Early on in my blog career, I wrote a post about conquering my fear of caramel. I received a very thoughtful and helpful comment to that post from none other than Shuna Fish Lydon, the chef behind one of the most accomplished and informative blogs out there: eggbeater.

When the hosts of the November Daring Bakers’ challenge, Dolores of Chronicles in Culinary Curiosity; Alex of Blondie and Brownie and Jenny of Foray of Food, announced that they would be venturing into caramel territory, I was so excited!

After embracing my fear of caramel, I’ve come to embrace the joy of making it. Mostly because I love the stuff but also because it’s the essence of a Daring Baker: face your fears in the kitchen!

The recipe they chose is Shuna Fish Lydon’s Caramel Cake with Caramelized Butter Frosting. As an added element, they invited Daring Bakers to try their hands at Golden Vanilla Bean Caramels from Alice Medrich’s Pure Dessert.

Before I begin discussing the challenge, I want to first thank Dolores, Alex and Jenny for forcing Daring Bakers everywhere to embrace their inner caramel-maker!

And I want to especially thank Shuna who has been so gracious throughout this challenge, not only for letting us use her recipe, but also for taking the time to answer the many questions that people have had. It’s an honour to have you with us, Shuna!

Every Daring Bakers’ challenge is different. Some have elements that are very new to me and others have methods that might be different from something I’ve tried before.

Some months I feel the need to provide a step-by-step account of what I’ve done and other months I don’t.

In this case, I would have to say that the key is the caramel. While I love caramel, I’m not a fan of dark caramel. I prefer the flavour of a lighter caramel so I didn’t cook mine quite as long as the recipe indicated. This meant that my caramel syrup wasn’t as dark and thick as some others, but that’s okay. The flavour was still gorgeous and I’m enjoying the leftover syrup on everything that I can pour it on!

For me, the best part of this challenge was the icing. This frosting for this cake is made with melted butter! I have never made a frosting with melted butter and to say I was intrigued would be an understatement. And not only is it melted butter, it’s browned butter which has to be one of my favourite flavours. When you brown butter, it takes on a nutty essence that is divine. Everyone adored the frosting! I can’t wait to try it in other recipes.

In deference to the chewy caramels I used to eat as a child, I had to try the recipe for the Golden Vanilla Bean Caramels from Alice Medrich. I was not able to obtain ground golden vanilla beans so I used pure vanilla extract instead. Because I love caramel and salt, I added a liberal sprinkling of fleur de sel to the finished product. It was like being a kid all over again!

Embrace your inner caramel-maker and be sure to visit all the other daring bakers to see what they made.

Ciao!

Je suis en retard.

I am late.

Sweet (and I mean SWEET) Fanny of Foodbeam was the host for this month’s edition of Sugar High Friday. The deadline was September 26.

But today is September 28.

Hmmm …

Since her theme is cupcakes, I am hoping (quite shamelessly) that I can entice Fanny to include me by bribing her with Cinnamon Cupcakes with Caramel Cream Cheese Frosting.

Here’s hoping it works.

S’il vous plaît, Fanny?

Ciao!

Cinnamon Cupcakes with Caramel Cream Cheese Frosting

For the cupcakes:

I used a basic yellow cake recipe to make these cupcakes. The recipe I used comes from Tish Boyle’s The Cake Book, but you can find great yellow cake recipes all over the web. Try this one, for example. I altered my recipe by baking half of it in mini paper cups and the other half in a 9-inch cake pan.

For the frosting:

1 pckg. cream cheese (8 ounces), at room temperature
1/2 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 cup caramel sauce
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 cup icing sugar

In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the cream cheese and butter together at high speed until light (about 2 minutes).

Lower the speed and add the vanilla extract and caramel sauce. Mix well.

With the speed on low, add the icing sugar until incorporated and then increase the speed to high and whip the frosting for 2 minutes.

Apply liberally to the base of your choice. Or eat with spoon.

Enjoy!

For this third edition of Magazine Mondays, I bring you what is quite possibly one of the most sinfully delicious things I have ever made.

Why I waited so long to try this recipe from the October 2004 issue of Food & Wine magazine is beyond me.

Beyond me.

Cream cheese. Caramel. And a hint of salt.

