Daring Bakers - Filbert Gateau with Praline Buttercream

Ring out the Filbert Gateaus it's Daring Baker time. The blogosphere will shortly be awash with hazelnuts, cake, chocolate and buttercream.

If I am perfectly honest I was a teeny bit disappointed to find another layered cake as this month's challenge. There have been quite a few lately. But I should not have doubted this month's host, Chris of Mele Cotte, because this cake is superb.



Yes it was a lot of work. But the end result was worth it. Let's go through the list:

1) hazelnut genoise - light, airy, soft and deliciously nutty
2) sugar syrup - flavoured with cointreau
3) praline buttercream - impossibly smooth, light and strewn with toffeed hazelnuts
4) whipped cream - always a good thing
5) glaze - tangy marmalade laced with cointreau
6) chocolate ganache - deep and rich and chocolatey



I had few problems in making it. The only issue was that the cake was not terribly high. I was convinced that if I tried to cut it into three layers it would crumble into crumbs. So I played it safe and stayed with two. I really need to learn how to do this better because one layer was double the size of the other.

There were no complaints though. Everbody loved it, including me.

The recipe can be found on Chris's blog. If it is not there just yet it will be in the next day or so.

To see a million other delicious versions of this cake, visit the Daring Baker blogroll.

Daring Bakers - Cheesecake Pops

I am a slave to recipes. I admit it. I'm drawn to a recipe because I want to try THAT. And if I'm really honest:

a) if I muck around with it I will just end up with a mess and have to stand there sadly scraping it into the bin; and

b) I rarely have any better ideas. I'm not known for my foodie imagination.

But when I saw this month's Daring Baker's challenge - cheesecake pops - it's like something clicked in my brain. I was just coming up with ideas left, right and centre. The little grey cells were on fire. It got to the point where I was worried that I would not have enough pops to demonstrate my creative genius. Heaven forbid!!!!

It was all alright in the end. The recipe said 40 pops, I think I ended up with about 60. I did this by breaking the Daring Baker rules. Oh dear! There I said it. Before I am blackballed into oblivion, let me explain my truly excellent excuse. I could not find lollipop sticks. I tried. The only other thing I could think of was wooden skewers, which are long and thin and not built for 2oz pops (as directed by the hosts). So I made them skewer appropriate. I throw myself on the mercy of the blogosphere.

So what were these wonderous ideas I dreamed up. I will go through them.

But first a quick word about the cheesecake itself. YUM!!! I think that about covers it. I had to cook it for much longer than the recipe suggested - over an hour versus 35 minutes. But it set up beautifully. And it was incredibly creamy and delicious.



I scooped out about half the cheesecake into balls and cut the rest into squares. So onto my big ideas.

Cachous

Okay not exactly ground breaking, but who cares. They are so pretty.





Milk Chocolate and Musk

These pops are dusted with ground muskettes. I love musk lollies. I always have a packet on hand. I think it all went together really well.



White Chocolate and Lavender

I was a bit worried that white chocolate and cheesecake would be too rich. But it turned out well. The lavender added a lovely touch. I've added a bit too much here, but they just looked so pretty. You really only need a few buds to add a lovely touch of flavour.



Dark Chocolate Rum and Raisin

These were one of my favourites. I soaked some sultanas in rum overnight. Then I roughly chopped them and pressed them into the cheesecake pops. I then froze the pops and dipped them into the chocolate. Yum.



Triple Threats

I made these to use up the chocolate leftovers from the pops above. But they were good in their own right.



Passionfruit Jelly

I was really keen to experiment with jellies. Unfortunately I couldn't find any fresh passionfruit. Usually I can get large nets for only a few dollars at the markets. But it seemed to be an off week. So I used passionfruit syrup instead.

I heated 300ml in a double boiler and then added some sugar to taste. I stirred in six gelatine leaves until dissolved. Once the jelly had cooled I quickly dipped some frozen pops and returned them to the freezer. This created a thin initial layer of jelly. I then left the jelly until it was very thick and just beginning to set. I then dipped the frozen pops again. The best approach is to twirl the pops horizontally and all around after dipping to force the jelly to roll around the pop. It is then able to set around the pop rather than just running off.







