Daring Bakers September 2014 Challenge - Kolaches

The September Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Lucie from ChezLucie. She challenged us to make a true Czech treat – Kolaches!

We had a choice of three different recipes (details can be found here) and I decided to make the Chodské koláče (Kolache from Chodsko) because I love quark and poppyseed. 

The recipe for the dough worked great - nice silky and soft texture. I'm not sure the poppyseed filling was optimal - it wasn't as homogenous as I expected it to be. And since I didn't have a good piping bag my patterns turned out a bit rough :-) But the taste was excellent!

Thanks for a fun challenge, Lucie!

Kolache, cut up in pieces

Finished Kolache

Daring Bakers' January 2012 Challenge - Scones

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!

I managed to find British strawberry jam, but unfortunately no clotted cream...

Now, I've written about scones before on my blog, but thought this would be an interesting opportunity to test a new recipe variation. I liked the idea of getting more layered scones, but unfortunately it didn't work out as expected. My scones looked and tasted pretty much the same as always (which isn't a bad thing!). Maybe I used too much flower. It couldn't have been the recipe as it seemed to have worked for many other Daring Bakers. Details can be found here. I used the basic recipe with the addition of ca. 20g of brown sugar.

Ah well, the scones were delicious as always. Thank you for hosting our January challenge, Audax!

Daring Bakers' October 2011 Challenge - Povitica

Even my little ghost family was interested in this dessert

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!

Povitica consists of a simple yeast dough, rolled out thinly and filled with a mix of walnuts, sugar and spices. Details and the recipe can be found here.

It is indeed a delicious recipe and also quite simple to make (I used the quarter batch measurements). The only change was to let the dough rise over night in the fridge, which worked extremely well.

Thanks for another great challenge!

Daring Bakers' September 2011 Challenge - Croissants

My first (and probably only) homemade croissants

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'm horribly late posting this challenge, but I'm just glad that I made it at all. It's been busy lately... To be honest I was always a bit afraid of making my own puff pastry, but I was astonished at how well this recipe works (details can be found here). Even though I spread making the croissants over three days, they still felt, tasted and looked like real croissants. Of course the store-bought variety is a bit fluffier but they were quite good for a first try. Especially the ones with the chocolate in them... :-)

Daring Bakers' March 2011 Challenge - Meringue Coffee Cake

The March 2011 Daring Baker’s Challenge was hosted by Ria of Ria’s Collection and Jamie of Life’s a Feast. Ria and Jamie challenged The Daring Bakers to bake a yeasted Meringue Coffee Cake.

Details to the recipe can be found here. I pretty much stuck to their suggestions, because chocolate and nuts is a great combination - no need to change anything… Well, ok, I used hazelnuts instead of walnuts, left out the cinnamon and used fresh yeast instead of dried yeast. But for the rest of the recipe I followed their suggestions and I'm really glad that I did because the dough turned out beautiful - very soft, silky and smooth. The taste of the finished cake was great as well. The cake was firm, but still soft and moist from the meringue. It wasn't too sweet - which I liked - and the chocolate chips and hazelnuts added a nice contrast.

It's a great cake for Sunday brunch or afternoon coffee and it's not complicated to make. I'll definitely have to put it on my list to bake again!

Daring Bakers' December 2010 Challenge - Stollen

Christmas is over and it's time for the monthly Daring Bakers' Challenge.

The 2010 December Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Penny of Sweet Sadie’s Baking. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make Stollen. She adapted a friend’s family recipe and combined it with information from friends, techniques from Peter Reinhart’s book.........and Martha Stewart’s demonstration.

In Switzerland, Stollen (or Christstollen, as it's usually called here) is pretty common in December and it's among my favourite Christmas food, even though I usually try to find a variation without candied fruit peel (I'm just not very fond of that stuff). I don't remember if I've made Stollen myself before. If I have, it must have been years ago, but I certainly didn't realise / remember that it was such a simple procedure. And the result was amazing. I loved this recipe so much, that I decided to make a second Stollen and give it away as Christmas gifts. Also the fact that I cut up the first one quite quickly and started to eat it before I could take a picture may have had something to do with it...

Anyway, the recipe can be found here. I used fresh yeast (about 30g) instead of the dried yeast and I substituted dried raisins with dried cranberries and the candied fruit peel and cherries with roughly chopped dried apricot (which, in my opinion, give a nice counterbalance to the sweet dough and sugar coating). Also, I reduced the vanilla extract to 1 tsp. and the lemon extract to 0.5 tsp. Following Audax' recommendation I added a few strings of marzipan (storebought, due to lack of time).

Thanks for a great recipe, Penny, I will certainly add it to my repertoire of homemade Christmas goodies!

Daring Bakers' October 2010 Challenge - Doughnuts and Berliner

This months Daring Bakers' Challenge was to make Doughnuts or Bombolonis (or Berliner, as we call them in Switzerland).

My first doughnut :-)

The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge DBers to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann and Epicurious.

