfully delicious candies! This was a special challenge for the Daring Bakers because the good folks at http://www.chocoley.com offered an amazing prize for the winner of the most creative and delicious candy!

Did I mention that right now, Nate and I have sworn off refined sugar six days a week? Oh man, this challenge came at the wrong time! But it was also so, so right…

The premise of this month’s challenge was to have all us Daring Bakers learn to temper chocolate, and then use it in our candy creations. To temper chocolate, you heat it, cool it, and heat it again to specific temperatures in order to create small, uniform crystals of cocoa butter in the chocolate so that it stays nice and shiny when it hardens and has a good snap when it breaks. It also gives a thin, even coating to things like dipped candies. Untempered chocolate will have a mottled, dusty look when it hardens, and will crumble rather than snap cleanly when broken. For chocolate making, couverture chocolate is the gold standard – this is chocolate with a high percentage of cocoa butter that, when tempered properly, results in a shinier, snappier, mellower finished chocolate. Lisa and Mandy provided chocolate tempering instructions plus a ton of chocolate and non-chocolate candy recipes, and to be eligible for the Chocoley contest, we had to make two kinds of candy: one chocolate, and one of our choice (chocolate or otherwise).

I started out with a non-chocolate candy: sponge toffee.…

Daring Bakers: Fresh Fraisier

July 27, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 21 Comments

Jana of Cherry Tea Cakes was our July Daring Bakers’ host and she challenges us to make Fresh Frasiers inspired by recipes written by Elisabeth M. Prueitt and Chad Robertson in the beautiful cookbook Tartine.

A fraisier is a French pastry consisting of two layers of cake soaked in simple syrup with strawberries and pastry cream sandwiched between. Essentially, it is a free-standing trifle, but the special thing about a fraisier is the exposed fruit around the sides. To make a true fraisier, you have to use strawberries (fraise = strawberry), so I’m not really sure what to call my strawberry-raspberry-blueberry combination – a baies mélanger-ier doesn’t really have the same ring to it. But whatever you want to call it, it was tasty!

I did this challenge while I was in California visiting my aunt and uncle, and it was extra challenging because I was baking in an unfamiliar kitchen and also contending with a wheat and corn allergy. But it turned out beautifully and just proves that you don’t need fancy equipment or lots of space to make a spectacular dessert. …