Raspberry and Dark Chocolate

I coated the pops in a raspberry jelly using the same method as for the passionfruit pops. This time I used a light sugar syrup, added some pureed raspberries which had been sieved to remove the seeds. At the very end I crumbled in some whole raspberries. I returned the jellied pops to the freezer and then dipped them in dark chocolate.

These were my other favourites.



Rose and Pistachio

Again I used the same method to coat the pops in jelly. This time I used a light sugar syrup flavoured with rose water. I dipped them in milk chocolate and sprinkled them with pistachio.

These were really good, but the rose flavour needed to be a bit stronger. It has to be quite intense to cut through the chocolate, pistachio and cheesecake.



Mango and Coconut

I abandoned the whole chocolate dipping thing. Instead, I made up a crumb base and used that to coat the pops. I crushed some Nice biscuits and mixed them with some melted butter. I toasted them in the oven until they were golden and crisp. I mixed up the cooled crumbs with some dessicated coconut.

I didn't freeze these pops at all. I simply rolled them in the crumb mix and then topped them with some sliced mango.

These were absolutely delicious. The crisp crumbs and coconut contrasted beautifully with the sweet mango and creamy cheesecake. Yum!!!



Pear and Hazelnut

I made these the same way as the mango coconut. Instead of coconut I added some ground hazelnuts to the crumb base. I topped the pops with some sliced pear. Again delicious.



Strawberry and Chocolate

Again, this is the same method as above. This time mixed some grated dark chocolate into the crumb mixture. I topped it off with strawberries. These were my other other favourites. They were really really seriously good.



Jelly and Crumble

I had quite a few pops, crumb mix and jelly left over. So I put them all together. These were good too.







Overall, I rate these as a huge success. I will be making them again. I'm not sure if I would go for the dipped chocolate, as good as it was. I much prefer the crumb mix. I can see a whole platter with different combinations of nuts, fruit, jellies and grated chocolates.

Thanks to this month's hosts, Elle of Feeding My Enthusiasms and Deborah of Taste and Tell , for a great challenge. The recipe will be available on their blogs sometime soon. To see a million more beautiful pops visit my fellow Daring Bakers through the Blogroll.

A Daring Bake - Stawberry Mirror Cake

'A Handful of Jelly'
By KJ
c.2007

"Holy strawberries Batman! Are we in a jam!"

by Robin

This quote pretty much sums up my thoughts when I spotted the newest Daring Bakers' challenge - strawberry mirror cake. The cake itself sounded fabulous, both interesting and delicious.

Rather it was the thought of buying 3 baskets (which I presume is the American term for a tray, rather than a punnet) of strawberries in the middle of a Canberra winter. This would require a mortgage and for all that they would be hard, tasteless and generally horrid.

Fortunately, the interrogation of hapless friends and work colleagues led me to a frozen strawberry source - my local Coles supermarket. I realise this doesn't exactly make them hens teeth, but I am a loyal Woolworths shopper. What their stocking agents have against frozen strawberries I don't know.

Anyway, with the essential ingredient in my hot little hands I could get going.

Day 1 - I make cake.

A plain vanilla sponge cake to be exact. The cake is supposed to be baked in a large jelly roll tin and then cut into circles.

I do not have a jelly roll tin. I'm not even sure what a jelly roll is. I do, however, have a smaller sized lamington tin. So I made the cake twice over using 2/3 of the cake batter each time. The left over cake would go into the freezer to be used in a future trifle.

It all started out really well. I beat and sifted and folded and turned out one lovely light cake.

As for the second cake - well there were issues. About halfway through the phone rang - my Mum reminding me about my nephew's birthday. Then the doorbell rang - the neighbour wanting to borrow a phillip's head screwdriver (I don't have one). Then the phone rang again - friends arranging Harry Potter tickets. I got back to the cake and merrily folded the egg whites into the yolk mixture - without first adding the flour! Aackkkkkk!!!!!!

There was hair clutching and a few non-child friendly words. What to do!!! All I could do was continue on by very carefully folding in the flour and hoping for the best. And it turned out surpisingly well. The crumb of the cake was coarser and a bit tougher than cake number one. But it was perfectly acceptable. It had to be really, I did not have the stamina or the eggs for a third cake.

