Chocolate Valentino

The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE's blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef.
We have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan; a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.
I wasn’t on planning to participate in this month’s challenge but I decided tonight to go ahead with it. Although I work with lots of recipes that use chocolate, I’ve never made flourless chocolate cake. This one doesn’t even have any sugar in it...just 3 ingredients – chocolate, butter and eggs. I used a combination of 70% and 52% lindt chocolate and added some raspberry puree into the batter. How can anyone resist chocolate with raspberries?
Although I made the cake component of the challenge, I didn’t make the ice cream part. I’m not a major fan of ice cream and I don’t feel like ice cream in the winter so I decided to skip that part of the challenge.

Sweet Caramel

My 2nd challenge for Daring Bakers is Caramel Cake with Caramelized butter frosting. This month's challenge is hosted by Dolores of Culinary Curiosity and co-hosted by Alex of Blondie and Brownie, and Jenny of Foray into Food. The alternative version of recipe is provided by Natalie of Gluten-a-Go-Go. The recipe is from Shauna Fish Lydon of Eggbeater.

I’ve previously worked with caramel once in baking class. We made butterscotch caramel for crunchy caramel cake. I remember using a pastry brush to continuously brush down sugar crystals to prevent the sugar from crystallizing. This time I was going to do the same but couldn’t find my pastry brush. Luckily my caramel didn’t crystallize. Thank goodness for the warning about the sputtering sugar...I poured in the water slowly and stepped back.

I thought the cake would be way too sweet for me but it wasn’t. The cake itself was very moist from the addition of caramel syrup into the batter yet not too sweet. The caramelized butter frosting on the other hand was too sweet. Even my co-workers who love caramel found the frosting too sweet for their tastes.
I was lazy with the decorations on this cake as I finished this cake really late and I just wanted to get to bed.

Although I didn’t really enjoy this cake, I had fun making it. I got to try making caramel syrup again and got the chance to make brown butter. I have several recipes that use brown butter but it’s something I never tried. The reason for joining Daring Bakers is to try recipes I wouldn’t on my own and this challenge gives me the opportunity to do just that.

Daring Bakers - First Challenge

I am extremely excited to take part in my first Daring Baker’s Challenge. I was a little weary upon seeing that our challenge this month would be pizza. I’m not a huge fan of pizza and not comfortable in making anything with yeast. However, I definitely can’t miss out on my first challenge so I decided to step up to the challenge. I knew I wanted to make chicken pizza so when we made roast chicken, I used the leftovers on the pizza.

Apparently tossing the dough makes the crust much better – I did manage to toss it but we didn’t manage to get a good picture. As we were starving, we gave up at getting a good shot and put together the pizza to bake it off and full our tummies.

Several smoke alarms later, the pizzas were done – here’s my sad attempt at a pizza. Tomy gave it a try too, here's his pizza. He has an edge as he used to work at Pizza Pizza. The pictures are deceiving as they look better than they taste. Tomy & I didn’t find the crust edible… I’m not sure if it’s my error in making the dough or it’s suppose to be like this but I didn’t like the crust at all. I suppose it’s my error in making the dough since everyone else’s pizzas turned out fantastic. I toyed around with the idea of trying the recipe out again but decided against it. The recipe is “Pizza Napoletana” from Peter Reinhart's “The Bread Baker's Apprentice”.

I just want to say I’m happy to be part of Daring Bakers and look forward to our next challenge. Please refer to attached link to see how everyone else’s pizzas came out. Be warned though – if you haven’t eaten, it’ll make you really hungry.