Daring Bakers' July 2014 Challenge - Surprise Cake

For the July Daring Baker’s Challenge, Ruth from The Crafts of Mommyhood challenged us to bake a cake. But not just any cake; she asked us to add in a special surprise for our eyes as well as our taste buds! Her instructions can be found here.

Now, there are many fun surprise cakes out there. There's rainbow cakes, checkerboard cakes, there's cakes with hidden shapes inside or with filled with chocolates.

But for me this challenge was the perfect opportunity to finally tackle the Mondrian Cake. Ever since I bought Caitlin Freeman's formidable book of Modern Art Desserts earlier this year, I wanted to try my hands on this pièce de résistance.

The cake is not per se difficult to make, but it requires mainly lots of time. The first step is to bake cakes in 4 different colours and let them cool over night. The next day the cakes have to be cut into different sized strips and glued together with chocolate ganache. In the end, the whole cake is covered in chocolate ganache.

The cake Caitlin Freeman suggests is Rose Levy Beranbaum's White Velvet Cake, tinted with food colouring for the coloured strips. I used a little more salt (3/4 Tsp.) and replaced the 300g cake flour with 250g all purpose white flour and 50g corn starch.

Here are the cut up strips before I started covering them in the chocolate ganache

The cake was quit firm and cutting the strips was not as difficult as I thought it would be. But as it turned out, my chocolate ganache was too liquid and seeped into the cake. This means that the lines between the squares are not as clean as they should be. At least the pattern is still clearly visible, so I'm pretty happy with it, considering it was my first try.

Blurry lines, but still clearly a Mondrian Cake :-)

The next day I was wondering what to do with all the leftover cake. While the cake itself has a nice taste, I still felt it needed a bit more. It is quite a sweet cake and I thought it would pair nicely with a little fruity acidity. So I cut the leftover cake into slices and filled it with lemon curd, passion fruit curd, whipped cream with raspberry jam or caramel spread. With the pieces and crumbs that were too small to be filled, I made cake pops. I crumbled them up in the food processor, mixed them with a little chocolate ganache, shaped them into little balls and covered them in chocolate icing. In the end, it took quite some time to make use of all the leftover cake, but I just couldn't throw perfectly fine cake out. And my office liked that they got so many extra sweets.

From back to front: red cake with raspberry cream, white cake with caramel spread, yellow cake with lemon curd, blue cake with passion fruit cake and cake pops

Thanks for a great challenge, Ruth!

Daring Bakers' May 2011 Challenge - Chocolate Marquise

The May 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Emma of CookCraftGrow and Jenny of Purple House Dirt. They chose to challenge everyone to make a Chocolate Marquise. The inspiration for this recipe comes from a dessert they prepared at a restaurant in Seattle.

Doesn't it look great when all components come together?

And what a challenge this was! Each single part was not too difficult to master, but the complete dessert consisted of several components and handling the frozen chocolate mousse was no easy task. But it was all worth it for such a plate of dessert.

I was very excited that this month's challenge included torched meringue because this was an excellent opportunity to break in my brand new blowtorch. Yay! :-)

The chocolate mousse obviously was the star of this plate. It tasted great and while preparing it, I realised how easy it is to modify it with different spices. And while I cut it into classical cube shapes for this challenge, it would be a cute idea to use cookie cutters to serve it in other shapes. As far as I could see, some of my fellow Daring Bakers already did this. The taste and consistency of the mousse was simply delicious: rich, dark and not too sweet - just the way I like my chocolate mousse.

The caramel sauce was maybe my favourite part of this challenge. I'm not very experienced with caramel and was amazed at how easy this recipe was. I love the slight bitter taste (maybe I burnt the caramel a bit?) together with the salt and rum (which I substituted for the tequila). There's still some sauce left in my fridge and I'm already planning on what to do with it. Maybe I could use it to bake some special cupcakes? Or I'll just eat it with a spoon…

My first plating. Well, the first that was worthy to be photographed, anyway...

Loved the spiced almonds! This is also a great snack that can be varied with all different kinds of spices and flavors. Unfortunately, I misunderstood the recipe (memo to self: "whisk egg white until frothy and thick" does not equal "whisk until stiff") and overbeat the egg white. After baking the almonds, I had to break them out of the egg white casing. The taste was still great, although I suspect that some of that spicy flavour  was lost in the discarded egg white… I'll definitely try this recipe again!