Dip your spoon through the caramel, sink into the cream cheese and taste the salty sweetness of it. And all the while, you watch as caramel oozes into the indentation you created with your spoon.

Don’t faint. Don’t wait. Just go and make this.

Oh yeah … and have a great week!

Ciao!

Magazine Monday #3: Salted Caramel Cheesecake.

Technorati tags: magazine mondays, cheesecake, caramel

Some months, I wait anxiously for the day to post the Daring Baker challenge. And then other months, like this one, I wake up one morning only to find that the month is almost gone and the Daring Baker challenge is about to escape me.

My friends, it has been a busy and frenzied month to say the least.

Luckily, however, things have calmed down just in time to celebrate another Daring Baker challenge. And this time around, we’re getting all tarted up!

The hosts for this month’s challenge are the lovely Veronica of Veronica’s Test Kitchen and Patricia of Technicolor Kitchen. They took pity on our Daring Baker souls and decided to choose a challenge recipe that didn’t feature forty steps and didn’t require that we start baking a week in advance.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve loved all the challenges up until now, but they have been quite involved. It was more than pleasant to settle down to baking a most elegant and simple Milk Chocolate and Caramel Tart.

As with most tarts, this one begins with a great tart base. The tart pastry consists of butter, icing sugar, ground hazelnuts, cinnamon, eggs, cake flour, baking powder and cocoa powder. I usually make crusts by hand but I decided to try this one in the bowl of the stand mixer and it worked out very well.

After creaming the butter, sugar, ground hazelnuts and cinnamon together, I added the eggs and then the dry ingredients. I gathered the dough into a ball and refrigerated it for eight hours (the recipe instructs you to refrigerate overnight but I made the dough in the morning and baked the tart late in the day).

When it came time to roll out the tart dough, I ran into a few problems in that the pastry cracked quite a bit. It seemed a bit on the dry side. However, after a bit of work I managed to line all my tart pans with the lovely cinnamon-scented dough. The recipe yields quite a bit of pastry so I was able to make a 9-inch tart and six 4-inch tarts.

I blind baked the tart shells (baked them with parchment paper filled with dried beans) for 15 minutes before removing them from the oven while I made the caramel filling.

Usually when I make caramel I begin with a sugar and water mixture. This particular recipe calls for a dry caramel, which means that you simply put sugar into a pot and slowly melt it until it turns the desired colour. I’d never made caramel this way before and was a bit worried as caramel can be tricky.

However, it worked out very well. I had to really watch it as it would have been quite easy to burn the caramel. As soon as it reached the desired colour, I added heavy cream and butter and set it aside to cool a bit. While it cooled, I mixed together eggs and flour, which I then added to the caramel mixture. This was poured into the waiting tart shells. I then put the tarts back into the oven for another 15 minutes.

By this time, the tart shells were a lovely golden colour and the caramel filling was firm. I could have easily dug in at this point but the tarts weren’t quite finished.

After the tarts were completely cooled, I put together the final layer which was a milk chocolate mousse. I whipped heavy cream and poured in melted milk chocolate. I spread the mixture over the tops of all the tarts and then refrigerated them for several hours.

Wanting to decorate my tarts simply yet elegantly, I drizzled the tops with melted white chocolate and made some chocolate curls with some leftover milk chocolate.

Finally, it was time to try one.

The first sensation I experienced when I sampled the tart was the deep flavour of cinnamon against the lighter, sweeter flavour of the chocolate. At first I didn’t notice the caramel but after a few chews, the caramel texture came through. Combined with the lightness of the mousse topping, it was a very interesting flavour experience. The tart was spicy and cool all at the same time.

I decided to bring the tarts to work for my coworkers and judging by how quickly they were gobbled up, I knew they were a great success.

I enjoyed making a layered tart using caramel having never made a tart like this before. It was a straightforward recipe and the results were more than worth it. I would like to thank Veronica and Elle for choosing such a classy recipe!

Ciao!

For the recipe for the Milk Chocolate Caramel Tart, please visit Veronica’s blog or Patricia’s blog.

To see what all the other Daring Bakers did with their tarts, please check The Daring Bakers’ Blogroll over the next day or so!

Technorati tags: daring bakers, tarts, milk chocolate, caramel

It was bound to happen. It was only a matter of time before the Daring Bakers adopted a patron saint.