Day 2 - Time to get stuck into the strawberries. I make juice, puree and syrup.

First the juice. Strawberries and sugar went into a saucepan and simmered away. Then I was supposed to strain it through a jelly bag. I don't have one of those either. The piece of muslin I use for this kind of thing seems to have moved out of home, it was nowhere to be found. So I improvised using a fine mesh strainer. I was quite pleased with my little setup. It worked perfectly.

The strawberry juice was absolutely delicious. It was all I could do not to keep, you know, 'accidently' dropping teaspoons into it. As you do.

Next came the puree. Strawberries into the food processer, mulch and push through a strainer. Easy peasy.

Finally, the soaking syrup for the cake. Sugar went into a saucepan of water and duly dissolved itself. Done.

Day 3a - I make bavarian cream.

I whipped up the bavarian cream with no real problems. The custard thickened nicely. The gelatine dissolved smoothly. The whipped cream folded in beautifully. It was all good.

Nevertheless, I have to say, I was a bit disappointed with the result. The basic strawberry custard tasted fantastic. Adding in the whipped cream diluted the taste quite a lot and it ended up being a wee bit bland I thought.

I pressed on. Everything was going so well, too well. It was at this point that things started going south.

After ages of just hanging around not doing much, the bavarian cream decided to thicken and set at a moment's notice. I didn't so much it pour over the cake as dollop it in in large globs (sounds delicious, no?).

Only then did I realise that I had made the cake layers too thick, meaning that I didn't have enough cream to cover them over and fill up the area between the sides of the cake and the tin. I ended up with a kind of a burial mound effect. A high rise circle in the middle with a depressed rim around the outside.

What's more I knew that, given the thickness of the mix and the hasty way I had thrown it in, there would be big airpockets in the cream down the side of the cake. But I didn't want to push the mixture down to fill them because then the level of cream woudn't be high enough to get a proper mirror across the top. All the jelly would just run off and sit in the runnel around the edge.

So I tried to create a smooth layer of cream over the very top, doing my best to form a tight seal with the tin all around the edge. It looked good and I thought it would be fine.

Yeah right!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Day 3b - I make a mess and then VOILA.

I made up the strawberry jelly and waited for it to thicken to a syrup. And waited. And waited. I got more and more worried that it would decide to set instantly like the bavarian cream. So I went ahead and poured it over the cake.

Then I stood and watched it ooze out the bottom of the cake tin. It had found it's way down the side, through the air pockets and out.

After a moment of jigging on the spot and flapping my hands in panic I grabbed it, shoved it holus bolus into the fridge, and slammed the door. My only hope was that the jelly would set before it all just drained away.

I spent the next hour and a half glancing anxiously at the fridge door. What horrors lay within? I couldn't bring myself to look. In the end I was overcome by hunger pangs and had to open it up for survival purposes. And I pulled out................ a not too bad cake. I was amazed. Sure the fridge looked like a crime scene, but I actually had a cake with a mirror on it. Of sorts.

If you got the right angle it looked really good (apart from the air pockets).

From other angles, errrr.......not so much.




But still, given what I thought I would end up with, I was quite chuffed. Once cut into slices, I think it looked quite nice.



In these photos, you can really see the difference in the cakes. The first perfect cake is on the bottom, the second screw up cake is on the top. I also let the second cake brown a bit too much. I wish I had either sliced off the bottom of the cake or used it as the first layer.



So there you have it - a strawberry mirror cake.

As for the taste. Well, the strawberry jelly was far and away the star of the show. It had a lovely intense strawberry flavour which really sparkled against the rest of the cake, which I found to be a bit bland.

Overall, I enjoyed it and I'm really glad I made it. But I don't think I will be making it again. What I have been doing is dreaming up all kinds of other uses for the divinely delicious strawberry juice and strawberry jelly.

Thanks to Peabody choosing such a great task. I can't wait to see what's next.

The full recipe is posted here on Peabody's site (if it's not there yet it soon will be). I also encourage you to check out the efforts of my fellow Daring Bakers, links here. They will be posting their results throughout the next day or so.

'Self Portrait in Strawberry Jelly'

By KJ
c.2007