This year for his birthday, Nate requested a creamsicle cheesecake. I’ll admit that the creamsicle combination of creamy vanilla ice cream with orange isn’t usually my first choice – especially when there is creamy vanilla ice cream with chocolate to be had instead – but since it was his birthday, I acquiesced. Compared to the chocolate caramel bacon insanity cake from his birthday a few years ago, it was a relatively simple request.
…
For the March Daring Bakers’ Challenge, Korena from Korena in the Kitchen taught us that some treats are best enjoyed upside down. She challenged us to make a tarte Tatin from scratch.
This month I was excited to host another Daring Bakers’ challenge, for which I chose the tarte Tatin. This classic French dessert is basically the apple pie version of an upside-down cake: apples are caramelized in sugar in a saucepan, covered with pastry and baked, and then inverted on a plate to serve. It’s a great example of the magic of caramelized sugar: the apples take on a deep, rich mahogany colour and become infused with the complex flavours of a well-cooked caramel, and the crisp puff pastry base also becomes practically candied with caramel at the edges, resulting in a fantastic mix of soft, crunchy, and chewy textures.
The tart is named after the Tatin sisters, who ran a hotel near Paris in the 1880s. Apparently, one day one of the sisters forgot to put a bottom crust on her apple pie, but instead of the disaster she was expecting to pull out of the oven, she ended up with a dessert so loved by the hotel guests that it became the hotel’s signature dish. However, this sweet story conflicts with the fact that a similar upside-down apple tart called tarte Solognotte (named after the Sologne region in France) existed long before the tarte Tatin, suggesting that the Tatin sisters’ creation was actually just an updated and improved version of the tarte Solognotte. Either way, it is a stunningly delicious yet simple and rustic dessert….
I’ve been trying to write this post about this Devil’s Food Cake with Black Pepper Buttercream for three days now but seem to be experiencing writer’s block, so in an attempt to get something down on the page so that I can share it with you in time for Valentine’s Day (because nothing is more appropriate than chocolate cake on Valentine’s Day), I give you the following Reasons You Should Make This Cake:
1) It has not one but two kinds of frosting: Swiss meringue buttercream filling laced with vanilla and cracked black pepper (yes, pepper), and the most divine whipped chocolate fudge frosting on the outside. Black pepper might sound like an odd thing to pair with classic chocolate and vanilla, but it’s not odd – it’s very, very good.
…
For the month of January Jelena from A Kingdom for a Cake invited us to start this year with a dreamy celebration cake. She challenged us to make the Esterhazy cake a.k.a the Hungarian dream. What better way to start the year than with a sweet dream?
A sweet dream? I could not agree more. The Esterhazy torte is a Hungarian pastry made of five layers of hazelnut sponge cake and hazelnut buttercream, all topped off with a gorgeous starburst of chocolate. If you like hazelnuts (or Nutella, Fererro Rocher, or Frangelico), then this is the cake for you!
…
The November Daring Baker’s challenge took us for a ride! Luisa from Rise of the Sourdough Preacher challenged us to make Paris-Brest, a beautiful pastry celebrating the Paris-Brest bicycle race.
My favourite Daring Bakers challenges are the ones where I get to pretend to be a fancy-pants pastry chef, so despite being several days late with this post, I was actually pretty excited about this month’s challenge: a very French pastry called the Paris-Brest. This pastry, which is a ring of choux pastry filled with praline crème mousseline, commemorates the famous bicycle race between Paris and Brest, and its circular shape is supposed to represent a wheel. Apparently it was created because the riders needed a high calorie snack to refuel them after their 1,200 kilometer race – the early 20th century equivalent of a PowerBar!
…
The October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Korena of Korena in the Kitchen. She took us to Austria and introduced us to the wonders of the Sachertorte. This month I was thrilled to be hosting a Daring Bakers’ Challenge for the second time. My favorite challenges are the ones where I get to bake a cake and/or pretend to be a pastry chef, so for this month’s challenge I chose a recipe for a classic European-style chocolate cake: the Austrian Sachertorte.
…
While local strawberries are still at least a month off, I admit to thoroughly enjoying the juicy red California-grown gems that have been showing up at the green grocer lately. I can’t help myself – this winter felt SO LONG and strawberries are like the breath of fresh air and ray of sunlight that I’m craving right now. And while they might not be local, they are at least in season, and for that I am grateful!
…
The January 2014 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Francijn of “Koken in de Brouwerij“. She challenged us all to bake layered cakes in the tradition of Baumkuchen (tree cake) and Schichttorte (layered cake).
When I first read Francijn’s challenge, I thought I had no idea what I was getting in to. I’d never heard of Baumkuchen – a traditional German cake baked in layers on a rotating spit in front of a grill, whose final spiraling layers resemble the cross-sectional growth rings of a tree [see how it’s done] – but when I got to the Shichttorte – a layer cake made by baking very thin layers of batter one by one on top each other – I realized that I had in fact bookmarked a similar recipe in a cookbook, probably close to fifteen years ago! I thought the recipe was just an extremely complicated way to bake a cake, which is why I had never attempted to make it before – I had no idea it was a legitimate traditional method, and I was excited to finally give it a try.
…
I’ve been making chocolate truffles at Christmas for at least ten years, ever since a friend of my Mum’s let me know how easy it was – just make a ganache of melted chocolate and cream, let it cool, then shape and roll in cocoa powder. Some years I decide to get fancier and dip each truffle in tempered chocolate. I usually spike the ganache with some kind of booze, but this year I made the caramel version I’ve had bookmarked for years in one of my Canadian Living cookbooks. All it entailed was cooking sugar into a caramel syrup, adding cream, and pouring it over chopped chocolate to make the ganache filling – simple, yet delicious. Because of the extra sugar in the caramel, these truffles were very sweet, so I added a pinch of salt to balance it out and made them into tiny portions (in hindsight, I wonder about using some portion of unsweetened chocolate in the ganache… perhaps an experiment for next year!).
…
The December Daring Bakers’ Challenge had us all cheering – the lovely and talented Bourbonnatrix of Bourbonnatrix Bakes was our hostess and challenged us to make fun, delicious and creative whoopie pies! Delicious little cake-like cookies sandwiching luscious filling in any flavors we chose… What else is there to say but “Whoopie!”
So, I’ve been meaning to post about Christmas cookies for the past two weeks… but I’ve literally been too busy baking the things to post about them at all. Now that Christmas 2013 has passed (MERRY CHRISTMAS, by the way!), when I finally do get around to writing about them, you can consider it extremely early preparation for next year… ;)…