The sugar adds a nice sweetness

To be honest, I was a bit afraid of deep frying. Partly because I've never done it before and partly because I currently have a kitchen with a gas stove and having an open flame next to a pot with boiling hot oil made me a tiny bit nervous. But everything worked out fine and I'm glad that I now can add one more cooking technique to my repertoire.

Yummie Berliner!

The recipe can be found here and was actually very simple in the making. The dough is a simple yeast dough which requires no special skills, except to be able to stick to a recipe and trust the many talented bakers before you who have designed it. The most important part is not to heat up the water and milk too much because you don't want to kill the yeast. Its ideal working temperature is around 40°C, much above and it will die. So keep everything lukewarm at the most. It is also important to knead the dough thoroughly (or work it in your stand mixer with the dough hook attachment for a few minutes). The third important thing when working with a yeast dough is to let it rise a proper amount of time. I actually changed Lori's recipe in this regard and took to Ms. Humble's advice for doughnuts and let my dough rise in the fridge over night. This also obliged me very much as I could spread out the challenge over two different evenings.

Some other changes I made: I substituted milk and butter with lactose free milk and lactose free butter (some girls at my office are lactose intolerant). Also, I used 540g of wheat flour and 110g of spelt flour because I ran out of wheat flour (what kind of a baker am I...?). Finally, I left out the nutmeg because I'm not particularly fond of it and 1 teaspoon seemed like an awful lot of it.

Many more - filled with crab apple jelly

I couldn't decide on the shape, so I made both doughnuts and small Berliner out of my yeast dough. The Berliner i filed with grape jelly or crab apple jelly (both not homemade) and rolled them in powdered sugar or caster sugar (to make sure I could distinguish them later on). 

 

The whole collection

 When tasting my first doughnut immediately after deep frying I was surprised at how unsweet it tasted. Then I realised that since I've let my dough rise for almost 24h the yeast had even more time to ferment the sugar. Next time I'd probably use a little more sugar in the dough. On the other hand, the not so sweet dough allowed me to make a chocolate glazing for the doughnuts (I chopped 120g dark chocolate, added 15g butter and melted it over a water bath, added a teaspoon of milk because the chocolate glazing was too thick, realised that this caused the chocolate to curdle, rescued it with a few teaspoons of warm tap water, lamented the fact that I seemed to have lost my chocolate karma, dipped the doughnuts in the glazing anyway) to balance out the tastes. I ran out of glazing so I rolled the rest of the doughnuts and the doughnut holes in caster sugar.

All in all I was very pleased with the whole experiment. This recipe is excellent, producing very soft doughnuts with a thin crisp crust. The chocolate or jam and sugar added the right amount of sweetness. Thanks for a great challenge, Lori!

Scones

I love scones. Whenever I spend some time in the UK or Ireland I eat as many as possible. Well, obviously not as many as possible - that would cause serious problems with my wardrobe... Notwithstanding my love for fresh, warm scones with clotted cream and jelly, it took me until the beginning of this year to find out that I could make them at home. For some strange reason I just thought it was a really tricky recipe. So I was very surprised, when I learned about how easy it actually is and that it only requires ingredients, that I have in my cupboard most of the time. So now the only problem is finding the clotted cream in Zurich...

 

This here is a basic scone recipe. I like them plain, but you could easily add raisins or chocolate chips or dried fruit. A word about the sugar: I like to use brown sugar, but of course you could also use white sugar. Also, an interesting thing happens when you lower the sugar amount to 30g: the taste of the scones will be on the verge of sweet to savory, so I imagine they would go great with e.g. gravad lax.

225g flour
1 tsp. baking powder
0.5 tsp. salt
40g sugar
40g butter, cold and in pieces
1 egg
100ml milk

Preheat the oven to 220°C. Prepare a baking tray with baking paper.

In a bowl sift together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar.

Add the butter pieces and grind it together with the butter (ideally using cold hands) until you end up with an even, crumbly, dry mass.

In a separate bowl mix together the egg and the milk and then add it to the flour-butter-mix. Quickly blend all the ingredients, trying to knead the dough as little as possible. It doesn't matter if it still looks uneven, as long as the wet and dry ingredients are combined.

Sprinkle a little flour on the working surface and lightly flatten the dough to about 2cm. Cut the scones using a round cookie cutter of about 4cm diameter.

Bake the scones in the middle of the oven for about 12-14min until golden brown.

Eat directly from the tray, with a little clotted cream and jelly. Or, if you're more disciplined than me, let them cool down until lukewarm and serve on a nice plate. Of course, you can also let them cool down completely, but scones are best eaten when really fresh, so don't wait with eating them for longer than a day or two.

Since clotted cream is quite hard to find here in Zurich (or ridiculously expensive) I usually use double cream (fat content of about 50-60%) and beat it until fluffy.

The jelly in the picture is crab apple jelly (not homemade). I believe traditionally it should be strawberry jelly, but I didn't have that in my cupboard at that moment. And at least I bought the crab apple jelly in Edinburgh, adding a real Scottish component to my Sunday breakfast.