Plating was no easy feat. The cubes were quite difficult to handle if they should stay neat and the cocoa powder seemed to go everywhere. On the pictures you can see two different platings, but I used up several more plates until I was satisfied with the result. Also, I cheated and put the chocolate mousse on the plate while it was still frozen, because obviously for the picture it did not have to be thawed. Until I was finished with taking pictures and started eating my plate, the mousse had the exact right temperature and consistency :-)

Details of the recipes can be found here. I made only half of the chocolate mousse and used rum instead of tequila and maple sirup instead of light corn sirup. In the caramel sauce I also substituted the tequila with rum. For the spiced almonds I picked several spices from my spice cupboard (coriander seeds, cardamom, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, nutmeg, clove and salt).

My favourite plating

Thanks for a great challenge Emma and Jenny!

Daring Bakers' April 2011 Challenge - Maple Mousse in Tuile Basket with Sugar Cage

The April 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Evelyne of the blog Cheap Ethnic Eatz. Evelyne chose to challenge everyone to make a maple mousse in an edible container. Prizes are being awarded to the most creative edible container and filling, so vote on your favorite from April 27th to May 27th at http://thedaringkitchen.com!

Yay - Sugar cage :-)

The recipe for the maple mousse and some suggestions for edible containers can be found here.

While I personally was intrigued by the idea of combining the maple mousse with bacon I quickly realised that I would not find many willing guinea pigs to help me eat this dessert. So I decided to stick to something more traditional and made tuile baskets. Tuiles were on my to-bake-list for a while now so I was happy to finally have a reason to try them out. I used this recipe and was surprised at how quick and easy it was. Ok, my tuiles were not browned evenly, but I blame this on my oven (yes, I do this a lot) and my impatience when trying to spread the dough on the sheet. But I still got some nice baskets to serve the mousse in.

The maple mousse itself had a great taste and everybody loved it. I used 4 sheets of gelatine (could not find powdered gelatine) but would reduce this to 3 sheets the next time. The mousse was fine and had the ideal consistency to spoon it into the tuile baskets and take nice pictures, but to eat it prefer a softer texture.

To decorate the mousse I tried my hands at a caramel cage. It actually worked better than I imagined. I actually managed to produce a little cage that did not break when plating the mousse... Also, the little sugar web underneath the tuile adds a nice contrast to the white plate (although, when looking at the finished plate, I realized, that I could have achieved the same effect with a maple sirup design, ah well...). All in all I again enjoyed this challenge. Now go check out the amazing creations of the other Daring Bakers and vote for your favourite edible container on The Daring Kitchen.

Decorated Sugar Cookies

The September 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mandy of "What the Fruitcake?!" Mandy challenged everyone to make Decorated Sugar Cookies based on recipes from Peggy Porschen and The Joy of Baking.

It definitely was a challenge for me as I don't usually decorate with Royal Icing. I don't have a very steady hand so I prefer things that don't require too much detail in the decorating. But then, the Daring Bakers challenges are all about trying out things one wouldn't normally do.

A part of the challenge was to decorate the cookies to the theme of September, whatever that meant to us. Since I am invited to four weddings this autumn - three of them in September alone - I decided to do red, white and pink hearts. Also, I figured it would be a relatively easy shape to pipe the icing on.

After my disaster with the Not-So-Red Velvet Cake I was a bit hesitant to work with food colouring again. But all white cookies would have been a bit boring, so I tried a different brand and discovered that luckily enough I've discovered the real stuff this time.

The recipe for the challenge and extensive instructions on icing techniques can be found here. 

Wedding Cake

Well, no, it wasn't a really real wedding cake, but my neighbours got married and I decided to make them something sweet for when they came home again. I've wanted to try a red velvet cake for some time and a wedding seemed like the right opportunity.

So much for the plan. I'd never used food colouring before so didn't know what to expect and didn't worry when the dough was more of an orange-beige colour. I imagined the colourchange might happen during the baking. Well, that was not the case - the cake remained a light brown with a slight touch of orange.

In what universe is this a red velvet cake?

The taste was fine albeit a bit on the sweet side, so I continued with the filling and decorating. I used a recipe that I've found on Ms. Humble's Blog. Instead of baking it in a tray, I made three variations: 1. small springform pan (diameter 18cm), 2. small loaf pan (lenght 16cm), 3. even smaller cake ring (diameter 8cm).  The bigger round cake was to be the wedding cake, the loaf would be a birthday cake for a friend from work and the small round cake was my guinea pig-cake for the filling and the icing.

My little guinea pig cake

After cutting the cake in half, I covered the bottom half with a layer of the white chocolate cream cheese frosting, put the second half on top and did a crumb coat of the whole cake. Then I covered it with white fondant (store bought). I topped the wedding cake with little red hearts and the birthday cake with candy roses.

Wedding cake

Handling the fondant was easier than I thought. I even rolled it out much thinner than recommended because I wanted to make sure that I had enough for all three cakes and it didn't tear.