Saint Honoratus of Amiens was a bishop of the town of Amiens, located in the North of France. He is believed to have died on May 16th, 600 A.D. While it doesn’t appear that Saint Honoratus was into making panna cottas and baking pavlovas, those that followed him did build a church in his name. In 1400, the bakers of Paris created a guild based in the church named after Saint Honoratus. Every May 16th, a feast was held in his honour and to this day, May 16th remains Saint Honoré Day. But perhaps even more than the day, Saint Honoré is known for the cake named for him: Gâteau St. Honoré.

After last month’s crepe cake, the hosting duties for the Daring Baker monthly challenge fell to Helene of Tartelette and Anita of Dessert First, both very accomplished followers of St. Honoré. Accordingly, they chose to challenge the Daring Bakers to bake the very famous gâteau.

When I first learned of the challenge for May, I ran to my room, hid under the covers and immediately began praying to St. Honoré himself for strength. This cake, you must understand, is made of some very lofty elements. To begin with, you have puff pastry.

That’s homemade puff pastry.

The puff pastry is followed by a pastry cream, which is then followed by cream puffs. While pastry cream and cream puffs may not be so bad, did I mention that there’s homemade puff pastry?

Oh, yes. For good measure, throw in a bit of caramel.

But St. Honoré must have felt that I was worthy because he sent some inspiration. Surely, I can do this. I’ve made croissants from scratch for heaven’s sake! So I printed the recipe, read it through, felt better and then promptly forgot about it for three weeks. But Saturday morning, I awoke and immediately began to worry … and pray. A recipe that had seemed straightforward and manageable three weeks earlier, was suddenly quite daunting.

So let’s begin at the beginning.

I started with the puff pastry, which involved making a dough and then preparing a butter packet. I have decided that I very much like butter packets and that if someone wanted to give me the gift of a butter packet, I would consider it a great gift.

But back to the puff pastry.

After enclosing my butter packet in the dough, I began the process of rolling and turning. Turning the puff pastry dough means rolling it out to a certain length and width (20 inches by 9 inches), and then folding the dough up in thirds, the way you would fold a letter. The seam of the letter will be facing you. After refrigerating the dough to let the butter cool down a bit, you remove the dough and begin rolling it out again with the seam facing to the right. That’s called a turn.

After repeating that process five times, I had a rather lovely (if I may say so myself) packet of puff pastry, which I left in the refrigerator overnight.

Before going to bed, I also decided to get a start on the cream filling for the gâteau. Helene and Anita chose what is called Rapid Chiboust or Diplomat Cream. I have no idea why it’s called that but I have to say I found the Rapid Chiboust name very entertaining.

Every time someone asked me what I was doing I barked, “Do not bother me! I’m making Rapid Chiboust!” We Daring Bakers have to amuse ourselves somehow!

Any way, the cream was quite easy to pull together. It involved combining sugar, flour, salt, egg yolks, vanilla extract and whipping cream to which was added unflavoured gelatin. Just before filling the cream puffs and spreading the cream on the gâteau, I added stiffly beaten egg whites.

Allow me to say that this cream was divine! I had a lot left over, which I was sorely tempted to eat with a spoon!

On the morning that I was ready to assemble and bake the gâteau (okay I’m not kidding anyone … it was this morning), I divided my puff pastry packet in half and rolled that half into a 12-inch square. From that 12-inch square I cut out four 6-inch circles. While the circles chilled in the refrigerator, I made the pâte à choux and this is where I encountered my first problem.

Clearly I had angered St. Honoré because I ended up having to throw out my first batch of pâte à choux and make a second one. When I make cream puffs, I’m used to mixing butter, water and salt and letting it come to a boil. I then add flour, all at once, and begin mixing together the ingredients to form the dough. This particular pâte à choux recipe requires that the flour be added slowly. I ended up with a lot of lumps, which I had to try to smush with a wooden spoon.

I hate smushing.

To make matters worse, because the quantity of eggs listed in the ingredients list was shown as “1 cup of eggs or 240 ml of eggs”, against my better judgement I ended up beating eggs and actually measuring out the liquid amount. I was so flustered about this that I didn’t read the instructions properly and poured in all of the liquid at once. The eggs are to be added one at a time, which posed a bit of a problem in that it wasn’t clear how many eggs were required. Needless to say I ended up with a liquidy mushy mess, which I very gladly dumped in the food bin.

After starting again, I decided to add the eggs individually and beat the mixture until it looked like thickened mayonnaise (as the directions indicate). I actually only used 3 eggs and the pâte à choux looked great.

Moving on to the assembly of the gâteau, I piped four rings of pâte à choux onto the puff pastry circles and used the rest to make little cream puffs. This is where I made my second mistake. The recipe indicated that we should pipe four concentric rings on the puff pastry.

Now when the Cream Puff hears the word “concentric”, for some reason she thinks of math and the Cream Puff was never very good at math. From reading other Daring Bakers’ posts, I gather that what I was supposed to do is pipe four rings with pâte à choux leaving a gap between each ring so that the pastry cream could then fall into the gaps. I didn’t do this.

Hey. I wasn’t good at math alright!

I piped the rings so that they touched each other and was left with a border all around the edge of the puff pastry circle. I didn’t realize my error until after the puff pastry and cream puffs were baked so at that point I realized I’d have to do some improvising with either the pastry cream or some whipped cream.

Mistake aside, I was delighted with how the puff pastry circles baked up as well as the cream puffs. While I think I made my cream puffs a bit too small, they were a lovely colour and the puff pastry was, if I may say so myself, just gorgeous!

After letting everything cool down, I filled my cream puffs with the Rapid Chiboust (never get tired of saying that) and then spread as much of it as I could on the puff pastry rounds. Unfortunately because of the way that I piped the pâte à choux on, I couldn’t get a lot of cream on there or it would fall over the sides. This is likely why I had so much pastry cream left over.

Oh, well. Live and learn!

I placed everything in the refrigerator for a few hours and then finally set about the process of gilding the cream puffs with caramel. I’ve made caramel many times before and I’ve always made it the same way. I’ve cooked a bit of water with sugar until a molten liquid develops and it turns the shade that I’m looking for. In this case, the recipe indicated that we should just cook sugar in a pot.

I had some difficulty with this method as it seemed that the sugar turned dark right away. I frantically started stirring it so that it wouldn’t burn but then it clumped up. I had to add a bit of water to help it along. While this was very quick, I disliked not having the control over how dark the caramel turns as I do when I follow my usual method.

All in all, though, the caramel worked out well and dipping the cream puffs in the caramel was fun. Once done, I used the extra caramel to drizzle over the cream puffs and to attempt to make some spun sugar.

To assemble, I began by piping whipped cream sweetened with sugar all around the edge of the puff pastry (that had no pâte à choux on it). I followed this by piping larger rosettes on top of the pastry cream. I set one cream puff in each of the large rosettes. I also piped rosettes around the base of the gâteau. I garnished with more cream puffs and also with raspberries. I dropped a few raspberries into the centre of the gâteau (on the pastry cream) and topped with some of the spun sugar.

I was very happy with the end result, my mistakes notwithstanding. I thought my little cakes looked very elegant. As I stood back and surveyed my work, I felt that all the effort was worth it. I’m already looking forward to trying the gâteau again very soon.

I’d like to thank Helene and Anita for pushing the Daring Bakers to even greater heights this month. This challenge was stressful, tiring and complicated. I had to sand blast my kitchen counter to get rid of the hardened caramel and I somehow managed to get pastry cream into every tile groove and cranny. But it was all worth it.

Clearly my prayers were answered.

Ciao!

Note: Helene and Anita have decided to post a round up of the Daring Bakers’ accomplishments this month. They’ve divided the group so that they will each list links to half of the Daring Baker blogs so be sure to check in with them regularly to see what everyone else has done. For the recipe, you can also visit Helene’s blog as she has kindly listed it.

One more thing, membership for the Daring Bakers is closed for the month of June. So many of you have e-mailed us asking to join that we’ve had to close the doors. But for those of you that do want to join, don’t worry, July membership is open. If you’re interested, send an e-mail to my lovely co-founder Lisa (tesla67@roadrunner.com) of La Mia Cucina or to me (imellozzi@sympatico.ca).

Technorati tags: gateau st. honore, st. honore, puff pastry, cream puffs, caramel, daring bakers