Birthday Cake

Vanilla-Raspberry-Cupcakes

These muffins (or cupcakes - I still haven't decided on the terminology) were specially requested for a barbecue of a friend of mine so I wanted to make them look extra pretty.

While browsing through my various baking books I came across a muffin recipe that used white chocolate chips and immediately had a vision of a muffin as white as possible with the occasional pink spot. I decided to supplement the white chocolate with almond slices and raspberries for the pink.

For the icing I wanted to use a white chocolate glazing. Now, I'm not very experienced (yet) with icings, but I found simple instructions on how to make your own chocolate glazing on the internet. Unfortunately it didn't turn out as planned. I expected a thin fluid to dip my muffins. Instead I ended up with a paste which I applied to the muffins with a spatula.

Vanilla-Raspberry-Muffins

250g flour
2.5 tsp baking powder
0.5 tsp natron

100g white chocolate chips

100g almond slices

1 egg

100g sugar

0.5 tsp vanilla extract

80ml sunflower oil

250g yoghurt

200g raspberries

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Prepare a muffin tin with paper cups (alternatively brush the tin with sunflower oil).

In a large bowl sift together the flour, baking powder and natron. Mix in the chocolate chips and the almond slices.

In a separate bowl scramble the egg and add the sugar, vanilla extract, sunflower oil and yoghurt.

Mix the dry and the wet ingredients. Carefully add the raspberries and fold them into the batter. Try not to brake the raspberries to prevent the batter from getting pink.

Spoon the batter into the prepared muffin tin and bake for 20-25min.

For the frosting melt 200g of white chocolate over a water bath together with 2 tbsp of butter and 2 tbsp powdered sugar. Apply to the cooled down muffins with a spatula and decorate with a sugar-covered almond.

Lemon-Raspberry-Muffins

I made these for the second birthday party of a little girl. It was a great excuse to go wild with pink icing and all kinds of glittery decoration. My inner little girl had a great time preparing the muffins :-)

I used an adapted recipe from this lovely book by the Cookie Girl that I've bought recently. It's as pink as my muffins and has a cute layout with fairy tale pictures. Actually, the recipe that I've used is for cupcakes, but I have so far not managed to find out the exact difference between muffins and cupcakes. I ended up defining my own distinctions, mainly based on ingredients and baking procedures and these go into my muffin-category.
 

Lemon-Raspberry-Muffins
Recipe adapted from Eat Me!
200g of flour
2 tsp of baking powder
45g of ground almonds
2 eggs
90ml of sunflower oil
150g of sugar
grated zest of 1 lemon
250ml of greek yoghurt
0.5 tbsp of lemon aroma
250g of raspberry

Pre-heat the oven to 180°C.

Line a muffin tin with paper muffin cases (preferably pink ones).

Sift together the flour and the baking powder and mix with the almonds.

In a separate bowl mix the rest of the ingredients excluding the raspberries. Once the oven is hot, add the raspberries and carefully combine the wet ingredients and the flour/baking powder. Stir until the flour is wet, but don't let the dough stand around for long, because the muffins will get sticky and hard.

Immediately spoon the dough into the muffin tin and bake for 20-30 minutes.

After they are cool go wild with the decoration. I've used this Dr. Oetker Lillifee icing in pink (with glitter!) and various sprinkles.

The muffins went down well with the kids and also the adults at the birthday party. I guess there's a little girl that likes pink glitter in all of us... :-)

Some Kind of Cheesecake

This cake made out of cheese was a present for the engagement party of friends of mine.

They both love cheese and therefore this somewhat different cheesecake seemed the perfect gift.

The bottom layer is a sheep cheese, the top layer a blue goat cheese. To separate the layers I cut out a piece of cardboard and covered it with aluminium foil. Then I decorated everything with a ribbon, some fresh and dried fruit, nuts, crackers and oatcakes.

Apologies for the poor quality of the picture. I didn't have my camera with me and had to take the picture with my mobile phone.

EDIT: Found a much better picture, thanks to the groom:

Easy Start

So, here we go... To make it easy for myself I'll start with blogging about last year's Easter muffins.


Why easy? Because I don't actually remember the exact recipe, thereby avoiding having to write a long post with detailed instructions. Why Easter muffins? Because I made them somewhen around Easter. We didn't actually eat them during the Easter weekend itself but I still got to use all the colourful Easter decoration without it being too out of season.


I made two kinds of muffins. Both times I probably used a basic muffin recipe and simply added differently flavoured yoghurt and fruits and nuts (I believe I ended up with raspberry-almond-muffins and dried-apricot-chocolate-muffins). Plus - as is obvious from the pictures - I added lots and lots of all kinds of decorations :-)